The Equity & Social Justice Education 50

Critical Questions for Improving Opportunities and Outcomes for Black Students

Baruti K. Kafele

• Editorial: ASCD
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781416630197
• Categoría: Pedagogía
• Categoría: Educación multicultural

ASCD Bestseller! Baruti K. Kafele offers 50 timely and important questions on equity and social justice education for educators to reflect on and discuss.

How do you ensure that no student is invisible in your classroom? How do you make the distinction between equity as the vehicle versus equity as the goal for each of your students? What measures do you take to ensure that you are growing as a culturally relevant practitioner? Can your students, particularly your Black students, articulate, beyond emotional reactions, the injustices that surround them?

The foregoing are not trick questions. Rather, they are those that best-selling author Baruti K. Kafele poses and on which he suggests you deeply reflect as a teacher of Black students. The Equity & Social Justice Education 50 will help you understand the importance of having an equity mindset when teaching students generally and when teaching Black students in particular. It defines social justice education and sheds light on the issues and challenges that Black people face, as well as the successes they've achieved, providing you with a pathway to infusing social justice education into your lesson plans. And along the way, Kafele reveals personal experiences from his distant and recent pasts to highlight how important it is that your Black students see themselves in all aspects of education every day.

You, the teacher, play a critical role in your students' success. The questions that Kafele asks in this book will help enhance your own understanding of race, systemic racism, and racial justice and guide you in developing strategies and lessons that speak to Black students in ways that truly support their achievement.

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Part I

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Equity

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Chapter 1

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Equity or Equality?

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Q1. Why all the discussion around equity?

The discussion around the achievement gap has been going on for decades within and outside the education community. I can recall initially hearing about the push to close the achievement gap during my time as a first-year teacher in Brooklyn, New York, and again 10 years later during my time as a first-year principal. Shortly after I began my first tenure as a principal, the No Child Left Behind Act, which stated that all children were expected to be at proficiency levels on state standardized assessments in reading, writing, and mathematics by 2014, became law. As positive and optimistic as I typically pride myself on being, the expectation seemed overly ambitious. As the principal of my school, I said, "OK, we will get it done." In fact, my expectation was that it was going to happen well before 2014! But I couldn't help but consider the countless children across the country and the myriad socioeconomic challenges that so many of them faced from birth to the present. I felt that the goal was unattainable—and it later proved to be just that.

During my time as an educator, I concluded that expending an excessive amount of energy on variables over which I had little or no influence was an exercise in futility. I had zero control over the socioeconomic challenges that impacted my many students and their families. Although the students mattered to me dearly, I could not change their situations outside school. Where I felt I had maximum influence and control was over what they experienced in my school and classrooms. I believed that the day that I felt that I no longer had maximum influence or control was the day that I would leave the education field. How about you? Have you concluded that you have influence or control over the classroom experience of your students? Is there something about your presence in their lives that increases the probability for their success? Do you positively impact the academic, social, and emotional growth and development of your students? My desire to answer these questions affirmatively drove me to look at each student individually.

That is what equity is—looking at each student individually. Each student has their own individuality, academically, socially, and emotionally. Each student has their own cultural identity, academically, socially, and emotionally. And each student has their own voice, academically, socially, and emotionally. Each student is somebody. Each student is somebody special. Each student has his or her own set of experiences, realities, challenges, obstacles, needs, interests, goals, aspirations, and ambitions. Additionally, each student has his or her own unique way of being motivated and inspired. What sets one student on fire might not be what sets another student on fire. Most importantly, how each student learns, thinks, makes sense out of, and processes new information may be unique.

Teachers navigating the aforementioned differences is equity. Being committed to individual differences is equity. Acknowledging individual differences is equity. Addressing individual differences is equity. Intentional ongoing improvement in equitable practices is equity. Engaging in anti-racist practices is equity. And, for the purposes of this book, equity is realizing, acknowledging, and acting on the fact that the academic, social, and emotional needs of your Black students may differ greatly from those of the other students in your classroom. Ignoring racial differences and treating your students as if they were a monolithic group boils down to practicing equality, an approach to teaching that is detrimental when used as a vehicle to achieve student outcomes (as I'll address in question 7). While equality as a goal is fine, it should never be the vehicle by which a goal is achieved. Equity must be the vehicle by which equality is achieved. Over the years, countless students, particularly Black students, have suffered as the result of having been subjected to equality environments when an equitable learning experience was required.

Q2. Am I an equity mindset teacher?

If a classroom is going to be a truly equity-based environment, it is going to require an equity mindset teacher. I have thought about this deeply for the past several years. Going to conferences and trainings and reading equity-related material is good, but it isn't good enough. My contention is that one must go further than just being knowledgeable about the right thing to do. One must develop a mindset of equity. Equity must be what you become and who you are in that classroom.

