Learning from our elders

 

 

We needed to look at the past through new eyes in order to determine what we might learn to help address the apparently difficult educational issue of providing an excellent education for all African-American children.

— Lisa Delpit (1998)

 

I shouted, “Amen!” when I read those words. Sadly, but predictably, the predominantly white educational system has rejected Delpit’s idea.

The wisdom and teaching traditions honed by black educators who worked mostly in southern rural schools continue to be marginalized — and even denigrated — by the broader educational community. But we can draw at least three lessons from those traditions, including instructional techniques, community partnerships, and teacher expectations, that rural and urban American schools could adopt today to support black student learning.

Lesson #1. Learn and use culturally appropriate teaching.

In the early 1960s, the elementary teachers and principals in my newly integrated neighborhood on Detroit’s west side were mostly black teachers from the rural south. They had arrived in Detroit after losing their jobs through the infamous massive resistance campaign of Southern states to forestall school desegregation. Their distinctive approach to teaching and learning included a heavy reliance on speaking and listening. As a 6th grader, for example, I was expected to stand on the school auditorium stage and recite a number of items as well as answer impromptu questions from my teachers before I could earn promotion to junior high.

Years later, when I began teaching in the Mississippi Delta, I was mentored and trained by educators who had grown up and spent their careers in the segregated schools of the rural south. My colleagues used the same techniques as my former teachers and achieved impressive results, even among high school students. Yet, what they were doing seemingly flew against what had been emphasized in my teacher education program. As a young teacher, I struggled to resolve the dissonance.

My mentors said they had developed their techniques out of necessity. The segregated schools had few if any textbooks; those they did have were the discards of the white schools, and there were never enough. With little or no access to duplicating equipment, the practical solution was to read material aloud and have students repeat or commit chunks to memory. Practices such as choral reading of texts also encouraged all members of the class — there was no separation of students by ability — to learn and help each other.

Choral recitations, call-and-response, and oral instruction also had deep cultural roots in our communities. These practices can be traced through the black churches to slavery and the underground education movement in the slave quarters and even farther back to the griots and elders in west African tribal nations. Relying on speaking and listening to transfer knowledge is still a highly regarded skill in black communities, whether in the pulpit or the street corner, from politicians to hip-hop artists.

To the less discerning, these oral practices are lumped together as direct instruction, a practice scorned by some progressive educators for not being student-centered or denigrated as an elitist sage-on-the-stage approach. Many black educators and researchers, including Gloria Ladson-Billings, Geneva Gay, and Lisa Delpit, have worked for years to challenge the racist and privileged underpinnings of these misinterpretations of black teachers’ pedagogy. What is critical is how those techniques are employed in the classroom based on the attitude, expectations, and cultural knowledge of the teacher, or what I call culturally engaged pedagogy.

In my own classroom, I still use techniques I learned from my black teachers and mentors. I routinely give composition students both written and oral assessments. Student writing portfolios are presented, not just submitted. Blended learning approaches allow for relatively easy mixing of teaching and learning styles, such as using audio-video for instruction and assessment performances, along with live and asynchronous group conversations or collaborations. The highest praise I ever got for my teaching was from a particularly jaded group of black sophomores who proclaimed, “We like the way you break things down.” Listening to and learning from other black teachers, and most of all to students and their parents, has helped me see broader possibilities for students’ learning when I purposefully combine approaches that are culturally appropriate.

Lesson #2. Initiate and maintain mutually respectful community connections.

The dangerous stereotype that black parents and communities don’t care about education contributes to the breach between many black communities and the schools that are supposed to serve them. The truth is that many of the challenges in educating black students today are rooted in the complex history of racism and the American educational system.

It is worth remembering that education, particularly literacy, was forbidden by law to black people for much of our time in this nation. Even after the schoolhouse door was forced open, blacks had to keep fighting for the most basic aspects of education. Brown v. Board of Education, the Little Rock Nine, and hundreds of other lesser-known, ongoing battles, continued simply to seek equity for black students. The small Delta town where I live and began my teaching career is still locked in a 50-year court battle with the federal government over whether and how it will fully desegregate its schools (Brown, 2016). Meanwhile, generations of black families have struggled with school systems over the unequal distribution of resources, assignment of less-qualified personnel, and disrespectful, even abusive treatment of black students and their parents.

As a result of this long train of abuses, many black families have become frustrated or disgusted with the educational system and may vent that frustration in various ways, such as refusing to be at the beck and call of school personnel. That makes it our professional responsibility to reach out patiently and consistently to rebuild trust between black students and their families and the schools in our communities.

When those connections exist, the results for students can be astounding. Consider the example of Mound Bayou, Miss., a town founded by former slaves. For decades, they operated their own schools, known nationally for their academic quality. One reason for this district’s success was that teachers clearly understood what the parents and the community expected from the school and its students.

