Teacher Leadership Standard 5: Establish a culturally inclusive learning climate that facilitates academic engagement and success for all
Artifacts: Community Engagement Product | School-Community Case Study | Integration and Action Exercise
Looking back at the last two years, I have had a moderate amount of success in my work toward becoming a more culturally responsive teacher. I have developed a curriculum that has featured more culturally diverse writers, and I have encouraged my students to listen to multiple voices and become more aware of the racial and social injustices in the world around them. Not everything has been a success; my unit on racial justice earlier this year stumbled when a student pointed out how some other students were making comments during a class discussion that she felt were insensitive to African Americans. This episode demonstrated that I still have a long ways to go, but it gave me a direction and some ideas about how to better proceed toward a culturally inclusive learning climate.
I’d like to think I’m progressive in my attitude toward race, but I never assume I’m ahead of the curve, so to speak. I wasn’t surprised about Peggy McIntosh’s (1988) article, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” and its assertion that “describing white privilege makes one newly accountable.” As McIntosh ran off her list of 50 daily effects of white privilege, I started to answer yes to each one of them. After a while I stopped because there was no variety in my answer. I recognized every one of the items on the list. Some I had recognized a long time ago, but many I had never thought of. For example, No. 11: “I can be casual about whether or not to listen to another person’s voice in a group in which s/he is the only member of his/her race” (McIntosh, 1988). I have done this before, and reflected on it for a discussion post in the Culturally Responsive Teaching class. I did not recognize at the time what I was doing. I wasn’t really paying attention to the person, in my mind because I was not interested in what that individual was saying, not because of their race. As I imagine how that person felt, being the only individual of their race in that room, and as they spoke and looked out at a room of disinterested individuals, I wonder how they felt. Did they know what was happening? Had this happened before, as in was it a regular occurrence? The lesson I drew from this was that I must be more aware of the unintended consequences of my actions, no matter how small or trivial those actions may seem to be to me. Something as little as lifting up my head and actively listening to an individual may empower them to believe that their voice matters.
One area I have more control over than others is in the materials I choose for my students. I have included different voices in my curriculum and have made some changes this past year to become more diverse, such as adding Chinese philosophy to my philosophy unit and ensuring I had more diverse writers in my environment unit. Banks (1996) highlights the need for changes such as these: “Many of our citizens - including many youths who are poor, who speak a language other than English, and who are of color - are alienated, and feel left out, abandoned, and forgotten by U.S. mainstream institutions” (p. 336). That statement made 20 years ago still applies. Our students often feel left out in our classrooms; textbooks are improving in their appeal to and reflection of our non-mainstream students, but there remains so much farther to go. For example, I enjoy teaching Shakespeare, but it does not reflect the culture of so many of my students. The themes they can relate to, but the characters they cannot, not to mention the setting. Yet English teachers are often limited in the curriculum they can present. When I taught sophomores I started the year with short stories from our textbook, and we had some flexibility to provide representative material there. After that, we researched Greek mythology, then read Oedipus and Antigone, Julius Caesar, and The Lord of the Flies. All of that is Western and male and white. Clearly we can find something in there that can be replaced with a text that better represents the lives of our students, while maintaining the curricular standards established by our district.
Our students are not just influenced by the content we share. Their outside lives have an even greater impact on their lives. My wife, a teacher like me, and I often complain at night about a school system that expects us to perform miracles but never takes into account the outside world that our students live in. So when I read about Allison Davis’s research in which he found that “education is strongly influenced by societal factors such as race, class, and the sociocultural context in which it occurs” (Hillis, 1996, p. 115), it struck a chord. We’ve been talking about this for years, the idea that our students have influences beyond our classrooms and that our job as educators is to somehow work with those influences.
Our careers started in the southern California desert, in a place where education was seemingly highly valued by our white students, but not so much by our Latino students. Upon reflection, the lines were more socioeconomic than racial, but the relationship between the two was there. As a high school teacher, I struggled to reach certain students who could not see value in what I was teaching. I wondered whether my curriculum was beyond their cultural understanding, and I debated how best to get them excited about Frankenstein and Macbeth. I didn’t have complete success, but perhaps I was thinking of the wrong problem. Maybe my lessons were better suited to middle-class students. Maybe I wasn’t giving my lower-income students content that related or mattered to them. Reading about Allison Davis’s work forces me to recognize a different approach to the problem. The lower-class child “learns from his family and teachers that the chances for a person in his lower-class position to finish high school and college, and to become socially mobile through education, are so slight in view of the economic position and classways of his family, that they scarcely exist” (Davis and Dollard, as quoted in Hillis, 1996, p. 119).
Today, I teach in a middle-class school in a middle-class district. Many of my students are lower-income, but not to the extent they were in California. I still have the problem of getting my students to care, but their support systems are so much different here than they were down there. I call back to the phrase, “I wish I knew then what I know now,” and wonder how different my approach to teaching those students would have been had I found ways to demonstrate value in education. I suspect my wife and I would have had some different conversations.
References
Banks, J. A. (1996). Transformative knowledge, curriculum reform, and action. In Banks, J. A. (Ed.), Multicultural education, transformative knowledge, and action: Historical and contemporary perspectives (pp. 335-348). New York: Teachers College.
Hillis, M. R. (1996). Allison Davis and the study of race, social class, and schooling. In Banks, J. A. (Ed.), Multicultural education, transformative knowledge, and action: Historical and contemporary perspectives (pp. 115-128). New York: Teachers College.
McIntosh, P. (1988). White privilege: Unpacking the invisible knapsack. Independent School, 49:2, 31-35.
No comments:
Post a Comment