Teaching for Social Justice?

Voices from the Front Lines

Connie E. North

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781594516184
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317250883
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Teaching for Social Justice? Voices from the Front Lines examines the process of four K-12 educators and a university-based researcher discussing, studying, and acting on the potential power of social justice. Through frequent, lively, and complex meetings, these educators examine their varying educational philosophies, practices, and teaching sites. Using experimental writing methods and qualitative methodology, North bridges the great divide between teacher and academic discourse. She analyzes the complex, interconnected competencies pursued in the name of social justice, including functional, critical, relational, democratic, and visionary literacies. In doing so, she reveals the power of cross-institutional, democratic inquiry on social issues in education.

PART I

FUNCTIONAL LITERACY

1

Functional Literacy in Context

A Portrait of Margaret

(Margaret’s responses to the portrait appear in italics.)

“Alright, folks, I need your attention,” Margaret said in a tone and at a volume impossible to ignore. Although petite, this silver-haired woman, who always wore glasses and never lipstick, was a force to be reckoned with. The seventh graders returned to their respective desks, lined up in rows, and with undeveloped slyness continued to exchange insults with their peers, stab each other with pencils, or give unsuspecting friends a smack upside the head. Margaret saw all of these actions and glared at each of the perpetrators in turn until all eyes were on her and all hands rested immobile on top of or below the desks. “You guys are so not smooth,” she joked.

The wall by the door held some framed landscape artwork and, more notably, a large bulletin board covered with photographs of students from previous years. Margaret clustered the photos by year and included quotes from the pictured students, like, “These kids ain’t bad; they just got issues.” Windows overlooking a busy four-lane street ran along the back of the room, where Margaret and Vivian, the special education teacher with whom she shared her classroom, each had a corner nook to house their desks and personal belongings. The wall between the chalkboard and windows displayed student work and “magic words,” the first item on this day’s agenda, which Margaret had written on the chalkboard at the front of the classroom.

“Monique, pick a magic word and use it in a sentence,” Margaret instructed while grabbing the raffle tickets and a glass jar off her desk.

“Middle school students are accustomed to having homework,” a student with piercing green eyes said in a matter-of-fact way.

“That’ll work,” Margaret said as she handed her a ticket. Monique wrote her name on it, and Margaret placed it in the jar. On the first day of the next month, Margaret would randomly draw a ticket and reward the winning student with five dollars.

“Alright, so accustom is off the table. Darius, you’re up,” Margaret said, ignoring the handful of students who were bouncing up and down with their arms raised.

“I concealed my magic word ticket so Daniel wouldn’t steal it,” a tall, lanky student mumbled into his crossed arms that rested on the desk.

“Darius, honey, nobody heard that. Say your sentence loudly and clearly.”

“I CONCEALED MY MAGIC WORD TICKET SO DANIEL WOULDN’T STEAL IT,” Darius boomed.

“Smart move, Darius. Here’s your ticket. Ricardo, cómo se dice, ‘I said the magic word,’ en español?” Margaret asked.

“Yo dije la palabra mágica,” a student with stylishly spiked hair replied.

“Yo dije la palabra mágica,” Margaret repeated. “Thank you, Ricardo, for the Spanish tutorial.” As she deposited a ticket on his desk, Margaret turned to a sullen female student. “Tonisha, can you say, ‘Yo dije la palabra mágica’?”

“No,” replied Tonisha. She sulked, flipped her long, neat braids, and slumped down in her chair.

“Ah, come on and try it. Just humor me for a moment. Curtis, you up for the challenge?”

“Yo dije la palabra mágica,” fumbled the class clown, casting a smile that lit up the room.

“Excellent effort. That merits a ticket.” Turning her attention to the back corner of the classroom, Margaret said, “What are you drawing over there, Chris?” as she approached his desk. “Nice work. I love confiscating things I like.” Margaret snatched up the piece of paper in front of Chris. “Give me a reason why I should give this masterpiece back to you at the end of class by using a magic word.”

Chris used his bright coffee-colored eyes to glare at Margaret but said in a voice that all his classmates could hear, “I toiled on that picture, which isn’t finished.”

“Here you are, sir.” Margaret placed a ticket in front of him, and Chris began doodling on it as soon as it hit the table.

“We have three native Spanish speakers in here, so we should make good use of their services, as knowing a second language is valuable and very cool,” Margaret said. “I encourage you to spend time practicing your Spanish. If we had a native Hmong speaker in this class, I would encourage us to learn how to say things in Hmong as well. Now, who wants to run the show for the last seven tickets?”

“I do,” a female student with a mouthful of braces replied. She leaped out of her chair, extending an open hand. Margaret placed the tickets in it and moved to the opposite side of the room.

