Let's Get Real

Exploring Race, Class, and Gender Identities in the Classroom

Martha Caldwell, Oman Frame

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000539943
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica multiculturale

This is a vital resource for any teacher or administrator looking to help students tackle issues of race, class, gender, religion, and cultural background. Authors Martha Caldwell and Oman Frame, both lifelong educators, offer a series of teaching strategies designed to encourage conversation and personal reflection, enabling students to think creatively, rather than stereotypically, about difference.

Using the Transformational Inquiry method, your students will learn to explore their own identities, share stories and thoughts with their peers, learn more through reading and research, and ultimately take personal and collaborative action to affect social change in their communities. This second edition's updates include new research throughout, as well as additional lessons on gender and sexuality.

The lesson plans and handouts throughout the book are appropriate for middle and high school classes and are easy to implement into your own curriculum.

1 Teaching and Learning by Discovery

DOI: 10.4324/9781003201342-2

Karla, a Black student, told the class about a time when she was in kindergarten and a white friend invited her home to play after school. As the two girls climbed into the back of the minivan, her friend’s mother tried to buckle Karla’s seatbelt for her. Karla pushed her hand away, saying she could do it herself. The mother stepped back, looked surprised, and called Karla a painful racial slur. As Karla told the story, her eyes filled with tears. Even though the incident had happened years ago, the pain was still fresh. At the time, she felt ashamed and didn’t even tell her parents about it.

Her classmates responded to her story with indignation. Maggie, a white student, was outraged. “How dare she? You were only a child!” she cried. Seeing Karla tear up again, Maggie moved across the room and put her arms around her. “You are not the one who should feel ashamed, Karla. That woman should be ashamed!” Other students echoed Maggie’s response.

It took courage for Karla to share her story, and Maggie’s and her other classmates’ strong support helped her move beyond the shame she had internalized. But the conversation wasn’t just important for Karla and other students of color who had experienced racism. For those who had never experienced it, empathy for Karla made the pain of racism suddenly very real. Many white students had known Karla for years, and like Maggie, they considered her their friend. Yet they had no idea she had experienced such blatant racism. Hearing Karla’s story, they felt compassion and respect. They felt honored to be trusted, and like Maggie, they felt protective. They wanted to protect children like Karla from the suffering the indignities of racism.

In a Transformational Inquiry classroom, our students’ stories serve as springboards for higher order learning. Through sharing personal experiences and listening to each other respectfully, they form a learning community in which examined thinking emerges. They gain important insights about their own identities, while learning about the lives of their classmates. They make important interpersonal connections, which allow them to form alliances across differences and think creatively, rather than stereotypically, about the differences between them. When their experience is the subject of shared reflection, learning becomes relevant and engagement increases (Baxter Magolda, 1999; Duncan-Andrade & Morrell, 2008; Friere, 1970; Shor, 1992; Wink, 2011).

Our students live and breathe the politics of social justice every day in their lives at home and at school.

Our students live and breathe the politics of social justice every day in their lives at home and at school. They understand the effects of social power in the hallways; they know the subtle workings of social hierarchies during lunch and in their social media networks. This knowledge can be used to build bridges to understanding how systems of power function in the wider world.

Through inquiries into literature, histories, politics, and cultures, they connect what they know from personal experience to how power and privilege function in institutions like schools, religions, governments, and businesses (Caldwell, 2012). By forging connections between their academic and personal worlds, they bring their personal lives to school and take their schoolwork home to be discussed over dinner with their families.

The Transformational Inquiry Method

All learning is channeled through the identities our students claim. Transformational Inquiry guides students on an identity quest by scaffolding instruction through four domains of learning: 1) personal/reflective, 2) social/interactive, 3) cognitive/intellectual, and 4) active/dynamic. The personal domain involves intrapersonal reflection. Students learn to attend to, regulate, and process feelings, recognizing their rich inner landscape as a source of learning. The social domain involves sharing stories from their lived experience. In the cognitive/intellectual domain, students acquire academic content and practice analysis and research. Studies in histories, politics, literature, science, mathematics, and other academic disciplines consolidate insights gained in the personal and social domains to expand their worldviews. In the active/dynamic domain, they put what they learn into practice, not only in their daily interactions, but also through art, stories, and participatory action projects they design and share.

