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

Coteaching in this model is predicated on the fact that the teacher cannot fully meet the needs of students unless the students have an opportunity to show the teacher what they need and then demonstrate what good teaching looks like for them. This requires the teacher to be transparent about aspects of their work that students do not usually know about. The teacher has to present the students with the larger contexts/information that shape how and why they teach the way they do so that the students can model how to work with the existing structures/resources and still be effective. I argue that the resilience required for being neoindigenous in contemporary America equips young people for being able to navigate the challenges of urban teaching.

Coteaching in reality pedagogy provides neoindigenous youth this opportunity to model good teaching by drawing from the three models of coteaching described earlier to create the ideal conditions for a reality-pedagogy-based model. Drawing from the first type of coteaching I described, the reality-pedagogy version focuses on creating opportunities for collaboration among experts. However, instead of having two teachers work together to create a lesson, two students or more are asked to not only teach the class but take on all the responsibilities that the teacher has for delivering the content effectively. This includes writing a lesson plan, aligning it to standards, identifying examples to be used during the lesson, finding teaching resources, arranging the seats in the class, and finding a method for the assessment of the teaching.

Given the responsibilities the students now have (that the teachers previously had), the teacher has to provide them with the same resources that other teachers have when teaching. This means that the teacher has to provide the students who are coteaching with previous lesson plans, teacher manuals, websites the teacher gathers resources from, and any other teacher materials that are used to supplement instruction. Once these materials are shared with students, they are given the full responsibility of teaching and are then graded by the teacher on the quality of their lesson plans and criteria that the teacher is usually assessed on. Rather than grading students for tasks like homework assignments and tests, the reality-pedagogy coteaching model assesses their content knowledge through how they design and teach their lessons.

This student had felt responsible for the learning of the other students in the classroom. Somehow, over the course of that academic year, we had created a family in that classroom that she was more loyal to than the father she hadn’t seen in a decade. She felt responsible for the learning of her peers, and in many ways over the course of that year, her peers made it clear that they felt responsible for her learning as well.

As a philosophy, cosmopolitanism is often traced back to Greek tradition. Anthropologists like Gustavo Ribeiro describe it as a way of being in the world that focuses on an individual’s embodiment of tolerance, sensitivity, and inclusiveness of others in the process of being a “citizen of the world.”

Consequently, I adopt an indigenous brand of cosmopolitanism that focuses on students getting an opportunity to feel as though they are valued and respected, a full active citizen of the immediate classroom place and space they occupy. This means that they are involved with every aspect of the operation of the classroom, and are responsible for ensuring that citizenship in the classroom is both enacted and extended to everyone who occupies the same place and space. The teacher is the facilitator of this process in identifying roles that the students can fulfill and tasks they can perform that connect them to the classroom. The teacher’s task is to let students know how important they are and how essential their jobs and roles are to the functioning of the classroom. This process involves making students aware of how each of them (through performing their tasks) becomes responsible for ensuring that the class runs well.

cosmopolitanism, as it is enacted in reality pedagogy, focuses on developing deep connections among students across differences such as race, ethnicity, gender, and academic ability as they work to ensure that they move collectively toward being socially, emotionally, and physically present and committed to the classroom they share.

During this process, students should be introduced to what cosmopolitanism means in the classroom. A working definition I have used in explaining the cosmopolitan classroom is that it is a space where each student is a full citizen, responsible for how well the class meets the collective academic, social, and emotional goals. Students are to be assured that the roles they take on in the effective functioning of the classroom are just as significant as, if not more important than, doing well on classroom tests. They are graded on and receive academic credit for their performance in these roles. If a student does not do the task associated with a role, it is not going to be completed by anyone else, and it will not only affect that student’s grades, but the ability of the rest of the class to learn in the optimal environment.

The typical response that a teacher (or anyone for that matter) has to feeling scared or vulnerable is to try to exert power over students (or anyone perceived as “other”). This is why teachers of urban youth of color become strict disciplinarians, and why students often alienate peers whom they view as different. To counter this phenomenon, humans have to be reconnected to each other through new and shared cosmopolitan practices.

For many teachers this is a challenge, because they have a flawed notion of the purpose of classroom assessments and grades. In a cosmopolitan classroom, the goal of the class is not for the students to be assessed so the teacher can discover who the top performer is. On the contrary, the goal of the cosmo duo is for all students to reach their academic and emotional potential. In this model, a student’s every incremental increase on conventional forms of assessment is valued and rewarded within the classroom structure, either via higher grades, extra credit, or some other form of classroom recognition.

The first involves being in the same social spaces with the neoindigenous, the second is engaging with the context, and the third is making connections between the out-of-school context and classroom teaching.

For example, when students have developed a disdain for school because they feel that to be successful they must repress their authentic selves, making them see that the content being delivered respects and values their culture makes them feel like the classroom is not at all like the rest of the school. The classroom that respects their contexts becomes a way to reconcile the broken relationship the neoindigenous have to schools and schooling. When a teacher makes connections between the context and content, innovative lessons that connect things like graffiti and mathematics or hip-hop music and science begin to emerge. The specific types of lessons will vary depending on the unique neoindigenous contexts that the students are from but will each connect to students from specific contexts in ways that the traditional curriculum cannot.

In these spaces the level of rigor is elevated, the number of higher-order questioning escalates, and the discussions about the content often reach levels that surpass the knowledge of any single individual in the classroom.

The first is to learn to welcome nontraditional ways of expressing content knowledge. The second is to create a space in the classroom for youth to post the questions they have that may go beyond the scope of the teacher’s knowledge or what is being taught. The third is to provide extra credit/grades for students’ expression of content in nontraditional ways or for researching questions their peers are posing, and the final one involves creating a space where both the student and the teacher are learning content together.

Students should know that this space is also available for those who may not be as verbal as their peers, and who need a platform for posing questions related to the content to their peers and the teacher that they may not feel comfortable asking in class. Many have called this type of space a parking lot—where participants in a social field can pose questions or share thoughts to be addressed later. In this iteration I refer to it as a “W board” because whatever is shared in that space should be a question (who, what, when, where, and why), not a declarative statement. I choose this practice because once the question is posed and then posted in the space, the rest of the class is responsible for finding an answer to the question. The teacher has to encourage students to research and find answers to questions, and then post responses to the questions back on the W board. This practice creates a physical space that promotes going beyond the content and elevates the discourse.

In classes I have taught, students have answered questions from the board in more detail than I had ever imagined, and received up to twenty points on a test grade for doing so. Again, in order for a teacher to show a student that he or she values something, it is important to not just tell students, but show them—and one of the ways to do this is by giving students good grades for their nontraditional efforts.

Symbolic violence refers to “the violence which is exercised upon a social agent with his or her complicity”2 and is not necessarily a physical violence, but a socioemotional one where one’s spirit is broken as a result of the constant pressure to adhere to a structure that runs counter to one’s worldview.

This is significant because the brand of competition that the neoindigenous engage in runs in sharp contrast to the competition that is found in traditional schools, where the goal is for one individual to be better than all others without a focus on building or supporting community or being successful together.

Each day, as we teach the neoindigenous, we have the opportunity to allow the modern-day Thomas Fullers to fully actualize their potential. However, in classrooms across the world, there are Thomas Fullers being silenced. It takes reality pedagogy and pedagogical strategies birthed from neoindigenous practices like the battle to bring their voices to the fore and allow their brilliance to flourish.