Gloria Ladson-Billings rocks

This is a response for CI 501 to "Toward a Theory of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy" by Gloria Ladson-Billings

            My favorite text this week was the piece by Gloria Ladson-Billings. Although I’ve been enjoying the theoretical readings, it was highly refreshing to read a piece with concrete examples from real classrooms. Ladson-Billings discusses the need for culturally relevant pedagogy, which she defines as a “model that not only addresses student achievement but also helps students to accept and affirm their cultural identity while developing critical perspectives that challenge inequities that schools (and other institutions) perpetuate” (204). This is a beautiful definition – in my opinion, it should be every school’s mission statement.

            I would like to specifically address the points that Ladson-Billings made in the “Conceptions of Self and Others” section. One thing that I struggled with when I was a teacher, and that I am now seeing some of the student teachers that I supervise struggle with is the idea of who is to blame. Ladson-Billings writes, “Students were never referred to as being from a single-parent household, being on AFDC (welfare), or needing psychological evaluation. Instead, teachers talked about their own shortcomings and limitations and ways they needed to change to ensure student success” (215). One of my biggest flaws as an educator is my pride; I hate to admit being wrong, since I really don’t want to do anything harmful to my students. However, blaming them (“They never do their homework;” “They always show up tardy”) is, in fact, extremely harmful to students. I worked hard to transform my mindset during my four years of teaching. Now, as a student teacher supervisor, I am observing some student teachers behave the same negative way. I’ve been trying to share my own experiences and explain that students never do something without a reason. Their decisions are not random, they are chosen; perhaps those choices are intentional, such as when a student decides to resist a teacher who is not valuing his culture. Or, those choices can be subconscious, such as when a student resists something in the classroom because he needs the extra attention and care because of some problem he is going through. Although teachers cannot hope to solve every problem that students come into the classroom with, we should analyze the students’ behaviors with them in order to discover what we, the teachers, can do better.

            Another piece from this section that I connected with was about the teachers trying to build community pride. I struggled a lot with this when I was teaching, and I still don’t have a good answer to it. The teachers the Ladson-Billings described were encouraging their students to stay in the community and work to improve it, rather than seeing “getting out” as their only chance for success. I want to fully support the activist’s perspective of staying in the hood and working to make it better. However, I taught in Pilsen, an area of Chicago with a strong gang presence. For students who were not gang affiliated, staying in the neighborhood and becoming activists was a future I supported fully. But for students who were heavily involved in gangs (and whose families were also gang-affiliated), I thought that they would have a better chance of success if they were far away from their hood. I’m still grappling with this, especially after hearing Ameena Matthews of CeaseFire speak; she grew up in a gang-affiliated family, and today she speaks with youth about stopping the violence in Chicago.

            Finally, in the “Conceptions of Knowledge” section of Ladson-Billings’s article, she discusses teachers fighting the students’ “right-answer approach to school” by encouraging them to ask “Why?” and promoting intellectual challenges (219). I love this idea, and I attempted to use it in my classroom as well. I recall asking my students to always ask me “Why are we doing this?” and telling them that if I could not provide a good enough answer, that we would not do that activity. Students took me up on my offer (especially in the beginning of the semester, when they wanted to test the waters), and I really enjoyed it. It forced me to think as I was planning each lesson, why are we doing this? Why is this important? How will this help my students to become better people, or to make the world around them better?

Linear

Principals tend to be threatened by things they don't understand or can't control because they're more dependent upon the person, not a system.

Chapter 12: Teaching, Gender, and Curriculum by Sara Freedman

I am, by nature, a linear thinker. My thoughts flow from left to right, from cause to effect, from manipulating variables to measuring outcomes. This means that I was, by nature, appreciated by my former principal, also a linear thinker. I observed some of the other teachers and judged them to be disorganized, too 'big-picture,' and failing the students for not teaching specific skills.

And I've recently realized that I was very wrong.

Lately, my opinion has been changing to believe that linear thinking has little to no place in the classroom. People are not linear. You cannot simply change one variable in two different classrooms and expect it to have the same effect. There's a lot more to it than that, but I'm going to focus more on the results of this realization. Although I'm very glad that I have a new way to think about teaching, one that is much more open, idealistic, and hopeful, I'm feeling pretty bad about what went on when I was teaching. 

