The Innocent Classroom

Dismantling Racial Bias to Support Students of Color

Alexs Pate

• Publisher: ASCD
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781416629368
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Multicultural Education

When children of color enter their classrooms each year, many often encounter low expectations, disconnection, and other barriers to their success. In The Innocent Classroom, Alexs Pate traces the roots of these disparities to pervasive negative stereotypes, which children are made aware of before they even walk through the school door. The cumulative weight of these stereotypes eventually takes shape as guilt, which inhibits students' engagement, learning, and relationships and hurts their prospects for the future.

If guilt is the primary barrier for children of color in the classroom, then the solution, according to Pate, is to create an Innocent Classroom that neutralizes students' guilt and restores their innocence. To do so, readers will embark on a relationship "construction project" in which they will deepen their understanding of how children of color are burdened with guilt; discover students' "good, " or the motivation behind their behaviors, and develop strategic responses to that good; and nurture, protect, and advocate for students' innocence.

Ultimately, students will reclaim their innocence and begin to make choices that will lead to their success. Teachers will renew their commitment to their students. And the current ineffective system can give way to one that reflects a more enlightened understanding of who our children are—and what they are capable of.

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Chapter 1

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Deepening Understanding

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Let's begin our construction project by outlining an overarching, two-pronged objective. First, we want to create an enhanced classroom environment for marginalized children that will positively affect their social and academic outcomes. Note the presence of "academic" alongside "social." Although the principal focus of the Innocent Classroom is building teacher-student relationships, the ultimate goal of this work is to address the achievement gap—to place our children in an environment where they are free to achieve academic success. We must continuously remind ourselves of this, because all too often, nurturing positive social-emotional development comes at the cost of academic achievement. It's crucial to academically challenge students while strengthening relationships with them.

The second part of our objective is to know our students well enough to construct the class environment in such a way that it encourages the fullest engagement from the most wounded. To get here, educators must take a circuitous route that requires them to examine the origin and implications of the guilt students bear and to gather knowledge about who each child is. Constructing the Innocent Classroom begins with a recognition that the relationship you develop with each child is the key indicator in your capacity to help them let go of the script that holds them back. It is your knowledge of each child's life that will open the door to that relationship.

Accordingly, in this chapter, we will deepen our understanding of the dilemma that children of color face with respect to guilt and innocence by looking at the ways in which the weight of guilt is bestowed on them. We will examine what the research says about stereotype consciousness and stereotype threat. Finally, we will explore how to start building a new educational operating system—chiefly, by gathering knowledge about our children and understanding that they all have their own "good."

Every single child deserves to believe that school is for them and that their educators care about them. Every single child deserves to believe that the world is open to them and their growth. Building an authentic relationship with a child based on their humanity shows them that they deserve to be a part of our society and that it is possible to meet every standard. Innocence for a child of color is a belief that they can be deeply and authentically loved by their educators. Innocence is entering a space and always assuming it is possible to be loved. When a child of color has a sense of their own innocence, they believe that they can be loved for who they truly are.

—Innocent Classroom trainer

The List

Defining and reclaiming innocence in the lives of our children requires us to first discuss its opposite: guilt. Guilt is more easily identified, more familiar to us, than innocence. In an environment that presumes and enables guilt, its presence is written into our thoughts and our language.

Years ago, I taught a college class on contemporary African American male novelists. The first time I taught this course, I stood at the board and asked my students to shout out one-word descriptions of black men. I was curious to hear their preconceived thoughts about the male protagonists of the texts we would be reading. After a moment of hesitation, the words came at me like a shower of spitballs. Threatening. Violent. Fast. Strong. Angry. Athletic. Rhythmic. Rageful. Irresponsible. Sexy. Loud. Dancers. Singers. Drunks. Criminal. Sneaky. Big. Lazy.

By the time they were done, I was exhausted and, I must admit, sad. There were very few words that were wholly positive; even the seemingly positive ones felt negative within the context of the list. On the one hand, I was pleased that my students felt comfortable enough with me to be so open and honest. On the other hand, I was shocked at how solidly negative their impressions had been. And later that night, as I thought about it, I got angry.

Why didn't my students know about my father, or any of the other men in my family? Why didn't they know about my neighborhood, or my friends who personified the responsible, ethical, beautiful, intellectual, resourceful, honest, law-abiding, and diplomatic qualities that I have come to see and expect in many African American men? And heaven knows, the one word I longed to have attached to my existence—safe—has perhaps never been used in a sentence about a black man.

At the next class, I put my list before the class. We shared a profound experience. Most of the students were white, and most of them couldn't remember when their attitudes about black men had soured. But they all had a clear memory of a time in their lives when they were free of such poison. When they could see goodness in the faces of anonymous black men.

