I Don’t Feel Qualified toTeach the History of African Americans

By Michael Eppolito, Vermont

“I don’t feel qualified to teach the history of African Americans. I don’t feel like I can speak for them.”

The other white teachers around the table considered this statement carefully. It was an open and honest statement made by a teacher teaching in the whitest state in the union and it gets at the heart of our problems in Vermont schools. We were in the third day of an institute about teaching local history. We were in the beautiful, almost Disneyesque town of Grafton, Vermont for a four-day intensive class on how to teach history using local primary sources. The night before we had listened to a lecture by Jane Beck, who had just published her book on Daisy Turner. Daisy was the daughter of the formerly enslaved Alec Turner. Alec had come to Grafton with his family after the Civil War to build a life for his family. The story of the Turners has been embraced and prominently displayed by the town. Daisy’s story has been faithfully and respectfully recorded by Jane.  While both acknowledge race, neither address it. Consequently neither representation helps us in Vermont schools have conversations about race and equity. So in a state that likes to imagine itself as the bastion of progressivism and openness, and yet at the same time has the highest incarceration rate of African Americans in the nation, how do we as educators address the “culture of denial” that persists in our state?

The obvious answer is to confront the issue head on and have discussions about race. Even in our all white schools there are plenty of resources we could read, watch or listen to that we could use to educate ourselves. We absolutely need to have these text based conversations about race as a way of educating ourselves. We could also have these conversations about poverty, the other great rift in Vermont. Regardless, we need to not only understand what it means to be a person of color or someone living in poverty we also need to understand what it means to be white and privileged.

For us in Vermont the thinking about equity means preparing our students to engage in a world where race and ethnicity are palpable daily concerns. It is easy to ignore this in a place where everyone looks like you. It also means on a more pragmatic level how we deal with issues of difference.

I would also argue that while these discussions are necessary for raising awareness they are not sufficient for changing practice. We must look seriously and intentionally at adult and student work. Directly linking what we do in our classrooms and schools to questions on equity forces us to look at practice. While there are implicit, and sometimes explicit, biases in our teaching and the way we interact with students I think we tend to ignore the much more pervasive problem of low and poorly communicated expectations. Far too many of our classes are thoughtlessly constructed so that they amplify inequities among our students.

My experience of working with small rural schools is that discussing issues of power and privilege, and looking at the work we do is easier said than done. Equity is a complex and difficult discussion.  Consequently, it is easily set aside for competing priorities, even trivial ones. The level of discipline and focus such discussions entail are daunting to teachers trying to balance priorities, and often have a weak skill set in facilitating and participating in intentional discussions.

Four years ago I began working with a teacher leadership team that wanted to improve the quality of teacher interactions across the six schools I work with. Our goal was to move our system to a point where we could work on equitable outcomes for each student. We were not specifically focused on race or poverty. Over the following years our awareness has grown thanks to conversations at the School Reform Initiative Winter Meeting and what has been happening within Vermont. We identified four areas we wanted to work on to move our system towards more equitable education.

Create and Communicate Vision. Holding thoughtful, sustained conversations about practice feels unnatural. We have to impose rules and constraints on our behavior if we are going to get anywhere close to addressing issues of equity at a systems level. Communicating a vision of why we need to have focused disciplined conversations is important. Those conversations feel at the outset contrived, but that “just talking” about equity issues is not sufficient for raising awareness or changing practice.

Build Capacity. When we we began our work we knew that any deep conversations required a teaching corp that knew how to participate, present and facilitate intentional conversations. Our thinking was that any broad-based change in our system would require developing the discipline and skill set in our educators to have intentional and in depth conversations about their work, the work of their students and the role schools play in society. To this end we run in house workshops on collaborative practices and facilitative leadership.

Do Purposeful Work. In conjunction with developing the skills, educators need opportunities to practice having intentional conversations. The structure of public school forces teachers to be overly pragmatic. They need to focus on the current initiative, the behaviors of students as they cycle through their classroom, grading. During the scant opportunities teachers do have time to think and work together, the pragmatics of the daily production line squeeze out time for more thoughtful conversation. We have been creating non-negotiable times and projects, like developing assessments and tuning them against student work, ties intentionality to pragmatic concerns.

Build Leadership. Two things I have heard again and again as impediments to building intentional learning communities is that principals do not understand or support the work, and that teachers coming out of five-day seminars do not feel empowered to set up ILCs. While ILCs are still important, we will have to create more and varied opportunities for teachers to engage in deep and thoughtful work, particularly when it comes to issues of equity. That means supporting our facilitators in embedding intentionality into the weekly and daily work of schools. We are now working with teachers to create agendas for staff, department and team meetings that can achieve our goals of addressing equity.

Getting our schools to play their part in addressing the “culture of denial” in Vermont is our vision. We still have a very long way to go to get teachers away from shallow musings about equity to purposeful work that changes practice. However we are beginning to see evidence of system wide change. We now have teams of teachers from different schools looking at student work together. Our principals are focusing more on developing clear system wide criteria for student success. Our high school teachers are for the first time making their planning process public and are getting feedback on the connection between assessment and instruction. These small steps seem a long way from the most pressing problems we face in society, but I believe that as we get better at our daily practice we will address equity issues.

If you have any questions, feedback for Michael, he can be reached at michael.eppolito@trsu.org. Feel free to discuss this and other topics in our Facebook group.

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