During an observation of a high school biology classroom in which
the teacher was a young White woman, and the students were all Black (about
half male), I was told by this teacher not to be afraid of the students. Now, I found this comment both amusing and disturbing. I am a Black woman, but because of a very
light phenotype which includes green eyes, I am often mistaken for White. This woman assumed that I was coming from her
culture – the culture where you are taught to be afraid of young Black men and
to take their high energy, debate oriented and macho personalities as aggressive
and disrespectful. In the Black culture,
we tend to engage in heated debates, we tend to be more physically expressive
and we tend to challenge authority to prove itself. If you understand this, then a White teacher
can develop effective interpersonal relationships with her students. The article I read today on the National
Black Child Development’s website discussed the vital importance of approaching
Black students from a culturally aware perspective. Interventions that work with White students
are likely to fail Black students. Black
males respond better to lessons that are more physically and verbally engaging –
these kids aren’t the ones to sit silent and listen to a lecture. In the article, White teacher are told they
need to start having dialogues that introduce them to Black culture or else
they won’t be effective.
Well, the report could be controversial, because there is a
defense mechanism that pops up where Whites tend to relegate everything back to
a racial issue so they don’t have to address it. It is an ancestral guilt that sneaks up because
of slavery. And while this issue is abut
race, it is about race in the sense of culture.
There is no need for Whites to feel as if they are being attacked for
their deficiencies in pedagogy – if it is not your culture, no one blames you
for not knowing, but you need to learn.
Simple. The blame comes in when
you refuse to learn, when you refuse to address the stereotypes in your head
and debunk them.
There is no specific information on the website about how economists,
neuroscientists, or politicians support the early childhood field or the issue of
teaching in a cultural context.
Now that is really interesting to know. I assume when they talk about interventions they mean academic interventions. Maybe that's why my class consistently scores high, most everything I do incorporates the kinesthetic modality. I have a gesture for collaborative learning routines, letters of the alphabet and every high frequency word for our reading series. I try to utilize lots of large motor physical movement where I can since recess has been eliminated and when I can't I use many fine motor movements.
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