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June 1, 2020 - February 4, 2023
argue that if aspiring teachers from these programs were challenged to teach with an acknowledgment of, and respect for, the local knowledge of urban communities, and were made aware of how the models for teaching and recruitment they are a part of reinforce a tradition that does not do right by students, they could be strong assets for urban communities.
It posits that the indigenous have their own unique ways of constructing knowledge, utilize distinct modes of communication in their interactions with one another, and hold cultural understandings that vary from the established norm.
For teachers to acknowledge that the ways they perceive, group, and diagnose students has a dramatic impact on student outcomes, moves them toward reconciling the cultural differences they have with students, a significant step toward changing the way educators engage with urban youth of color.
the brilliance of neoindigenous youth cannot be appreciated by educators who are conditioned to perceive anything outside their own ways of knowing and being as not having value.
The reality is that we privilege people who look and act like us, and perceive those who don’t as different and, frequently, inferior.
In schools, urban youth are expected to leave their day-to-day experiences and emotions at the door and assimilate into the culture of schools.
All schools take students from various background and create a new one. Not limited to urban. Rural folks have the same issue.
Failure to prepare teachers to appreciate the psychic spaces students occupy inevitably limits their effectiveness.
Reality pedagogy is an approach to teaching and learning that has a primary goal of meeting each student on his or her own cultural and emotional turf.
Excellent goal!
Instead, the teacher begins from an understanding of the students as unique individuals and then develops approaches to teaching and learning that work for those individuals.
This is humanistic pedagogy with regard to race.
Reality pedagogy focuses on privileging the ways that students make sense of the classroom while acknowledging that the teacher often has very different expectations about the classroom.
This should always be done regardless of the race of the teacher or student.
Our preoccupation with positioning ourselves as good guys in a war against the young people meant that we were fulfilling our chief function as cogs in the urban-education machine. The more we told tales of dysfunction, the more we worked to maintain it.
For many of the white teachers, the process held an unmistakable element of racism. Phrases like “these kids” or “those kids” were often clearly code words for bad black and brown children.
That's pretty presumptuous of your coworkers. This is basically the same thing as the teachers were doing with the students - see previous highlight.
These scholars argue that black youth view doing well in school as acting white, without considering that teachers may perceive being black as not wanting to do well in school. The issue is not that youth of color see academic success as limited to whites. It is that they typically see white teachers as enforcers of rules that are unrelated to the actual teaching and learning process. Consequently, they respond negatively to whatever structures these teachers value even at the expense of their own academic success.
Every educator who works with the neoindigenous must first recognize their students’ neoindigeneity and teach from the standpoint of an ally who is working with them to reclaim their humanity.
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.
Ouch! But it's so true!
being a model teacher meant being able to develop lesson plans that could be followed by any teacher across the country, reflecting the language of the newest academic standards. It had nothing much to do with students’ learning.
Pentecostal pedagogy is an approach to teaching that reminds us that teaching is not just telling students what you know; it is about knowing how to share what you know so that it can be optimally received.
The strategies that Marcus employs with his clients issue from Pentecostal pedagogy. Infusing humor and story into the instruction, allowing the space for the release of tensions and frustrations, and welcoming the voices of the people you are sharing information with or providing a service to—these are tools used on the pulpit and in the barbershop, and should be used in the classroom as well.
Cogens are simple conversations between the teacher and their students with a goal of co-creating/generating plans of action for improving the classroom.
Cogens, in their purest form, are structured dialogues about the inner workings of the social field participants coinhabit.
