Verdict Set Table For Learning Educators Exposed To New Ways To Teach Tolerance And Diversity

Attending Saturday’s Diversity in the Classroom conference was more productive for a local elementary school teacher than standing in front of Kootenai County’s courthouse to protest at the recent Aryan Nations trial.

“This is my way of representing the human (rights) task force and what they stand for,” said Kim Yearsley, a second-grade teacher at Hayden Lake Elementary.

Yearsley was one of 200 educators and students from Idaho and Washington who attended the free conference at North Idaho College on Friday and Saturday. The event was organized by the Human Rights Education Foundation and Kootenai County Task Force on Human Relations.

Although planned for months, the conference occurred shortly after the recent $6.3 million verdict against the Aryan Nations leadership, found responsible for an attack on two Kootenai County residents in 1998.

The jury’s decision and the conference’s topic of racism and diversity hit home for local educators, who learned new ways to teach diversity and tolerance in their classrooms. In front of Boswell Hall Auditorium, signatures were collected as a thank-you gift to Morris Dees, the founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center who represented the residents against the Aryan Nations.

Though Yearsley said her class of 21 students hasn’t discussed the trial, they do recognize the value of diversity. Some students live with their grandparents, for instance, she said.

Yearsley said she tries to develop her students’ individual identities during the first month of school. That could simply include a birthday, a haircut or a lost tooth, she said.

“By celebrating people’s identities, we’re celebrating differences,” Yearsley said.

Speakers from across the country led workshops and spoke on issues that included tolerance, racism and human rights.

Omowale Akintunde, a professor teaching diversity at the University of Wyoming, applauded listeners for their reactions to the recent Aryan Nations issues. But racism also occurs less blatantly in institutions and societies.

“I can tell you how it feels, but you can’t see it,” Akintunde said. “The most dangerous person to me is the one who swears they’re not racist.

We’re all racists. It’s subconsciously entrenched, and we can’t escape them.”

Akintunde captured the attention of the 140-person crowd Saturday morning with stories and humor about society’s handling of skin color, stereotypes and closed minds. His speech left the audience with some racial issues to think about.

“Until we start to talk about the substantive issues of race, we are going nowhere fast and it pains me,” he said.

Loretta Ross, director of the National Center for Human Rights in Atlanta, handed out booklets on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In her workshop Saturday, she challenged listeners to identify violators of human rights.

“Everything unlike us is different and everything different leads to discrimination,” Ross said. “Developing our own identity is a very special and precious thing.” Society’s basic human rights are civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights. They were declared on Dec. 10, 1948, but are unknown by a majority of the population, Ross said.

“The wonderful thing about human rights is we all have the same human rights,” Ross said. “Don’t attack people because of their identities. Let’s talk about those structures which lead to discrimination.”

Diversity in the classroom is a subject Yearsley said she’s approaching very carefully in her Hayden Lake classroom.

“I need to support other views, and I feel like I do,” she said.

As a classroom topic, human rights is just beginning to develop, and people are just beginning to recognize its importance, according to Ross. No one’s yet written a textbook on the topic, she said.

“There’s so much to get done I just get excited thinking about it.”