I vividly recall being subjected to overt hostility while conducting a one-day equity training session with district staff. (By overt hostility, I mean that I was heckled and disrespected.) The tension in the room was palpable. Tension, discomfort, and unease are often present during equity trainings and, quite frankly, are always welcomed by me. In fact, I want the room to be filled with tension, discomfort, and unease. Discomfort can cause the person who's experiencing it to say the proverbial "ouch." It creates cognitive dissonance and, if experienced fully, forces one to change—the goal of any presenter. But in this particular case, in attendance were staff members who couldn't wrap their minds around the concept of equity, particularly along racial and ethnic lines. I was brought in because the administration felt that the disconnect between their predominantly white staff and their large Black student body was so great that grossly unacceptable levels of Black student underachievement prevailed. The tension, discomfort, and unease in the room were joined by anger, which spilled over onto my social media platforms (an occasional consequence of engaging in equity work). At the conclusion of this session, I sat in my car in the parking lot for about three hours and processed the day while feeling a deep sense of sadness for the students to whom the attendees would return the following day. I remember thinking that the district, as it realized, had a lot of work to do (which was why I was brought in). While I reflected deeply on the day in my car, I reached the following conclusion around the practice of equity:

Equity is not solely something that you do. Equity is who you are. Equity is a reflection of the educators' humanity toward the students they serve. Equity is not a new program, model, initiative, or training. It's a way of classroom life that intentionally goes about meeting the needs of all learners in the classroom.

I will be the first to admit that those are indeed strong words—but I stand behind them. You can sit through an equity training and get absolutely nothing out of it if the content is in conflict with your values and beliefs. On the other hand, I would dare say that equity training ranks as one of the most significant trainings that an educator can engage in because it speaks directly to the teacher's commitment to meeting the individual needs of each and every student in the classroom. It speaks to the students' individuality, cultural identity, and voice, and goes far beyond training. It speaks to one's humanity. It speaks to who you are in that classroom. And I might add that equity work is difficult work, not so much in practice but in terms of your beliefs about who you are in your classroom and your values relative to your perceived responsibilities to your students (which we'll explore further throughout the book).

So what then is an equity mindset teacher? Throughout my travels, the term that I typically heard was equitable practitioner. My thinking, however, was that the teacher has to be more than just a practitioner. The teacher has to have a particular mindset, a particular attitude around equity work. Moreover, I felt that equity work, rather than be something that we shift gears into, has to be organic. It has to be something that you do naturally as an outgrowth of your compassion for your students.

As I developed my definition of an equity mindset teacher over time, I thought about the individuality, identity, and voice of students in general and Black students in particular relative to the entire teaching–learning process and concluded that an equity mindset teacher is a teacher who

Utilizes a variety of developmentally appropriate instructional strategies that take into account the differing academic, social, and emotional needs of all learners in a student-centered, culturally responsive, and culturally relevant equity mindset classroom, where student individuality, student cultural identity, and student voice matter exponentially.

Let's break down the components of the definition in the questions that follow.

Q3. Do I utilize a variety of developmentally appropriate instructional strategies that consider the differing academic needs of my students?

I will say it until I can't say it anymore: Teaching is one of the most challenging yet rewarding occupations on the planet. It requires taking a youngster whom you may have never even seen before and nurturing a relationship with him while positioning yourself to help the youngster grow academically, intellectually, aspirationally, socially, and emotionally. The role of the teacher would be rather easy if students were the same in all regards—but that just isn't reality. Students are different along a variety of lines, such as race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, gender, and so on. A teacher in a classroom with diverse learners must always consider students' differences. Students, even if they are of the same race, are different because they have their own unique experiences. All of this culminates in a diversity of academic needs in your classroom.

Imagine a classroom where, in a math lesson, the entire class is being taught a math concept using a whole-group instruction methodology for the entirety of the lesson—where everyone is receiving the same instruction at the same time and at the same pace. This is potentially disastrous for many of the students in that classroom. If I were a student in that classroom, it would be disastrous for me because of the way my brain processes math equations, which may be very different from the student sitting next to me. As my teacher, how would you account for my academic needs in this classroom? Have you considered that I may not learn at the same pace as some of my peers? Have you considered where I am developmentally in the process? Have you considered that, although I may not comprehend the concept initially, I still have the capacity and potential to excel in math in your classroom? If I am a Black student and thereby a member of a historically oppressed, underserved, and marginalized group, have you considered the uniqueness of my collective experience when you prepared the lesson? The foregoing would require that you differentiate instruction while viewing me through an equity lens—meeting me where I am developmentally.

A question that you must always ask yourself is "Do I understand how my students make sense of the information presented?" Said differently, "Do I understand how my students learn?" For me, probably the most pertinent yet basic question that you as an educator can ask yourself is "How do my students learn?" In other words, how can you best determine the most effective teaching strategies toward meeting the learning needs of all of your students, and does the reality of having Black students in your diverse classroom alter your preparation in any way? It might, when all variables are considered. An equity mindset dictates that to effectively meet the academic needs of your students, you must discover how they make sense of new information, process information, and learn.