Almost all of them felt that the cumulative exposure to the fears of their parents and popular media—news, movies, music, and so on—had something to do with the change in their fundamental feelings about black men in America. They were taught to fear me, to mistrust me. Our culture broadcasts abbreviated and coded realities of black humanity that make compassion and understanding hard to come by.

Over the years, I've seen many similar responses to that exercise. One especially hit me hard. A young pregnant black woman wrote in her class journal that the discussion forced her to admit her anger and mistrust of African American men. She talked about the baby boy that she carried in her belly and how much work she had to do to be ready for him. Him, a young black boy.

This pollution seeps deep into the fabric of our society.

My student's unborn son and all of us who began life as black boys share this awful legacy. No matter what we have done, no matter how hard we have worked or how long we have served, we are unfortunately privileged to know that people think these things about us.

My students provided me with a list of stereotypes associated with being African American, but other groups of people of color get their own lists, of course. My experience bears out that when you gather any group of people, including teachers, and ask them to be honest about what they've been told about Latinos, Indigenous peoples, Asian Americans, or African Americans, there is a list at the ready. The qualities and characteristics on these lists absolutely indict our society as one that consistently—though not always consciously—demonizes people of color (Greenwald, Poehlman, Uhlmann, & Banaji, 2009). And while all this is happening to adults, our children are absorbing it at alarming rates.

What Does American Culture Tell You About the Children You Teach?

We must fully acknowledge the breadth of the stereotypes that have been promulgated about people of color. How virulent they are. How deeply each of us has been affected by the cumulative weight of negative narratives about people of color.

Now take a deep breath and make your own list. What does American culture tell you about the children you teach or are responsible for?

When I started writing this book, I planned to include a list from one of our Innocent Classroom training sessions, created by the educators we work with, but I eventually decided not to. Your list will suffice, and it will mean more to you. Just make sure to be honest in this exercise. Your personal beliefs about race and culture are immaterial; what matters is your ability to decode and acknowledge the way our culture has created stories and images about people.

Practice

What does American culture tell you about children of color? What does our society tell you about the children you teach? Record your list in the space below.

The Cumulative Impact of Negative Stereotypes

Living with stereotypes is a limiting, destructive, and psychologically debilitating way to go through life. In the Innocent Classroom, guilt is defined as the cumulative impact of negative stereotypes that affect attitude and behavior; the absence of innocence.

Guilt becomes a barrier in the development of relationships between teachers and students. The list you made above has already been made by the children in your classroom. They've committed it to memory. In many ways, for many children of color, this list might be seen as the origin of their disidentification with academic achievement. If we know that these negative stereotypes about them exist, our children know it, too. Some of our children may already believe that this is their destiny. Guilt provides them with a script for where they are and where they're going.

Again, I want you to assume that your list exists within the consciousness of many of the children of color in your class. You should also accept that many of them already believe that you believe all the stereotypes about them. These stereotypes weigh on our children as if they were already lived experiences and are converted, emotionally, into actual guilt. This guilt imbues children with a sense that they have done something wrong before they've actually done it. It's no surprise, then, that guilt triggers cynicism, anger, apathy, and a general sense of opposition to education. Our children get the sense that it doesn't really matter what they do or how they behave; the world will see them as guilty because that is the way the world sees them already. Unfortunately, most of our children exhibit the negative consequences of this guilt before they even know what motivates their behavior. According to McKown and Weinstein (2003),

Between ages 6 and 10, children's ability to infer an individual's stereotype increases dramatically. Children's awareness of broadly held stereotypes also increases with age, and children from academically stigmatized ethnic groups (African Americans and Latinos) are at all ages more likely be aware of broadly held stereotypes than children from academically nonstigmatized ethnic groups (Whites and Asians). (p. 498)

This is the dilemma of children of color. They know that they are problems or problems-to-be. I can't help thinking of W. E. B. Du Bois's classic The Souls of Black Folk (1903), in which he asks, "How does it feel to be a problem?" (p. 1).

In the absence of innocence, guilt thrives and accumulates over time. From the moment a child is followed by the keen, suspicious eye of a department store detective or disrespectfully challenged by a police officer, from the first moment they can detect from anyone in a position of authority a sign of double standards, negative expectations, or malicious patronization, the weight of guilt begins to accumulate. Any indication that they are the subject of stereotyping and marginalization simply adds to this weight. Part of their job, as children of color, is to learn how to manage this weight and survive. Their immediate goal may not necessarily be to perform well in school, but simply to endure the rattling weight of guilt that they are quickly gathering within themselves.

The Research on Stereotype Consciousness and Stereotype Threat

As I developed the Innocent Classroom training process, I came across the work of researchers who analyze the impact of stereotypes on students of color. Their research makes it clear that children are deeply affected by a "consciousness" about stereotypes that resides within them (McKown & Weinstein, 2003). McKown and Strambler (2009) define this stereotype consciousness as "knowledge that others endorse beliefs about the characteristics of ethnic groups" (p. 1643).

