In Part Two of this blog, we look at five classroom practices that will help culturally relevant critical teacher care flourish in your own classroom.
I am sitting in Switzerland right now, watching my 30-something daughter cook up a fabulous batch of soup. She’s working toward a second Master’s degree at a Music Conservatory here. She’s had a LOT of teachers and professors over her educational career. When I asked her who was one teacher that stood out to her as a teacher she knew, without a doubt, cared about her and what that care looked like, she responded with the name of her high school band teacher, Ben. And how did she know he cared? “He kind of let me say what I needed and wasn’t dictatorial in his approach,” was her answer. “He let me say what I needed...,” which is how my daughter knew he cared. But for Francisco, it was another matter altogether.
“Why are you always bugging me? Why can’t you just let me alone?” That was Francisco and it was also the basis of our relationship. Francisco was not used to a teacher bugging him, poking him, pushing him, prodding him. While he did not always like it, he always knew I saw him, saw his struggles, saw his effort, and saw his successes. I also saw his failures, which sometimes burst forth in outbursts involving shoving of desks, aggressively challenging taunts toward other students, and shutting down. Francisco was an eighth grader reading at second grade level, he was really familiar with failures. He was also the oldest son of a young immigrant mother who had been the first in her family to graduate from high school. In fact, my teaching partner, JP, had been the alternative high school teacher who allowed and encouraged Francisco’s mother to bring her infant son to school so she could continue to learn and advance. My teaching partner and I did not know it then, but the strategies we were deploying in support of Francisco and the strategies deployed in support of his mother, were part and parcel of CRCTC.
In Part One of this blog, we talked about the three guiding principles that must be present to create the conditions for CRCTC to take place: Political Clarity, Critical Hope, and Asset-Based Thinking. When those three principles are embodied in a classroom, a school, or a district, then Culturally Relevant Critical Teacher Care can soar and so can student outcomes - particularly for students from communities of color and/or marginalized communities.
But once those conditions are in place, what does a teacher actually do in his or her classroom to let students know they care? Here are five practices you can implement that will increase CRCTC.
1. Build authentic community in your classroom. I say authentic because too often the teacher drives or insists on how that community looks. That community may reflect the teacher’s background, not the students. Involve your students in the community building from day one. Empower students to speak up and help design classroom systems around rewards, consequences, interactions, all of it.
Take into account the students own home community as you do this. For example, I teach native youth on an Indian reservation which is home to three different tribes who have formed a Confederation. The Tribal Council is a mix of elected representatives who have terms of office and Chiefs who are chosen and serve for life. This brings a very unique sense of what leadership looks like and has provided a backdrop for incredibly rich discussions about how the members of my classroom will operate towards each other. My students bring a deep sense of what it means to be a part of a community to our classroom. Is it different than the mostly white community up the road? Yes. Is it any less effective or less representative of what a community could/should be? Absolutely not. It is simply different and because of that we have a real give and take when our class discusses how to support success for all members of the community.
2. Which brings us to the next practice - make sure you look at your students with a glass “half full” viewpoint. This is asset-based thinking rather than deficit-based thinking. Your students may come to class with a backpack filled with issues - food insecurity, housing insecurity, abuse, unstable or dysfunctional family connections, learning challenges, behavior challenges, the list goes on and on. Your students may also look, talk, act, and interact in ways that are very different from your own. But that does not mean that they are any “less than” you are or your own experiences. It simply means different.
To cultivate CRCTC, welcome those differences and challenges. Teach and build relationships with your students in a way that creates an authentic form of caring where you get to know your students personally and culturally rather than some preconceived form of care that prioritizes concepts and objects over those students and their lives. The students in your classroom bring their own unique funds of knowledge in your door each day. Tap into that and watch the strength of your classroom community and the interdependency between students grow.
3. Become a Warm Demander. A colleague of mine, Shannon, shared an experience she had in her eighth year of teaching. She was serving in an urban school in California and her students were primarily African American. She was meeting with a mother of a 12 year old student. Also with her was the principal and a fellow teacher who taught the same class as she did. Shannon was meeting with the mother to convince her that her son should be moved to the other teacher’s classroom. Shannon felt she had tried to build a relationship with the student but had been unsuccessful in finding any common ground. Shannon was white and her fellow teacher was an African American man.
The student’s mother, however, was having none of it. Shannon recalled that the mother, “came out of her seat, leaned across the conference table, and accused me of giving up on her son. And you know what, she was right.” Shannon went on to say that she had convinced herself that she was just too different than the student and as a result she had thrown in the towel, emotionally and academically, on this student.
If Shannon’s principal had signed off on this classroom move, deficit thinking would have won the day. But instead, the principal did not sign off on the move. Shannon had a conversation with her principal that helped her understand that she needed to become a warm demander in her classroom and as Jason’s teacher.
Being a warm demander means that you practice deep listening, that you are committed to building trust in your classroom, that you believe in each and every student’s ability to achieve, that you teach self-discipline, and that you embrace failure as an integral part of learning.
Instead of moving the student from her room, Shannon dug back in and committed to deeply listening to the student which meant she finally heard his profound shame at being unable to read at the same level as his peers. It also meant that Shannon asked the student to trust her and trust that she would help him close that gap in his reading ability. Finally, it meant that Shannon and the student would begin to build a relationship that fostered the student’s self-discipline and resilience.
Teaching as a warm demander means you create a loving and supportive environment in your classroom with high expectations for everyone, not just some.
4. Use current events to teach with political clarity. There are a lot of events that happen each and every day that provide us with fresh topics for discussions in our classrooms. Are some of them upsetting? Absolutely. However, teachers who operate with political clarity don’t sugarcoat what is happening in the world. They bring it into the room, acknowledge it, then support student learning, student growth, and help students find the resiliency to continue to hope in a world that is filled with inequities. Political clarity also requires a teacher to embrace the role of advocate for their students. This can take the form of helping students find their voice on issues important to them perhaps hosting town halls, writing to newspapers, producing podcasts, and speaking out about injustice in ways that advance a cause.
My teaching colleague, Jennifer, does this masterfully. As an accomplished African American educator and leader, Jennifer developed a town hall protocol that she uses with her high school students to discuss issues like racism. Jennifer doesn’t shy away from the tough and challenging questions these conversations bring up. She knows that her students are grappling with racism, negative stereotypes, the challenge to “act white” in order to be safe and successful in mainstream America. Her town halls gave voice to her students concerns and questions. Each and every day, Jennifer operates with political clarity.
5. Build the capacity for critical hope. Teachers embodying critical hope strive, each and every day, to create strong, interdependent community within their classrooms. Critical hope is that condition that helps each student understand that they have a responsibility to raise the collective well-being of the entire class. Actually, critical hope means that you have a profound sense of responsibility for the well-being not just of those in your immediate community, but for the well-being of humankind. Teaching with critical hope means that you instill in your students the sense that they too have a role to play in making this world a better place.
One clear way I see this taking place in classrooms everywhere is when teachers help students understand the steps they can take to clean up the environment and tackle climate change. I have watched students tackle big issues like changing local regulations to ban phosphates in water, lobby for and require installation of filling stations for water bottles so single use plastic bottles are no longer used or needed, and speak out to help change school district purchasing decisions so that styrofoam lunch trays become a thing of the past. While these kinds of examples are everywhere, they are clear examples of teaching with critical hope.
CRCTC puts forth a viewpoint that education should be a humanizing process. One in which all students gain a growing awareness of their individual and collective capacities. Out of this awareness, the students will push harder to improve not just their own lives but the lives of those around them. Think of the strength our students will bring to this world with that kind of a mindset.
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