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“It is not light that is needed, but fire” (Douglass 1852). Douglass knew what many are noticing now: that we never seem to graduate to the next conversation. The hard one. That we hide our stasis beneath puffed-up punditry and circular debate. He called for us to infuse our conversations with fire—to seek out and value historical context, to be driven by authentic inquiry, and above all, to be honest—both with ourselves and with those with whom we share a racial dialogue. Just as fire rarely passes through an environment without acting upon it, so too should our world be impacted by our
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Perhaps most importantly, dialogic pedagogy disrupts the traditional classroom power dynamic, positioning school as a place where students have an equal share in their education. Students are not empowered; rather they are shown that their inherent power has been recognized—and that it matters. Well-crafted discussions build confidence, and confidence is sacred currency to students and teachers alike.
They are coming of age in a world of artfully disguised injustices, most of which will stay both invisible and vicious if people never learn how to meaningfully discuss them.
Itching for a fight in the way of the vaguely bored, I deliberately tried to stir up trouble with comments that seemed either superficial or untested.
The penalty for misspeaking, improper planning, or a lack of foresight can be the total loss of a teacher’s moral authority. And once lost, students’ respect can seem impossible to recover. No wonder my Penn classmates spoke about the prospect of race discussions with a tremble in their voices. No teacher wants to be the villain in someone else’s horror story, or the fool in a dark comedy.
Most importantly, such a stance stymies teacher development. We rarely work on attributes that we believe to be fixed. We invest hundreds on gym memberships because we consider our waistlines alterable. We listen to Rosetta Stone lessons because we know our brains have room for new words. The moment our deficiencies become immutable, our efforts to improve begin to wane.
This assertion is offered with a magician’s Voila!—I have said it, therefore it is so. And with these magic words, bullies are tamed and introverts peek from their shells. We are suddenly ready to lead conversations about sensitive topics, because our students are magically now eager to take risks. If, over the course of the year, they forget our first-day pronouncement, we eagerly remind them: Remember, everyone, this is a safe space. After this, students who undermine such spaces are viewed as troublemakers, and to mete out appropriate discipline, we pull from our bag of behavior
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However, for most students, a teacher’s safe space designation doesn’t mean much. Definitions of safety are surprisingly varied.
leaving teachers to define where on the ideological comfort spectrum they’d like their classroom conversations to fall. This can be especially frustrating for students, who might find standards in their English class drastically different from those in their history class.
In order to nurture hard conversations about race, first we must commit to building conversational safe spaces, not merely declaring them. The foundation of such spaces is listening.
Without prompting, colleagues often share moments when they were not listened to, and how it made them feel. Ignored, unimportant, unsafe. It stands to reason then, that we should create a culture of listening—
We can no more punish our way into a conversational safe space than we can conjure one from thin air—so we must instruct where we used to admonish, encourage where we used to excoriate, and carefully track what we used to ignore.
three discussion guidelines: Listen patiently, listen actively, and police your voice.
That raised (and sometimes waving) arm is saying, “I wish you would shut up! I have my own thing to say!”
Students who have an impulse to interrupt each other care deeply about what is being discussed—this is a win! Calling out signals impatience, not meanness.
Students should reflect on what they appreciate from a listener and try to mimic those behaviors when someone else is speaking.
Mr. Kay (smiling, holding up a placating hand): Patience, man! Listen to Joe—he’s making a good point! Tell your story in a bit. Mike: Oh, my bad, Joe.
“Joe’s ideas are worthwhile to everyone in the classroom community.”
students are encouraged to write down classmates’ comments that intrigue them.
Students eventually are encouraged to cite each other in essays as reliable sources, as fellow experts, when such citations are appropriate.
The reminder is gentle, and often excited, as if I am trying to say, What you are saying is too good for just me to hear. Let’s get everyone else in on this stuff!
“3 Smart Ways to Keep Yourself from Rambling” called P-R-E-S. (First, state your Point—the main idea, then your Reason—why you think so, then an Example—the evidence that backs you up, then offer Summary—restate your main idea.)
PRACTICE LISTENING Patient listening, active listening, and policing your voice establish a good conversational foundation for the heavy stuff.
“I don’t want to talk about Ferguson with white people. No matter how liberal they are, it’s still going to be just … academic for them. But it’s our actual lives. We really have to be black when this stuff is going on. I don’t have the energy to explain my emotions every time a teacher decides to talk about race.” There was near-universal agreement, and the implications of her comment were not lost on me.
In my role as mentor, I rail against this and do my best to affirm my female students when I can. However, I am not a woman, and as such, I recognize that I might look and sound like the man who tried to touch them this morning on the way to school. It would be hubris for me to expect every girl to feel comfortable sharing their anger, embarrassment, or shame with me. What is academic to me is visceral to them.