The danger of stereotype consciousness is that it can easily trigger stereotype threat—"the fear that one's behavior may confirm or be understood in terms of a negative stereotype associated with one's social group" (Guyll, Madon, Prieto, & Scherr, 2010). Stereotype threat has been shown in multiple studies to lower performance of a target group on achievement tests. In multiple tests, and with multiple "outgroups" (blacks, women, immigrants, and so on), targets' performance has flagged when their knowledge of mainstream stereotypes of their group have been "primed" (Guyll et al., 2010; McKown & Strambler, 2009; Spencer, Steele, & Quinn, 1999). As Spencer and colleagues' groundbreaking 1999 study showed, "stereotype threat decreases performance on tasks that are associated with a stereotype-relevant domain because it generates a disruptive pressure akin to anxiety" (Guyll et al., 2010, p. 120).

Summarizing his work with Claude Steele, Joshua Aronson (2004) explicates how stereotype threat can hamper achievement:

I've come to believe that human intellectual performance is far more fragile than we customarily think; it can rise and fall depending on the social context. As research is showing, conditions that threaten basic motives—such as our sense of competence, our feelings of belonging, and our trust in people around us—can dramatically influence our intellectual capacities and how stereotypes suppress the performance, motivation, and learning of students who have to contend with them. (para. 14)

Unfortunately, the ramifications of stereotype threat do not end with academic performance. As Guyll and colleagues (2010) explain, the phenomenon may have a cascading effect:

Stereotype threat can lower performance, and such direct effects could produce additional consequences. First, teachers may falsely believe that poor performance reflects true ability, thereby setting a self-fulfilling prophecy in motion. Second, stereotype threat's negative effects on test scores could reduce a student's chances of gaining admission to a quality school. Third, a student who must repeatedly contend with stereotype threat may, over time, disidentify with academics. Disidentification serves to distance one's identity from the threatening domain and, by so doing, strips away the desire and motivation to excel. Disidentification can influence student choices that fundamentally alter their education and career trajectories (Steele, 1997). (p. 121)

Lisa Delpit (2012) endorses this conclusion, noting that "black students today, as perhaps never before, are victims of the myths of inferiority and find much less support for countering these myths and embracing academic achievement outside of individual families than at other times in the past" (p. 42). In their book Generations of Exclusion: Mexican Americans, Assimilation, and Race, Edward Telles and Vilma Ortiz (2008) warn of similar effects that propagating racist stereotypes will engender now and far into the future:

The signals and racial stereotypes that educators and society send to students affect the extent to which they will engage and persist in school. Racial stereotypes produce a positive self-identity for white and Asian students but a negative one for blacks and Latinos, which affect school success. … Racialized self-perceptions among Mexican American students generally endure into the third and fourth generations. (p. 132)

Mary J. Fischer's (2010) study on outcomes for students of color at elite institutions showed that black and Latino students who had internalized stereotypes about their group "were found to spend fewer hours studying than those who reported less negative stereotypes about their own group" (p. 22).

If we are to be honest, we must accept that stereotypes are pervasive in our culture. We must also accept that teachers are not immune to them. No matter how hard we work to prepare ourselves to teach a diverse population of students, chances are, we hold negative stereotypes within our conscious and unconscious minds. As Christine Reyna (2000) writes,

Stereotypes pervade educational and achievement domains, from the classroom to the playground, from the dean's office to the advisor's office, from the time a child enters preschool until they retire. Stereotypes can impede people's goals through catalyzing and justifying negative evaluations and punitive or rejecting behaviors toward the stereotyped. Stereotypes also create internal barriers to success by propagating self-doubt, dashed hopes for the future, or lost confidence in an environment that does not let the stereotyped succeed. And although they are too numerous to count, the multitude of possible stereotypes have very specific consequences for the way students are judged and treated by their teachers and peers, and for the way students perceive their own capabilities and potentials. (p. 106)

The research is clear that teachers' perceptions of students can directly affect student performance and evaluation. Gary L. St. C. Oates (2003) states,

Teacher perceptions … may facilitate perpetuation of the black-white gap even if they arise from a process that is largely race neutral. Jussim, Eccles, and Madon (1996) ob...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Praise for the Innocent Classroom Approach
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter 1. Deepening Understanding
• Chapter 2. Discovering Students' Good
• Chapter 3. Valuing
• Chapter 4. Engaging and Responding to Students' Good
• Chapter 5. Nurturing Innocence
• Chapter 6. Protecting and Advocating
• Appendix: Key Terms and Definitions
• References
• About the Author
• Related ASCD Resources
• Study Guide
• Copyright