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.