Q4. Do I utilize a variety of developmentally appropriate instructional strategies that consider the differing social needs of my students?

Social-emotional learning (SEL) continues to be a hot topic in education. Thankfully, it doesn't seem to be one of those fads or trends that is here today and gone tomorrow. Our children cannot afford for it to disappear. As a teacher and principal of predominantly urban Black student populations (replete with all of the social-emotional challenges that accompany growing up in an urban environment) for 21 years, I recognized that social-emotional learning was at the core of our work before there was a formalized language for it. A great deal of work has gone into creating solid SEL practices in schools nationally. When it comes to learning, there's no such thing as optimally meeting the academic needs of a learner if attention isn't paid to the social-emotional needs of the learner. However, in doing social-emotional work, I have a tendency to look at the two separately. I will here examine the social needs of students through an equity lens and will in the next question examine emotional needs through the same lens.

It can never be assumed that, socially, all Black children arrive at school at the same "starting place." They have their own unique social experiences and starting places. Their experiential backgrounds dictate who they are socially. Consider a family where parents are intentional about the social development of their child, with a particular emphasis on their child's verbal communication skills. The parents are very intentional with respect to both the ability to communicate effectively and language development. This means that when they are communicating with their child, they are constantly challenging him by using unfamiliar words, with the hope he will comprehend them in the context in which they are used, and urging their child to internalize the words. Additionally, before their child is of reading age, the parents read to him daily. When he is old enough and developmentally ready to learn how to read, he begins to read on his own (which, in this case, is a requirement in this household toward further developing his vocabulary to help him become a better communicator).

Now let's consider a child whose social experience is the antithesis of that of the child just discussed. In her household, communication does not occur with the same intentionality—there's no objective attached to it; it just happens. The child is neither read to nor required to read independently when she's developmentally able to do so.

By the time both children are 3 years old and ready to enter preschool, their communication skills will probably differ vastly—because they had very different "birth to 3" experiences, not because one child is more intelligent than the other.

The same can be said regarding the various genres of social development and teachers' use of developmentally appropriate instructional strategies that consider the different social needs of students. Students are entering classrooms every day with differing social skills, and they have to be considered. In a true cooperative learning classroom environment, students engage with one another regularly and daily. If the students do not bring or possess the requisite social skills, there will inevitably be breakdowns in the communication process that may culminate in off-task behaviors. Therefore, it becomes incumbent on you to reexamine your focus on cooperative learning and ensure that social skill development is a part of your repertoire—which is what an equity mindset teacher will do naturally. Cooperative learning requires that attention be paid to the ways that children interact with one another. However, if there are children in the classroom whose social interaction skills are deficient, you must expend maximum attention to their social interaction skill development.

Q5. Do I utilize a variety of developmentally appropriate instructional strategies that consider the differing emotional needs of my students?

I'd planned here to share with you a detailed account of my first trauma-related experience as a middle schooler. (As I wrote it, I broke down, for the first time ever, as I recalled it and my 27-year-old witnessed his father in tears. Until that point, I'd only spoken about it and realized, after the emotional outpouring that I underwent after I'd spent quiet time writing about it, that I was for the first time fully processing it—almost 50 years later. Once I got myself together, I called my now-85-year-old mother to tell her that I was going to detail the experience in a new book and to get her thoughts. After she thought about it, she advised against it, and I took her sage advice and deleted what I'd written. Until that date, I had never shared my feeling about the experience with my mother. She was saddened to hear that I was still affected by it emotionally after so many years.) As I mentioned in the Introduction, by the time I graduated from the 8th grade, my wheels had completely fallen off, and I didn't recover until 10 years later, when I finally enrolled in undergraduate school. Looking back on it now (and my apologies for leaving you in suspense), my conclusion is this: For a Black boy growing up in America, life is very challenging.

I share this with you because I am using my trauma-related experience as a microcosm for so many of the children across America in general and Black children in particular who are experiencing their own trauma about which so many of their teachers are unaware. For a variety of justifiable reasons, many students have seen fit not to share their traumatic experiences with school personnel, which in many cases leaves educators to draw incorrect conclusions about their students. Black children make up about 15.2 percent of the students in U.S. public schools, while Black teachers make up 6.7 percent and white teachers make up 79.3 percent of the total teaching staff in the United States (Riser-Kositsky, 2020). This translates to thousands of Black students who potentially go through their entire K–12 experience without ever having been taught by a Black teacher. In a society that is as race conscious as the United States, and with race relations continuing to be one of the most significant issues in this country since its inception, Black children do not always have a teacher who looks like them, whom they can identify with along racial lines, and whom they can talk to about a plethora of emotional issues that a Black teacher would likely understand. In other words, let's say that there is a student who is acting out or exh...