Transformational Inquiry develops a learning community that shares a common language and builds shared knowledge. Personal stories mined in the personal and social domains are connected to conceptual frameworks in the cognitive domain to lead to an understanding of systemic injustice. Once that understanding is reached, students are motivated to take action for transformational change.

Research shows that integrating multiple domains results in sustained learning (Pelligrino & Hilton, 2012). Self-exploration strengthens identity, improves self-esteem, and accelerates academic performance (Cabrera, Milem, & Marx, 2012; Harper & Tuckman, 2006; Romero, Arce, & Cammarota, 2009; Steele & Cohn-Vargas, 2013; Toomey & Umana-Taylor, 2012; Valenzuela, 1999; Rouland, 2017). While the Transformational Inquiry process is not linear, and learning does not progress in an orderly fashion from one domain to the next, educators can nonetheless scaffold instruction that incorporates and moves through each of the four domains. Of course, students achieve cognitive insights in the personal realm and frequently act on what they learn in the social realm. Using the Transformational Inquiry method, academic inquiries are infused with the passion generated in the personal and social realms and integrated through action. Action, likewise, is inspired by personal insight, compassion for others, and includes cognitive analysis.

Transformational Inquiry leverages key developmental needs. Identity formation is considered the task of adolescence and is among the most important work our students will do. They are already questioning who they are and who they want to become, so moving their life experience to the center of the curriculum has profound effects on learning. Gaining awareness of identity-based power and politics gives them the opportunity to develop cognitive resistance and counteract negative stereotypes they may have internalized. As a result, they obtain greater agency during a critical window of development.

Having discussions about aspects of identity, such as race, gender, religion, and abilities, can mitigate these effects.

According to Richardson, Sinclair, Poteat, and Koenig (2012), over a third of bullying is related to social identities such as race, gender, religion, perceived sexual orientation, or physical or mental disability. Bullying is associated with high-risk behaviors, poor grades, and emotional distress, and when bullying is related to core components of a student’s identity, the effects are even more dramatic. Having discussions about aspects of identity, such as race, gender, religion, and abilities, can mitigate these effects. As a result of learning supportive peer relationship skills, students are better able to engage with each other in the academic realm (McIntyre, Roseberry, & Gonzalez, 2001; Steele & Cohn-Vargas, 2013). Harper and Tuckman (2006) relate positive outcomes, especially when students of color are a minority population, to positive racial experiences in school. Other studies reflect what we see in our classrooms and show that conversations about social identities increase perspective taking, critical thinking, and transfer to better academic performance (Berrett, 2012; Gurin, Dey, Hurtado, & Gurin, 2002). Through developing their voices, students’ identities are strengthened, and their confidence as learners and knowledge builders increases.

Knowledge as Power

Learning involves emotional, social, cognitive, and action-taking processes, which result in the expansion and reorganization of information into new patterns of thought. The inquiry method of learning recognizes that learning is sustained when cognition is integrated with its social, emotional, and creative counterparts (Pelligrino & Hilton, 2012). Inquiry learning cultivates engagement and motivation, as the thrill of discovery serves as its own reward. In their review of research spanning several decades, Barron and Darling-Hammond (2008) substantiate the effectiveness of inquiry learning and emphasize the power of collaboration and learning-in-community on social, emotional, and academic development.

Critical inquiry educators argue that education must be transformed to address the needs of students and designed to help them solve the persistent problems faced in the world. They believe that learning goes deeper than the capacity to regurgitate content information fed to them by teachers, but rather, that true learning is a journey of discovery that begins with the discovery of self. Their aim is to empower students to think for themselves, to learn what they most need to know, and to act in their own interests and in the interests of others through acts of solidarity. According to Ira Shor (1999), “Critical literacy thus challenges the status quo in an effort to discover alternative paths for self and social development.” A goal of critical pedagogy is to empower student voices, which can mean students take part in curriculum design and are actively engaged in teaching each other.

