Educator and AFT Civics Design Team Member
Lisa Rand Harmon’s 17 years of teaching experience span work in urban, suburban and rural school districts. She currently teaches 10th grade U.S. history at Cleveland High School for the Digital Arts, part of the Cleveland Metropolitan School District. She is a member of the Cleveland Teachers Union (CTU).
From an early age, Rand was interested in pursuing a career in education. “As a young Black girl, all my teachers were strong Black women. I was impressed: I took after them and learned from them. I wanted to become a teacher to be a model for others,” she says.
She earned her bachelor’s degree in secondary social studies education at Kent State University and has been teaching since her early twenties. Her earliest jobs were in the Atlanta area, where she learned the importance of having robust professional development and support.
Rand was drawn to social studies because of the subject’s ability to make sense not only of history, but also of the current world. “I always had a million questions, and social studies was the only subject that answered the ‘why,’” she says. “By studying history, you can see cause and effect more clearly and learn how the past helped to create the present.”
Rand’s local union chair nominated her to the CTU president to participate in the American Federation of Teachers civics design team. She was eager to participate. From her experience teaching in different kinds of schools, she understands how important it is to develop research-based professional development that can work for any school district.
“I was so excited. If you teach any type of history, civics is intertwined in it. Our nation is civics; our democracy is civics. You can’t teach American history without teaching civics. That’s who we are,” Rand says.
Getting students engaged in civics is one way to combat the increasingly negative tone of political discourse in the country. For example, Rand says, it’s critical for students to understand the importance of voting in every election, including local elections. “It is so important for students to understand that they are the people who make up the democracy, and they must be active participants,” she says. “Only 13 percent of Clevelanders voted in the most recent mayoral election. It feels as though voter participation is dwindling. To reverse it, we have to dive back into the classroom. We have to tackle civics engagement in the classroom to change things in the future.”
Within the design team, she is studying how teachers can incorporate a fair and factual dialogue about controversial topics regarding civics actions, including infusing controversial issues and readings into the curriculum and being able to extract facts to create discussions from them.
Getting students to acknowledge a variety of perspectives is key. “We need to start by telling students that although you may feel strongly, so does someone else. Getting a student to extract and explain another perspective grows the student’s empathy and tolerance,” Rand says. “It can help students understand that their world is not the only world.”
Rand looks forward to sharing the results of the design team’s work with school districts across the nation and emphasizes the importance of teaching this critically important curriculum without judgment. The design team’s work will give teachers research-based resources and information about how to teach civics in an empathetic and open way.
“I am optimistic about this project and our approach to the work,” she says. “I am working with a good group of open-minded teachers who are engaging in evidence-based work and who are excited about training others to help them implement the professional development that we’re designing.”