The dangerous stereotype that black parents and communities don’t care about education contributes to the breach between many black communities and the schools that are supposed to serve them.

Building strong cultural ties with families and communities really happens at the classroom level. One technique I used for years was to ask each student to choose a significant adult to be his/her mentor for the year. This could be the parent(s), but it did not have to be. The person had to be an adult the student highly respected and someone the student believed really cared whether s/he finished high school. I met grandparents, pastors, coaches, neighbors, all eager to help a youngster succeed. But, equally important was what I learned from the mentors about the students and their lives. The success of the effort could be measured by the shift in pronouns I heard in the community, from that school and those people, to our school and our teachers.

Lesson #3: Expect great things from every student.

Perhaps the most significant feature of traditional black schooling was teachers’ expectation of their students’ success, despite being part of an educational system designed to perpetuate the myth of black inferiority. These high expectations extended into the black community. Black teachers, in many ways, set the expectations that the rest of the community then urged and nurtured us to reach. Their confidence in us, as evidenced by their work, gave substance to our hopes and aspirations. I cannot remember a black adult during my school years ever saying “if” when describing my academic future. They always said, “When you graduate . . . ” or “After you finish college . . . . ” Not only did they expect my peers and me to achieve academically, but they also assumed (and preached to us, as did our teachers) that we would use our successes to help the entire community. This sense of collective responsibility to the larger African-American population and to the nation drove tireless efforts of black students and teachers in the face of continuing inequality.

Sadly, recent studies have reconfirmed what has been true for too long in American education: White teachers tend to have lower expectations for black students than do black teachers (Gershenson, Holt, & Papageorge, 2015). While these findings aren’t new, their persistence is profoundly disturbing and even more damaging now that students of color are the majority of students in the public schools yet the majority of their teachers are white.

While many white educators labor under distorted notions of a so-called culture of poverty or that black students lack grit, I agree with teacher educator Django Paris (himself building on the work of Ladson-Billings and others) who urges us to help more of these teachers become “culturally sustaining educators”:

. . . understanding that humanizing relationships of dignity and care are fundamental to student and teacher learning. That is, they engage teaching in ways that allow teachers and students to foster complex understandings about each other that disrupt damage-centered deficit views (Paris, 2016, p. 8).

Teacher education programs are gradually taking up the challenge of preparing all candidates to teach in a multicultural society, having been pushed for years by the work of champions such as Jacqueline Jordan Irvine, Carl Grant, Geneva Gay, Gloria Ladson-Billings, and others. Similarly (albeit slowly), more effective professional development in multicultural understanding is becoming available. Increasing numbers of dedicated teachers are seeking such training on their own time and expense. Some are already working for social justice within education (for example, through The EduColor Movement, www.educolor.org). Promoting traditional African-American values, such as pursuing and using one’s education to serve our community, would not only help African-American students but also the nation.

Part of being a culturally engaged educator is connecting students’ learning to their true cultural and community values. For example, highly accomplished teachers recognize that black students are not inherently deficient but understand that the students may have been told that in dozens of ways during their schooling. Consequently, many of the students have internalized a distorted view of themselves and their academic abilities.

In addition, we have wasted a generation telling young people the primary reason to pursue education is to get into a good paying career. Black youth — urban and rural — have living, aching proof that this is fallacy. Too many of their parents and siblings are blocked from getting a good education by the educational system itself, and those who finally do achieve academically find that it is not necessarily the golden key to the economic success they were promised. In the struggle for a truly just and equal society, education is much more than just a pathway to personal gain; education is a necessary part of full citizenship and franchise. By attaching the dreams and aspirations of African-American students to a higher good, their expectations and those of their teachers are likewise lifted and infused with barrier-shattering purpose.

 

References

Brown, E. (2016, July 13). Mississippi school district to appeal court-ordered desegregation plan. Washington Post. www.washingtonpost.com/news/education/wp/2016/07/13/mississippi-school-district-to-appeal-court-ordered-desegregation-plan/

Delpit, L. (1998). Foreword. In M. Foster, Black teachers on teaching. New York, NY: The New Press.

Gershenson, S., Holt, S.B., & Papageorge, N.W. (2015). Who believes in me? The effect of student-teacher demographic match on teacher expectations. Kalamazoo, MI: W.E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research.

Paris, D. (2016, May). Preparing culturally sustaining educators. Teaching Works Working Papers. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan, Teaching Works. www.teachingworks.org/images/files/TeachingWorks_Paris.pdf

 

Originally published in February 2017 Phi Delta Kappan 98 (5), 45-47. © 2017 Phi Delta Kappa International. All rights reserved.