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

Its presence in the book title indicates that there is no political correctness, no tainting of the truth, and no hiding of what needs to be said. It prepares the reader for the substance of the text.

This is the equivalent of the black educator so invested in the structure and pedagogies of the traditional school system that the needs of black and brown students become secondary to maintaining the status quo.

How do we get disinterested students to care about themselves and their education? Why are our students not excited about learning? Why aren’t they adjusting well to the rules of school? Why are they underperforming academically?

My People the Sioux by Indigenous American writer Luther Standing Bear.

The school celebrated teachers’ rigidity and strictness out of a belief that this was the type of training that would be successful in acculturating indigenous students to white society.

exoticize

I 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.

The term neoindigenous carries the rich histories of indigenous groups, acknowledges powerful connections among populations that have dealt with being silenced, and signals the need to examine the ways that institutions replicate colonial processes.

Too often, when these students speak or interact in the classroom in ways that teachers are uncomfortable with, they are categorized as troubled students, or diagnosed with disorders like ADD (attention deficit disorder) and ODD (oppositional defiant disorder).

In urban schools, where the neoindigenous are taught to be docile and complicit in their own miseducation and then celebrated for being everything but who they are, they learn quickly that they are expected to divorce themselves from their culture in order to be academically successful.

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.

The Ways of White Folks, by Langston Hughes.

The reality is that we privilege people who look and act like us, and perceive those who don’t as different and, frequently, inferior.

Most importantly, they don’t consider their distance from these communities as an impediment to their ability to engage in the work within them.

The idea that one individual or school can give students “a life” emanates from a problematic savior complex that results in making students, their varied experiences, their emotions, and the good in their communities invisible. So invisible, in fact, that the chief way to teach urban youth of color more effectively—that is, to truly be in and in touch with their communities—is not seen as a viable option.

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.

This definition provides a simple yet necessary framework for understanding youth realities—because it moves educators to focus on the ways that youth see the world and their position in it based on the facts, laws, rules, and principles that govern the places they are from and the consequent spaces they inhabit.

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.

Rather than give teachers a set of tools to implement and hope that these approaches meet the specific needs of urban youth and their teachers in particular classrooms, reality pedagogy provides educators with a mechanism for developing approaches to teaching that meet the specific needs of the students sitting in front of them.

The more we told tales of dysfunction, the more we worked to maintain it. This process eroded the unbridled passion that brought us into the field of education, transforming us into agents of a traditional school culture that worked against young people.

In many ways, this is where the association between being academically successful and “acting white,” studied by education researchers like John Ogbu, comes from.

We were both told not to express too much emotion with students or be too friendly with them. I was told to “stand your ground when they test you,” “don’t let them know anything about your life so they don’t get too familiar,” and “remember that there is nothing wrong with being mean.” Everyone from whom we solicited advice shared a variation of the phrase “Don’t smile till November.”

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.

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.

Once educators recognize that they are biased against forms of brilliance other than their own, they can finally begin to truly teach.

The teacher must work to ensure that the institution does not absolve them of the responsibility to acknowledge the baggage they bring to the classroom and analyze how that might affect student achievement.

The lessons were so structured and inflexible that they restricted student involvement to a set time period for questions, and even these were planned for—the lessons featuring answers to students’ “expected questions.”

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.

The teacher who was being groomed to lead instruction based on the quality of his lesson plans had no idea what it meant to engage and connect to students.

Teaching prep programs focus primarily on the construction of great lesson plans and less on the relationships being built with students. I believe people feel that is the easy part of the job. Are you teaching for the right reasons?

The videos from black churches reminded me that teaching requires showing the learner (whether teacher or student) models of what is to be learned. In this case, it required having the teacher imagine who (if anyone) he was seeing when he created his lessons, and then showing him examples of how those lessons would differ if he was designing the lessons for the church congregation—which would require learning from the preacher.

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.

Cogens are simple conversations between the teacher and their students with a goal of co-creating/generating plans of action for improving the classroom.2

Cogens, in their purest form, are structured dialogues about the inner workings of the social field participants coinhabit. A social field is any location where human beings interact under particular rules and hierarchies established by society. It is understood that any person who spends time within a certain place is an agent of that place whose actions are somewhat predetermined by the structures in place. To have a cogen about a particular social field requires the belief that everyone who will participate brings tremendous value to the dialogue, because each has a unique perspective and vantage point. Those who participate in the educational cogen are viewed as experts on their own unique relationship to the social field that is the classroom.

A young person who is emotionally connected to the classroom as a cosmopolitan space will not only be willing to learn in that classroom but is committed to that classroom.

The fallout from the student’s failure to perform his assigned role results in healthy peer pressure from the class in holding him accountable for the disruption.

In this model, very few of the students end up successful. Those who perform smartness never truly engage in the learning process because they are too preoccupied with playing a role. Students who refuse to comply become so preoccupied with shattering the inauthenticity of the classroom that they lose the opportunity to be academically challenged. Students who actually manage to engage in the learning process become lumped in with the group of “performers” and never truly connect to their peers—which, in the long run, affects their self-identity as neoindigenous. This is why cosmopolitanism has such significance in urban classrooms.