Reflection on Teacher Leadership Standard 1: Moral Leadership

My preconceptions about our Moral Issues in the Classroom class focused mainly on the religious aspects of the course, but those ideas changed once I began the reading. Our first text, The Charged Classroom: Predicaments and Possibilities for Democratic Teaching, forced me to think about the various issues regarding social justice and democracy that flow through my classroom. Technically, Judith Pace (2015) defines a charged classroom as one “suffused with contradictions that create both friction and potential” (p. 4). This could be a teacher trying to entice students to perform well without embarrassing them in front of their classmates. Or it could be a discussion about a controversial topic where the teacher is trying to navigate between conflicting and provocative viewpoints. Then there’s the teacher negotiating the balance between a district’s curricular demands, state testing, and the unique needs of individuals within a classroom. The “charge” from these areas can be enough to ignite a spark, but the question is whether that spark will destroy confidence or create knowledge.

Pace’s (2015) discussion about face highlights a major charge within the classroom. Students appreciate high expectations, but they don’t want to lose face in front of their peers, and when expectations are not met, public criticism, even constructive, needs to be couched in a way that does not diminish the relationship between teacher and student. This isn't anything new to most teachers; nobody likes to be shown up in front of others, and the teenagers I work with are often at their most vulnerable. When an adult makes them lose face among their peers, they shut down and often fail to return to engagement. Culturally responsive teaching goes a long way toward maintaining a strong relationship; when teachers can empathize with their students’ unique circumstances, they are more likely to avoid face-losing situations.

Controversial topics provide another challenge in the classroom. Often the teacher has a desire to control these discussions to avoid offending students - and perhaps their parents or administrators. Yet the discussion of controversial and provocative topics opens students to new knowledge and is vital to democratic education (Pace, 2015). Teachers should not avoid these topics, but rather they should seek training in facilitating these discussions. Teachers and students must tolerate conflict, according to Pace; she recommends the use of peacemaking curriculum to promote a deeper understanding of conflict. Clary (2017) suggests using reflective writing to have students think about their religious or philosophical views and how they relate to the content. The reflection acknowledges the students' viewpoints without compromising the curriculum.

When I first started teaching about research to my Advanced Placement English students, I had one topic on the taboo list: abortion. I did not trust faith-based arguments, because I felt those arguments were not arguable - I cannot argue against the existence of God. Furthermore, one cannot point to the Bible and its commandment as empirical evidence, as many evangelicals seem to do. Basically, I did not want to deal with abortion, so my students wrote about global warming or animal rights or whether or not college athletes should be paid. After reading Religion in the Classroom (James, Schweber, Kunzman, Barton, and Logan, 2015), I felt that excluding a religious-based argument would limit my students’ ability to discuss those issues of faith in what I hope is a safe environment. This year I did not exclude any topics, but I focused more on making sure my students had arguable topics for their research, religious or not. When I explained this to one of my students who I know has strong religious beliefs, she was pleased with my explanation, a sign that I made the right move. Her research topic: the effect of religious beliefs on the adoption of scientific knowledge. Trocco (2000) actually has his students study topics on the fringe of science and health because "when students study fringe topics, they have to weigh evidence against testimony and claims against facts, and these responsibilities immediately draw them deeper into their work" (p. 628).

Finally, teachers should address curricular demands head on and demand an acknowledgement of their role as the gatekeeper of what actually gets taught to students (Pace, 2015). The teacher is the obvious choice to prioritize those demands, and while some priorities might be set aside, administrators should give teachers training that allows them to provide “access to challenging, meaningful, and multicultural subject matter” (p. 117). With an eye on the needs of the students, teachers should be trusted to manage this conflict, as well as the many others that will inevitably arise in the classroom.

References

Clary, R. (2017). Defusing discomfort: Bridging philosophical and religious conflicts through reflective writing. The Science Teacher, 84(2), 26-30.

James, J. H., Schweber, S., Kunzman, R., Barton, K. C., & Logan, K. (2015). Religion in the classroom: Dilemmas for democratic education. New York: Routledge.

Pace, J. L. (2015). The charged classroom: Predicaments and possibilities for democratic teaching. New York: Routledge.

Trocco, F. (2000). Encouraging students to study weird things. Phi Delta Kappan, 81(8), 628-631.

Reflection on Teacher Leadership Standard 5: Culturally Inclusive Teaching

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.