For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood... and the Rest of Y'all Too: Reality Pedagogy and Urban Education (Race, Education, and Democracy)

by Christopher Emdin

The point here is that there are both black and white people who can be classified as “white folks”—in that they maintain a system that doesn’t serve the needs of youth in the hood.

This tension between educators who saw themselves as kindhearted people who were doing right by the less fortunate, and students who struggled to maintain their culture and identity while being forced to be the type of student their teachers envisioned, played a part in the eventual recognition that the Carlisle School was a failed experiment.

the neoindigenous in urban areas have developed ways to live within socioeconomically disadvantaged spaces while maintaining their dignity and identity.

They are blamed for achievement gaps, neighborhood crime, and high incarceration rates, while the system that perpetuates these issues remains unchallenged.

they are expected to divorce themselves from their culture in order to be academically successful. For many youth, this process involves the loss of their dignity and a shattering of their personhood.

Students quickly receive the message that they can only be smart when they are not who they are. This, in many ways, is classroom colonialism; and it can only be addressed through a very different approach to teaching and learning.

a role reversal of sorts that positions the student as the expert in his or her own teaching and learning, and the teacher as the learner. It posits that while the teacher is the person charged with delivering the content, the student is the person who shapes how best to teach that content. Together, the teacher and students co-construct the classroom space.

Instead of seeing the students as equal to their cultural identity, a reality pedagogue sees students as individuals who are influenced by their cultural identity.

Reality pedagogy

Rather than face our fears, the mantra helped us to mask them.

And because being in touch with one’s emotions is the key to moving from the classroom (place) to the spaces where the students are, our students were invisible to us.

White folks who teach in the hood are particularly prone to this sort of rote model. This is especially the case if they are convinced that having all students pass tests creates some form of equity. In these cases they are so married to a curriculum that is sold as the only path to passing

the test that there is no willingness to deviate from it even if it is harming students.

Once educators recognize that they are biased against forms of brilliance other than their own,

they can finally begin to truly teach.

there is no starting point to changing the dismal statistics related to the academic underperformance of urban youth.

Deficit thinking by author right here.

After leaving this class, I wondered why the ability to plan a lesson, and not the ability to connect with students, was the prerequisite for being a model teacher.

inspire urban youth of color,

Othering

The preacher’s ability to have control over the service while allowing the congregants to guide his preaching can be replicated in the classroom through an approach to teaching that I call Pentecostal pedagogy.

"Control"????? Is this about pedagogy or performance? Is this teaching or art?

highly charged exchange,

Meaning, fully engaged with each other.

contexts of the gathering

effects of the contexts on those that gather

I have found that the two most powerful elements of a Pentecostal service, as related to pedagogy, are

the call-and-response exchanges between preacher and congregation, which results in focus and engagement,

the solemn call to the altar that moves them t...

church attendees

sit where they wanted,

led

without commandeering

guide without con...

use music to create a context for engaging their audience and then utilize the context that has been created as a tool for sharing information.

he

tells them

to put their h...

he

asks...

to throw up a peace sign for Tupa...

he’s asking when it’s more emotional. Like it’s a shifting of the emotions. There are times in class to tell the kids to do something, and then times to a...

If a student needed to take the class to a different emotional place or a different topic of conversation, the teacher needed to be like the preacher and not only allow it to happen, but celebrate it.

need for students to engage emotionally in order to learn

Pentecostal pedagogy, and the hip-hop pedagogy that comes from it, is successful because it provides a safe space ...

emo...

pedagogical skill to be able to both evoke and contain emotion in a way that supports free exchange among students, and between the students and the teacher.

teaching is a process where a context is created in which information is exchanged among people with the end result being an increase in the knowledge/information of everyone who takes part.

welcoming slang, colloquialisms, and “nonacademic” expressions, and then uses them to introduce new topics, knowledge, and conversations.

If one feels like what they have to say is of value in a particular place, they are more apt to transform the place into a community and partake in the activities that are valued within it.

These families may not share biological bonds but they do share values, language, and experiences (often around negative encounters with authority figures) that forge bonds as strong as or stronger than blood connections.

For the educator, knowledge of the process by which these familial bonds are created, and a command of the tools that support their creation, is integral to being effective. The best classroom teachers develop ways to make the classroom feel like a family that has its own distinct rules, ways of speaking, and power dynamics. Pentecostal pedagogy teaches us that once student voice is prominent in the classroom, and a classroom family structure has been established, issues that traditionally plague urban classrooms, like poor management and low participation, are quickly addressed or even self-corrected. Students with behavior management issues begin to self-manage and may even facilitate classroom discussions when there is a space for voice within the classroom family.

tools associated with reality pedagogy.

“Seven C’s”—cogenerative dialogues, coteaching, cosmopolitanism, context, content, competition, and curation.