August 9, 2016
Several weeks ago, we invited interested bloggers to write for an SRI team blog, a new resource we want to develop for our community of learners. We now have nearly 40 authors on our team! We are thrilled to share our first two blog posts from SRI Affiliates, Michael Eppolito (VT) and Tina Ruybalid (FL).
I Don’t Feel Qualified to Teach 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?…
Conscious Equity: Managing our Unconscious Student Expectations
By Tina Ruybalid, Florida
…And then, it hit me like a wet fish. I was a low expectancy student in the class. The presenter did not expect me to know the answer. Whether he moved on to save me from embarrassment, or moved on because he didn’t have the time to spend assisting my learning, he didn’t think I was capable of answering correctly.
Flashback to my classroom. How many students did I give up on too quickly because I ‘knew’ they wouldn’t get the right answer and we didn’t have time to let them sit and stare at me, or fumble for an answer? How many times had I refused eye contact because I didn’t want to embarrass them, knowing they would say the wrong thing. How often had I let them off the hook by allowing them to ‘phone a friend’ or allowing the class to ‘give them some help?’ I never returned to allow them to expand on the answer, or tell me in their own words, or explore their thinking aloud. Absent were words of feedback on what they DID answer correctly and what they still needed to consider. Now I knew first-hand how these students felt. And I was determined to change my practice…
You can look forward to a steady stream of writing from our community members! All of our team blog posts can be found at: schoolreforminitiative.org/category/team-blog/
Thank you,
Chris Jones
On behalf of School Reform Initiative
