by Pat Norman, SRI Board Member
Like the majority of teachers in the United States who enter the profession, I am a white, middle-class female. My own teacher candidates at Trinity University mirror the U.S. teaching force. The School Reform Initiative has helped me become fiercely committed to educational equity and excellence, but also to supporting my teacher candidates in becoming so as well.
My work with SRI introduced me to the concept of white privilege and helped me slowly begin to understand the ways that Whiteness has shaped my life. SRI seminars also helped me see that schools largely function to maintain inequality. Although seemingly committed to interrupting that inequity, I was reluctant to explore implications for my practice as a pre-service teacher educator for more years than I am comfortable admitting. When a close friend and colleague gently raised questions about whether and how we were helping pre-service candidates develop culturally responsive teaching practices, my response was defensive: “I am already responsible for teaching students how to build learning community; how to plan and teach in each content area; how to assess; how to collaborate with parents and colleagues; how to reflect on and grow from their practice. There isn’t room in the curriculum for anything else!”
Trayvon Martin’s death and George Zimmerman’s acquittal in 2013 woke me up. As I struggled with my own response as well as the nation’s to Trayvon’s murder and Zimmerman’s non-guilty verdict, I felt an enormous sense of urgency to engage my students in a dialogue about race and its impact on education. I had to acknowledge that I had been preparing educators ill equipped to teach diverse students. I was a significant part of the problem.
Bonnie Davis, in her book How to Teach Students Who Don’t Look Like You: Culturally Responsive Teaching Strategies, suggests that educators need to engage in a multi-pronged journey to become culturally responsive. First, we must look inside ourselves to explore our racial identity and build racial competence. Second, we need to listen to and learn from others in order to expand our understanding of culturally diverse students and families. Then we are in a position to integrate new knowledge into our teaching practice, implementing strategies to teach and engage culturally diverse learners.
Armed with my newfound resolve, I mapped out how to explicitly address issues of race and equity across the summer, fall and spring semesters in the elementary Master of Arts in Teaching program. I reorganized the summer session to better lay the groundwork for having courageous conversation. I realized that I should introduce students to adult developmental theory from the outset of the program, and to make the claim early on that we would engage in lots of instrumental and socializing learning before beginning to head out to the skinny branches to examine questions that are hardest to address, including issues of race. We read chapters from Leading for Powerful Learning: A Guide for Instructional Leaders written by SRI colleagues. As I have in years past, I continue to use many SRI protocols and processes to help us establish our professional learning community. During the summer session, however, I am now explicit when using protocols such as The Paseo and Diversity Rounds that we are moving into self-authoring territory.
I did a lot more reading to find pieces that both compliment and expand on Singleton and Linton’s ideas in Courageous Conversations about Race: A Field Guide for Achieving Equity in Schools, one of our anchor texts for the year. I knew from years past that when white teacher candidates are asked to write their cultural memoir, they largely talk about the influence of their families and rarely explore issues of race. Thus as a way to launch our transformational learning community in the summer, I now invite all of us, myself included, to share photo presentations of the ways that our family has influenced the person we are today. My intention is to help us begin to learn about each other quickly and to establish the trust needed to take a much more focused look at the ways race has influenced our lives in the fall and spring semesters. We also begin to examine ways that we can learn about children’s families as candidates begin their year-long internship placements.
In the fall semester, we work our way through Courageous Conversations about Race: A Field Guide for Achieving Equity in Schools. We explore how the two elementary schools we work in, one suburban, one urban, separated by only 3 miles, have such different resources, expectations and learning opportunities for students. We examine Whiteness and white privilege at some length, exploring ways that many of us have benefitted from the latter and not understood the former. We learn that white people in the U.S. generally think that to have a race is to be a person of color. But to be White is to have a race. We explore micro-aggressions, what they are and how some of us have unwittingly engaged in them. We often explore the many racialized incidents that occur in the United States over the course of our year together. We read and discuss Ali Michael’s book, Raising Race Questions: Whiteness and Inquiry in Education. We learn that race is a force that influences every aspect of classroom life. Race impacts our relationships with our students and their families. It influences both what we teach and how we teach it, our discipline practices, school and classroom culture/community, expectations, and communication.
Instead of writing a cultural memoir, we now write and share our racial autobiographies. By exploring our own and each other’s racial identities and reading about the racial experiences of others outside of the teacher preparation program, we actively work to strengthen our racial competence. Ali Michael describes racial competence as:
- “having the skills and confidence to engage in healthy and reciprocal cross-racial relationships;
- to recognize and honor difference without judgment;
- to notice and analyze racial dynamics as they occur;
- to confront racism at the individual, group and systems level;
- to cultivate support mechanisms for continuing to be involved in antiracist practice even when it is discouraging or conflictual;
- to speak one’s mind and be open to feedback on one’s ideas;
- to ask for feedback about one’s ideas and work
- to raise race questions about oneself and one’s practice” (2014, p. 5).
We come to understand that if we want our students to have a positive racial identity, we must have one ourselves. That means moving past a typical White stance of colorblindness and color muteness and being able to identify our privilege and work to interrupt it.
After graduating, we continue to use SRI tools and processes to explore issues of race and equity once in their own classroom through a monthly beginning teacher study group that I facilitate for our graduates.
It has taken me a very long time to develop teacher education practices that better reflect my fierce commitment to making schools more equitable places for students’ learning. I have so much more still to learn. I stumble often and understand on a near daily basis what it is I don’t know I don’t know. One thing I do know — I could not have progressed in the ways that I have without the School Reform Initiative. I am grateful that the term fierceness is embedded in our mission. Fierceness gives us the energy and courage we need to change the things that must change.
– Pat Norman can be reached at pnorman@schoolreforminitiative.org