Transformational Inquiry builds on the work of critical educators such as Paulo Friere (1970), bell hooks (1994), Marcia Baxter-Magolda (1999), Joan Wink (2011), and Ernest Morrell (Duncan-Andrade & Morrell, 2008). Based on key tenets of critical inquiry, Transformational Inquiry emphasizes the process by which learning occurs rather than the acquisition of content. Far too many students come to us with the view that learning is a passive activity. Rather than generating their own questions, they expect teachers to deliver content and tell them what is important to know. They have learned to measure success in school based on grades alone and have no real connection to learning as a self-motivated, intrinsic drive. They repress authentic questions and instead focus on questions they think will be on the test. When we tell them that asking questions is more important than knowing answers, they are initially confused. Knowledge does not fall from the sky fully formed, we tell them. People, rather, generate knowledge, and a classroom at its best becomes a shared learning community in which students generate, rather than consume knowledge. Learning is driven by questions, and knowledge is a social, political, cultural, and historical construct, always value laden and always imbued with power (Apple, 2019; Sturrock, 1979; Wortham, 2006). According to Clifford and Marinucci (2008), knowledge is not fixed and static, but an ever-evolving construct built by a community of learners:

Genuine inquiries demand that understanding develops in a public space in which each person’s abilities, interests, perspectives, and talents help move everyone else’s thinking forward. It is a knowledge-building space in which ideas are at the center, and each individual has a commitment to producing the collective, evolving understanding.

Transformational Inquiry provides the framework for students to reflect on learning as a political act. By presenting dominant social paradigms concerning race, gender, and class identities as social, historical, hierarchical constructs, the tenets of “knowledge” belying bias and stereotypes are surfaced and brought into question. When such tenets have been normalized and internalized, students may have difficulty articulating opposition and resisting their influence, even when such ideas cause them harm. The Transformational Inquiry process presents perspectives to challenge the status quo and encourage the analysis of power relations. The process works through self-examination, the inclusion of student voices, introducing students to multiple perspectives, and creating forums for action.

Transformational Inquiry invokes generative themes related to identity: race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, cultural background, and learning styles. Generative themes work to bring unexamined ideas into conscious awareness through a depth method of inquiry. Sharing personal stories facilitates empathy and drives questioning. The relationships formed in the process inspire connections in the academic realm. Inspired by care for their classmates, students feed off of each other’s learning. When young men of color, for instance, tell stories of being followed by security guards, the insidious nature of racial profiling is made explicit for white students who have not experienced it. These students can then extrapolate what they learn about each other’s lives to better understand racial disparities in the justice system. They move on to study the history of prisons, capital punishment, the drug war, and the prison industrial complex.

Carlos, a Mexican American student, described crossing the border in the trunk of a car with his mother and being abandoned by their coyote in the desert. When Carlos shared his fear that his parents could be deported, other students empathized with him, understanding how painful it would be to be separated from their parents. When then President Obama issued an executive order outlining a process by which Carlos’s parents could “come out of the shadows” and gain legal status, Carlos’s classmates were attuned to this important political event because they could relate his personal story to events occurring in the national forum. They were eager to learn the constitutional underpinnings of a presidential executive order, and what they had learned in their civics class about the balance of power in the United States government became meaningful to them.

Thus, the content of the curriculum shifts based on emerging student identities, interests, and current events. Yet students learn important academic skills no matter the content: close reading, critical thinking, effective communication skills, and clear writing. Through critical reflection, they achieve metacognitive awareness, which results in important insights into themselves, the ways they learn, and the society they live in. They form alliances and feel a sense of belonging in the classroom, which counteracts the alienation from school so many students, especially those with socially marginalized identities, experience. School becomes about them, and their engagement incre...