“Sheila, I need to hear everything that happens so speak in a loud, clear voice and ask the other students to do so as well.”

Sheila called on a student with pale blue eyes, who said in a soft voice, “Eating vegetables is beneficial to my health.”

“What did you say?” Sheila barked.

“Sheila,” Margaret admonished, “saying ‘what?’ like Crystal is stupid is the wrong thing to do when you are in charge of a task. You need to adjust your tone and ask her, in a respectful way, to repeat the sentence.”

“What did you say, Crystal?” Sheila said with sugar in her voice. I made eye contact with Margaret, who shook her head in amusement. Crystal repeated her sentence so that at least Sheila could hear it, and Sheila subsequently distributed the remaining tickets to her peers without interference from Margaret.

“Alright, it’s time to work on making inferences, which is a fancy way of saying we’re going to solve problems using information that we already have. You need your language arts folder, your notebook, and something to write with.”

Several students yelled out, “I need a pencil, Ms. Nowak.”

Margaret retrieved several pencils from her desk and, as she passed them out, declared, “If you need to sharpen your pencils, do it now, because I don’t want to be interrupted once we start this activity.”

Finding Ms. Nowak

I met Margaret while tutoring in her seventh-grade language arts classroom at Johnson Middle School during the fall of 2005. The idea of recruiting Margaret as a study participant emerged after watching her teach during my initial months of tutoring. The decision to ask her to be part of the study, however, occurred after I had already begun it. I was interviewing one of the other teacher participants, Joe, in mid-January when I realized how valuable Margaret’s voice would be to the study group.

“I’ve been talking a lot with this teacher I’m tutoring for at Johnson who has a lot of African-American students,” I said to Joe as we talked about the lack of teachers of color in the United States and, more generally, the inability of many teachers to be effective with students who are not white and/or middle class. “She’s a white woman,” I continued, “and when she teaches, she really seems to command her students’ respect. She sets clear boundaries for them and is always explicit about both her purpose for doing something and her expectations of the students. She sets high but realizable goals for them, making her classroom a safe space where students don’t feel demoralized. I think because she has garnered their respect, they’re responsive and she has been able to conquer part of the alienation that so many black students experience in schools. Being in her classroom has made me think a lot about the relationship between kids feeling disrespected and many of the discipline problems that teachers face.”

“Yeah, this issue of respect would be a good study in and of itself.”

“I wish Margaret were in the study because she’s been teaching middle school language arts for a number of years and—”

“Did you ask her?” Joe interjected.

“I didn’t.” I sighed. “It’s been recently occurring to me that I should. I don’t know if Margaret would identify herself as teaching for social justice, but I think she models Lisa Delpit’s philosophy. Have you read Other People’s Children?”¹

“No, I’ve seen it, but—”

“She talks a lot about the tension between honoring students’ cultural backgrounds and teaching them the skills they need to gain access to the system so they can change the status quo. Delpit argues for tackling institutionalized racism and other forms of oppression but, at the same time, wants teachers to acknowledge that a code of power exists, and students need access to the rules of this code if they are going to be able to challenge it successfully.

Over the years, I have developed what appears to be an unhealthy disregard for academic scholarship regarding education issues. I had never heard of this woman, or her book, until I met Connie. If that is what Lisa Delpit said, I certainly agree with her. However, is she in a classroom putting her knowledge to some use? How many teachers have changed their practice because of her book? I am reminded of what Joe said at our August 2006 meeting. No matter how many times he heard something from his teachers, he needed to experience life for himself before he could make the kinds of changes that led him out of dead-end jobs and on to a successful career as an artist and teacher. Some people (probably including me) need to find everything out the hard way. I don’t know that reading Delpit’s book would have made any difference in my teaching.

“This is the kind of teaching that I think Margaret does,” I said. “She helps students develop a lot of skills, but she will tell them directly, ‘I’m not having you learn these skills for learning’s sake alone. I’m having you learn them because they’re going to be important for you to know when you want to get access to certain things as adults.’”

“Does she use those terms with her students?” Joe asked.

“She does,” I replied with conviction.

“If her students understand that that’s what she’s doing, I would imagine they respond well to her teaching.”

“Watching her at work, I am always impressed with how often she is explicit with her students about why she is teaching a lesson in a certain way. She scaffolds her lessons beautifully and will say things like, ‘I don’t expect you all to know these skills already.’”

“Good for her,” Joe said. “Wow. Now that’s a skill I would like to develop.”

“Maybe I can get her to be in the study after all,” I said, laughing. “I think it would make this study more meaningful to have a classroom teacher in the group who works in a school with such an ethnically, racially, and socioeconomically mixed group of kids.”

