Suzana Ustabecir serves as an instructional effectiveness specialist with the Chicago Public Schools. Dedicated to supporting learning for all students, Suzana Ustabecir brings a strong working familiarity with such educational programs as Facing History and Ourselves.
Facing History and Ourselves is a community engagement program that works against prejudice and encourages justice by teaching the lessons of history. Each lesson uses material from history and literature to explore how individuals and groups make decisions, and how students can use what they know about the past to make ethical decisions in the present.
All Facing History and Ourselves courses begin by exploring how individual identity and group membership develop. By learning how groups include or exclude certain members, students come to understand concepts such as individuality, conformity, stereotyping, and group loyalty. Students then apply this understanding to history or historical literature in context.
They learn how people's choices and participation in civic processes make the difference in what becomes history. Given the opportunity to discuss and evaluate the choices of involved and uninvolved parties, from leaders to everyday citizens, they come to understand that it is everyone's responsibility to leave the legacy of their time.
The program reinforces this understanding by closing with stories of those who have made a difference. Like all Facing History materials, these lessons engage the student in a threefold pedagogy of emotional engagement, intellectual challenge, and reflection on ethics. The target result is activation of the student's civic agency, which often manifests as an action project that students initiate as the course ends.