For one thing, the focus of my classroom was on the mastery of skills. During my first year of teaching, I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, and so the students and I read things and talked about them, and then we wrote things and talked about them. We enjoyed each others' company in our discussions. We had fun, and we laughed. During the next three years, my classroom was focused on skill mastery. I attempted to get teaching down to a science -- if I plan out every step, determine exactly how everything will be scaffolded, and know precisely how I will measure it (over and over again), then I will be a good teacher. Don't get me wrong, in some ways, I still think those ideas are solid--but I don't think that they should be the basis for curriculum. Teaching is not a science, it's an art, and it's informed by human interaction, not numbers. 

If I went back into the classroom today and had to choose what type of teacher I would be, I would be the teacher I was during my first year. I was confused and my grades were a "cloud of mystery" (to borrow Pete's phrase), but I think that my students developed a stronger love of reading and writing than they did in my subsequent years. Of course, I have no data to back that up -- and I wouldn't want any because it would be in direct opposition to everything I'm saying here.

crafty aspirations

1 final exam, 2 presentations, and 4 massive papers? Check. The first semester of grad school is donezies. I put a lot of effort forth with most of the assignments...however, with one of them I decided to follow a motto I'd heard from a friend working on her Ph.D.:

The best dissertation is a finished dissertation.


So, laziness aside, everything's done - YAY! And that means I get to turn my attention to Christmas shopping and Christmas crafting. I made some adorable and delicious-smelling presents for my family, and I only had a few minor fails...such as:

Oh well. It's the thought that counts, right?

finals

In short, this is a particularly un-fun time of the semester. I've got 4 massive papers, 2 presentations, and 1 final exam. Thus far, I've completed 1 presentation, and written pretty solid drafts of 2 papers. But I've got a lot to do before December 15th at 5pm (when my last paper is due).

I'm currently working on a paper for a class that was cross-listed between English and Curriculum & Instruction. I seriously doubt that I will ever take another cross-listed course that isn't between two education-y fields. Even though I was an English major in undergrad, this course is focusing on a specific field within English -- which I have almost zero background in (and actually, had never even heard of during my undergrad days -- it's a new concentration at U of I). Thus, I'm having a pretty hard time figuring out how to do the research required for the literature review section of my paper. I like to work hard and figure things out, but it's quite tricky to learn the mechanics of a whole field in one semester -- much less to know the literature base so you can utilize it in a paper. Ugh. I think I'm becoming incoherent. Can we just fast-forward to December 15th at 5:01pm?

registering for classes

I asked Brian to help me narrow down my list of classes to register for. After we looked at a few and read some descriptions, he said something to the effect of, "So, are all the classes about how minorities? I mean, that's really valuable so you won't be a racist teacher, but they're not teaching you how to be a teacher!"

Although I really appreciate how liberal and progressive U of I is, I do wish that there were more practical courses. From my perspective, I'm pretty good at not being racist and recognizing the advantages I have as a white, middle-class, raised-Christian female. I want some strategies and discussions with other teachers about why this might work and the flaws in that. I suppose that's why I think I'd rather teach at a community college or PDS instead of a university.

and now, for something a bit lighter...

My writing studies teacher, on the gift of technology:

And what about the overhead projector? When that first came out, it was so amazing: this piece of technology that allowed you to face the class and simultaneously totally destroy your eyesight.

how we talk about racism

As I was reading an article this morning about social justice in curriculum evaluation, I considered how I usually discuss racism (often in the context of immigration). My argument is typically that we cannot stereotype people as a whole, and I often mention the model, hardworking immigrant.

That argument doesn't address what I believe actually causes prejudice: institutionalized racism. However, the argument about institutionalized racism is a lot harder for people to hear, because it requires whites to admit that we are oppressors. Another problem with the argument of institutionalized racism is that it makes the speaker seem more distant from their audience -- if you (and by 'you,' I mean a white person discussing racism) acknowledge that institutionalized racism is an overwhelming force in america, you probably place yourself within the (small) population of people working to resist it. That will create a divide between speaker and listener if the listener is not also down with the cause; and arguments tend to be more persuasive and more easily 'won' if the speaker can forge a connection with the listener and make it less threatening for the listener to alter their point of view.

Anywho, I don't have any answers to this quandary, just some observations. I'd like to move towards the more radical way of arguing, but I feel that doing so would just alienate my sparring partners -- I predict that they would listen to me less, placing me in a "radical crazies who talk about stuff I'll never agree with" category.

Edit: I think I'd like to do a research project on this at some point, exploring people's opinions of institutionalized racism (and their motivations for thinking the ways that they do) and perhaps trying to create a curriculum/unit that investigates institutionalized racism.