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March 11 - May 24, 2021
When I say that their skin color doesn’t matter, I am not dismissing the particular responsibilities of privileged groups in societies that disadvantage marginalized groups. I am also not discounting the need to discuss race and injustice under the fallacy of equity. What I am suggesting is that it is possible for people of all racial and ethnic backgrounds to take on approaches to teaching that hurt youth of color.
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?
that is, the very obvious racial and ethnic differences between these mostly white teachers and their mostly Indigenous American students.
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.
In this case, care is demonstrated by a teacher’s patience and dedication to teaching. In urban communities that are populated by youth of color, there are other, and oftentimes unwritten, expectations like having strong classroom-management skills and not being a pushover. In this case, care is expressed through “tough love.”
Many urban youth of color describe oppressive places that have a primary goal of imposing rules and maintaining control.
These programs attract teachers to urban and rural schools by emphasizing the poor resources and low socioeconomic status of these schools rather than the assets of the community.
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.
A fundamental step in this challenging of structures is to think about new ways for all education stakeholders—particularly those who are not from the communities in which they teach—to engage with urban youth of color. What new lenses or frameworks can we use to bring white folks who teach in the
hood to consider that urban education is more complex than saving students and being a hero? I suggest a way forward by making deep connections between the indigenous and urban youth of color.
Because of the similarities in experience between the indigenous and urban youth of color, I identify urban youth as neoindigenous.
Identifying urban youth of color
as neoindigenous allows us to understand the oppression these youth experience, the spaces they inhabit, and the ways these phenomena affect what happens in social settings like traditional classrooms. It seeks to position these youth in a larger context of marginalization, displacement, and diaspora.
The neoindigenous will continue to exist, and need to be acknowledged, in classrooms for as long as traditional teaching promotes an imaginary white middle-class ideal. As long as white middle-class teachers are recruited to schools occupied by urban youth of color, without any consideration of how they affirm and reestablish power dynamics that silence students, issues that plague urban education (like achievement gaps, suspension rates, and high teacher turnover) will persist.
Students who are treated harshly in classrooms are less likely to academically engage in classrooms, which results in their being perceived as academically inferior.
culturally relevant pedagogy.
Unfortunately, this approach cannot be implemented unless teachers broaden their scope beyond traditional classroom teaching.
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.
These same achievement gaps exist between neoindigenous urban youth of color and their counterparts from majority-white schools with students of middle to high socioeconomic status.
The work for white folks who teach in urban schools, then, is to unpack their privileges and excavate the institutional, societal, and personal histories they bring with them when they come to the hood.
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.
They don’t see the deep connections that exist between urban experience and school performance; many more have come to view school as a discrete space, as if what happens outside school has little to no impact on what happens inside school.
Consider, for example, the growing number of new charter schools in urban communities with words like success, reform, and equity in their names and mission statements, but which engage in teaching practices that focus on making the school and the students within it as separate from the community as possible.
First, the belief that students are in need of “cleaning up” presumes that they are dirty. Second, the aim of “giving them a better life” indicates that their present life has little or no value.
In fact, the students’ symptoms of fear, anger, and powerlessness led to what Dr. Wells calls postracial tension stress disorder, which derives from youth seeing themselves as powerless in a world that conveys to them the message that race doesn’t matter, at the same time it subjects them to physical and symbolic violence (at the hands of police and schools) because of their race.
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.
To understand that if we have to learn with each other we should also learn about each other so we can bring each other up
An understanding of neoindigineity allows educators to go beyond what they physically see when working with urban youth, and attend to the relationship between place and space.
Healing the physical wound occurs in a certain place, but healing the soul wound requires being in a space.
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.
Most importantly, it begins with the acceptance of the often overlooked fact that there are cultural differences between students and their teachers that make it difficult for teachers to be reflective and effective, while providing a set of steps that allow these misalignments to be overcome.