A Short History of Johnson Middle School

“So Johnson Middle School was created in 1994?” I asked Margaret while interviewing her in her living room on a cold February evening.

“1993,” Margaret corrected. “It opened as a charter school on the east side of town in a building that served as a temporary space to launch the school. I took a language arts job there in ’95. I wanted to get out of ESL, and this position was a shot.”

“I know the school moved to the north side in 1997. Did the student population change when the school moved sites?”

“The second or third year that we moved to the new building, I had my class do a project on the history of our school,” Margaret said. “Although the city’s demographics are rapidly changing, and these changes are making Hobson less white, Johnson remains one of the few schools in town with a racially and ethnically diverse student population. I had the students go back and interview the original principals, teachers, and kids who had been at the first building. One of the things that we did was pull demographic data on the student population from the time the school opened. I remember we made a line graph, and it sort of went like this.” Margaret created a large X in the air with her index fingers.

“The year that we moved to our current location, it jumped one hundred eighty degrees,” Margaret continued, shaking her head. “It was so stunning. The students’ racial and ethnic backgrounds completely flipped overnight. The politics of the funding, staffing, and population of that school is intriguing for anybody who is interested in the racial politics of Hobson.” Margaret paused. “It was not an experience, believe me, that I ever would have chosen to live through. Had I known what was coming, I would have gotten a job as a manager at Wal-Mart and just been done with it.” I laughed at the improbable image of Margaret bowing to Sam Walton’s heirs.

“But, you know, it’s like any other experience,” Margaret said. “Once you’re in it, if you manage to come out in one piece on the other side, you’re a smarter and richer person for it. Although it’s not the kind of thing that anybody would knowingly subject herself to, unless you’re a masochist. It was,” Margaret paused again. “It was really a brutal transition.”

“Well, the old building is tucked back in the wealthy, white, overeducated hills of the east side, isn’t it?” I asked.

Margaret nodded. “And when the charter school was in that location, the student population reflected that. But right before we moved to the new location, which is a predominantly African-American area, our black principal was fired. That decision created a nasty situation because the district pulled a white guy out of retirement to replace him. This was a huge mistake and only exacerbated the racial tensions that the former principal had already fueled. The black community on the north side hated us—the principal and the teachers—because we were all white. And the students, well I’m not sure what the agenda was downtown. Several kids that the district office sent to Johnson had already been expelled from other schools.

“It’s a funny process to go through,” Margaret continued. “To realize what it feels like when somebody is specifically and deliberately out to get you because of your race. It doesn’t matter what really happened or who you are. The only thing that matters is your skin color. To have experienced it once to the extent that I did is a fairly unique experience for a white woman of my generation and social class who wasn’t looking for it. I didn’t, say, go to Selma, Alabama, in 1963. I wasn’t knowingly putting myself in harm’s way for a higher cause. All I wanted was a job,” Margaret said, laughing. “I was so clueless about what I was getting myself into.”

“So what changed the dynamics at the school?” I asked.

“Well, they hired a new African-American principal, Mike. Looking back on it, I don’t think the board of education had any choice except to hire him. Mike was exactly the right person at the right time for that school. He was the community’s choice for principal and created enough social and political stability to let the situation settle into a place where the staff could at least get our footing. I don’t think there are many people who could have come in and done what he did.”

Margaret’s Path to Teaching

“When I was in seventh grade, we moved to New Jersey from Chicago because my father was transferred,” Margaret said as she leaned into her chocolate leather sofa. “I went to high school in what was basically an affluent suburb of New York City. It was a very homogenous school. Everybody was white, and everybody was in the middle to upper-middle class. The major identifiable ethnic groups were Italians and Jews. There was one black family in our entire town, whom I never knew.”

“Did you go straight to college after graduation or—”

“I did, but I crashed and burned that first year of college—flunked my first class, went home for a year, and came back. I really don’t like school. I know that sounds odd coming from a teacher, but I don’t like being a student or doing the kinds of things students have to do. I find them really confining and boring. I think at the tail end of my high school years, I realized that nothing really bad was going to happen to me if I refused to study or do my homework. You understand that this was the time of the Vietnam protests and women’s movement. Everybody was protesting everything. I thought, well why study for tests that I don’t care about or write papers on subjects that don’t interest me? So I quit. That experience really influenced my attitude about encouraging kids to go to college. I went to college because nobody ever told me that there was anything else I could do. There were no choices. Nobody asked, ‘Who a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword by Kevin K. Kumashiro
• Introduction
• Part I Functional Literacy
• Part II Critical Literacy
• Part III Relational Literacy
• Part IV Democratic Literacy
• Part V Visionary Literacy
• Appendix: Study Methodology
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Author