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The Practical & Liberatory Logic of ‘Culturally Responsive’ Teaching'

Dear friends and fam,

Last week, I wrote about my student P, and the roller coaster of transportation that it took just to get her up to Buffalo to start college.  I also wrote about Emma Dabiri’s concept of coalition building from her book What White People Can Do Next, and talked about the Rainbow Coalition that was formed in Chicago in the late 1960s between the Black Panthers, the Puerto Rican Young Lords, and the working-class southern whites called the Young Patriots. 

What White People Can Do Now:

Emma Dabiri describes that when white people only want to hear about the “racist” experiences felt by  Black* people, it really only centers on white people again. Instead, she contests:

“We should learn about non-European cultures not just because it is nice or “antiracist” to do so but because we’re stuck. What lessons might we learn from cultures with different understandings of subjectivity outside of Enlightenment humanism?”

It is with this in mind that this week’s post. Today, I’m talking about “culturally responsive” teaching, and the joy of Dominican American students. During my failed attempt to secure a NY teacher’s license, I took many online courses focusing on anti-bias. They were all utter bullshit, but as I studied for the equally bullshit exam called Educating All Students, I learned the word “culturally responsive” teaching. The exam study guide said it was the best way to engage students. But not what it was. And despite its recommendation to develop “culturally responsive pedagogy” for teachers taking this absurd exam, very few curriculum changes have been made to either common core or NY’s standardized curriculum. If you’re surprised by this incompetent irony, you must not be familiar with secondary education. 

But rather than rant about how “culturally responsive teaching” is really just learning about your students and then teaching lessons based on their unique community/history/identity, I’m going to tell a story about just how powerful it is as a practical tool in the classroom (which is precisely what makes it so liberatory). 

Like the grand majority (90%) of my students at that school, P’s family is from the Dominican Republic. To prepare over the summer, I read YA books by Elizabeth Acevedo, a fellow Dominican American from Harlem, because most of her novels are about Black and brown teenagers struggling to find themselves. What better way to prepare to learn the unique needs and talents of my students? You see, I wanted to be the most effective teacher I could be, and I knew that meant “meeting students where they are” in every sense of the word. Because I am a nerd, I read all of Elizabeth Acevedo’s books (they really are good fun, and offer such a magical perspective on BIPOC teens and the b.s. they face today, I recommend them to erry’one). This was how I discovered the former middle school teacher also performed slam poems. 

Despite my low tolerance for poetry (not ALL, dear poets reading this!), and despite the fact that I am a nerdy white woman, I had taught slam poetry units before with high school students. I relied on the curriculum that Chance the Rapper modeled and described in his own sessions with BIPOC youth, bc wtf do I know about slam poetry? But that’s the thing, I didn’t need to know, because the students already did, and when I assigned a slam poem assignment, I got even the very reluctant and underperforming students to engage. 

Knowing that in many ways successful teaching is an audition and then a performance, I did this in the first month of school. This way, when they loved it, they’d be more inclined to do the rest of the class’s assignments. It worked. But as long as I did one “fun” analysis assignment a month (which I always made deliberately harder than their normal assignments, proving that when it’s meaningful to them, they work harder). 

Here’s the Youtube video of Elizabeth Acevedo performing her poem “Afro-Latina” (here it is in written form)-- if you don’t read anything else in this newsletter, at least go and watch this-- I guarantee it’ll uplift you!

When I taught Elizabeth Acevedo’s slam poem “Afro-Latina” in class, the students went wild. They lit up when they realized the poem was in Spanglish, and that it wrote about scenes of city life that they knew intimately. This is what it means to teach “culturally responsive” pedagogy, as the ed-speak people call it. From that moment on, I had the heart of the class. Because of this, the students shared their lives with me as I taught them the mechanics of essay writing and critical thinking. I marveled at how smart they were, and how much harder they were working following my tactic of teaching authors that looked like them and came from the exact same background.

[note: any of these poem’s shortcomings must be seen as my own teacher failings-- as a white lady who familiarized herself with how to teach slam poetry late at night when she had to wake up in 4 hours, not from say, a Black woman who’s been doing it all her life-- she’s the one who should’ve taught it for maximum learning ((this ties into my continued musings on whether or not white teachers should even be in majority-minority schools, but that's a subject for a different day)).

Here’s one slam poem my students wrote, I love teenagers’ capacity to make even getting glasses A MAJOR LIFE CHANGING EVENT, but nonetheless, this student’s fancy footwork with metaphor got me:

I wasn’t always aimless

I didn’t always bump into things

I remember looking

Without the gloss

At first I didn’t want it

At first I was fine

All I wanted to do

Was go and stay blind

I thought the glasses would change me

Make me a nerd

And it did change me

Set me free from my faults

The glasses let me see

The world I was born in

But seeing may have made things worse

Made me see how people are

The truth behind their lies

The truth of who they are

With glasses I saw

What I only thought before

How they now call you names

A whole other person

Like clark kent and superman

One’s weak while one has power

With it on i’m one thing

Without it i’m another

But I won’t listen

I won’t care, because I see now

The truth behind it all

I know that one day it’ll all come to an end

I embrace who I am now

With glasses and without

I set my own path

And another’s, this student struggled with severe ADHD and other learning disabilities. With the help of his Dominican paraprofessional, he spent the most amount of time on this assignment than anything else I assigned, and I think it sharpened his critical thinking toolbox as a result: 

Using me like a dry cloth to dry off your tears

Using me so I can control your fears.

Using me so I can guide you to your goals.

Using my energy like I’m a train engine full of coal.

Using me to buy stuff for you, but not getting anything in return.

Using me to walk through fire and not feel the burn.

But it doesn’t matter anymore

I’m stronger than you think

I might be stronger than I board

You backstab me!!! And you betrayed me!!!

I will come back to you and 

Show you how strong I can be!!!

I’m staying strong para mi familiar. 

I promise you, I’m a very strong persona.

I may be judged

Don’t worry, I won’t have a grudge.

Reparation Opportunity for the Melanin Deficit:

For educators, check out an "Afro-Latina" lesson plan the org Learning For Justice made (note: I made my own, as I didn't know this was available, but now you don't have to!). You can read more here about teens in spoken word poetry workshops.

Those of you with jobs with real salaries: If you’re so inclined (and able), here’s a chance to donate some financial reparations to Learning for Justice and/or to the NYC Teen Poetry Slam by the org Urban World NYC

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