Just as we cannot conjure safe spaces from midair, we should not expect the familial intimacy, vulnerability, and forgiveness needed for meaningful race conversations to emerge from traditional classroom relationships.
This banking of conversational democracy buttresses all other classroom dialogue—students can take more risks, and our classroom culture can survive more mistakes, because students are less likely to consider our respect for their opinions either disingenuous or capricious. We build with them every day, and not just about things that they will eventually be graded on.
people are naturally quicker to share negative ideas and reluctant to share good news. Yet there is a strange intimacy to sharing good news; asking someone to join you in celebration takes a degree of trust that they will be happy for you.
A high-grade compliment says, “I see you. I appreciate you. And here are some of the reasons why.”
Courageous Conversations About Race (2006) describes this idea: In terms of our own racial experience, we may have a limited understanding not only of the lives of people of a different race, but even of how our own personal racial identities impact our own lives. White people struggle to recognize that they have a racialized existence and that their color, indeed, affords them privilege and opportunity in our society. Likewise, people of color may distrust the motives of White people collectively, without actually discussing this distrust with individual White people in their lives. To
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“When I get a text now, I’m going to say: Who wrote this? What’s being included and what’s being left out?” Inherent in this young woman’s observation is not only a critical examination of a text, but by extension, a questioning of the process by which the text was selected … Her question is a question about power, authority, point of view, pedagogy, inclusion, and exclusion—as each relates, in part, to cultural identity.
To strike the right balance, we must try to understand the intersection of our students’ histories and the exchange of ideas they are about to engage in. One way to do this is to acknowledge aloud—and express clearly—our own experience with what we’re about to discuss.
It positions me not as an intimidating authority about to publicly expose their ignorance, but as a fellow traveler, someone who has also been exposed to the myth.
In response, some argue that teachers should hide their opinions in student-centered academic discourse. They argue that we should act only as facilitators, burying our voices so as to not become a “sage on the stage.” While I have seen this done masterfully, I believe this stance to be an overreaction. We should never forfeit the right to be scholars in our own discussions. In fact, the more we do the work to build the classroom culture described earlier in Chapter 1, the more the students will be interested in our contribution as their companions in the conversation.
Students should be pushed to recognize that conflict is good for learning. It means we are awake, that we care—and should we handle conflict well, we will all be a little wiser.
Over Facts or Data 2. Over Process or Methods 3. Over Purposes 4. Over Values
For language arts teachers, this often appears in literature circles, with their Discussion Leaders, Illustrators, Literary Luminaries, Reporters, Summarizers, and Investigators. Even with this, we teachers cannot track every word spoken—and we must not concentrate our efforts on finding ways to do so.
With no “expert” nearby to correct incomplete thoughts, students are more likely to share them—feeling that, unlike their teacher, classmates will not be accessing a vast store of as-yet-unlearned information. Also, when skirmishes erupt, students are saved from a teacher’s overreactions; they are often capable of working things out on their own.
When planning curriculum meant to engage race controversies, a teacher’s first question shouldn’t be which text to teach. It should be, What kind of scholar do I want to help mold? Followed closely by, What kind of citizenship do I hope to encourage?
The final project asks them to write a persuasive speech and record it as a podcast with accompanying images.
February Soup—a bland, scattered morass that most curricula mistake for sound multicultural education.
We can never be too aware of the things we carry, and we can never be too curious about our students’ cargo.
We need to give our students enough time to get to some conclusions. So often, the resources we bring in leave more questions than answers, which is a problem only if we do not give them enough time to at least work through their questions.
we would need to figure out what decisions, agreements, and action items our conversation had led us to.
cutting one-on-one segments short, always claiming to have overheard some amazing ideas and expressing an eagerness for everyone to build on some of the genius being bandied about.
They were encouraged to see each prompt in all its complexity; for example, they could answer the first as “Who is ghetto?” or “Who uses the word ghetto?” or “Who is offended more by it?” After all the prompts were addressed in writing, students shared in pods, with the goal of better understanding the term’s complexity.
If they are reading and discussing poems, they must write poems. Whatever I am asking them to analyze, they must be encouraged to create.
Appropriation occurs when a style leads to racist generalizations or stereotypes, but is deemed as high fashion, cool, or funny when the privileged take it for themselves. Appropriation occurs when the appropriator is not aware of the deep significance of the culture that they are partaking in.
Can a race “own” a cultural element?
When answering such accusations, the first instinct is to equivocate, to justify, to dig in, but rarely to empathize. Unfortunately, when our students witness adults’ engagement of this topic, their most unproductive habits are reinforced: accusation before questioning, vilification before education, defensiveness before humble reflection. Students learn that when emotions are high, it is permissible to suppress their analytical natures. Most destructively, both sides of the argument learn to celebrate cheap victories in inconsequential battles over would-be allies.
