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?