Reflections on Race and Cultures in Teaching
Teaching is a critical part of the process by which we pass on culture and social mores as well as knowledge and understanding. Whether a teacher is aware of her role or not, she is transmitting expectations to her students and defining their understanding of the world. Teaching is therefore a social action, whether it promotes change or the status quo. “Researchers have argued that educators need not only to acknowledge the diversity among their students, but also embrace these differences and to treat their students as raced, gendered, sexualized, and classed individuals.” (Kumashiro, p.28) When one teaches in a way that promotes diversity and supports equality, she helps build a society where individual rights and opportunities flourish within a cohesive whole. When one teaches to a supposed uniform standard student, the message is sent to all students, typical or otherwise, that conformity is valuable and the smoothest path toward success is found by complying with expected norms.
School is one of the most influential experiences in a child’s life. Children spend six hours a day or more in the environment that we curate for them. Outside of school, students are exposed to a barrage of media; adults often tolerate “othering” attitudes, even when we disagree with them because of the impracticality of challenging so much of our culture. But at school, teachers and administrators make choices about what music, books and video we include, and we make the rules that govern student behaviour. Teaching, then, is a position of privilege: we have nearly all of the power within the school setting, and with that power, the opportunity to counter the dominant assumptions and equip students to evaluate the biases that inform our current social structure.
The Canadian experience illustrates the power of the education system. Residential schools were used by the Canadian government as a weapon against First Nations, Metis and Inuit (FNMI) people in a prolonged attempt at assimilation. Since the time of residential schools, mainstream education has marginalized aboriginal people by narrowing the history that we tell to misrepresent FNMI people, their claims to land and self-governance, and the value of their cultures, and by situating FNMI peoples in the past without reference to the diversity of FNMI people and ideas, and any modern contributions and successes. This has been done without acknowledging the role that colonial governments played in damaging families and transmission of values and ways of living. Though we are not the same individual people who committed the crimes and abuses of power over Indigenous people through the residential school system, we represent the same institution and the same governments that did; it follows that schools have a moral obligation to use their power and privilege be part of a solution. However we come to be teachers in Canadian schools, we inherit this moral imperative.
Non aboriginal Canadians find ourselves in the position of needing to change how we acknowledge aboriginal people in Canadian society so that we can work to heal the damage from the Canadian genocide. But teachers are at great risk of making the same mistakes that were made in the era of residential schools by defining the terms on which we interact rather than co-constructing them with all the people involved. I think it’s for this reason that De-colonizing our Schools (Aboriginal Student Well-being) emphasizes student well-being rather than just academic success. Student Well-being “differs in significant ways from student success”. (Dion, Johnston and Rice) An “emphasis on academics in the absence of attention to the whole of the person is alienating and contributes in substantive ways to disengagement and dissatisfaction with schooling.” The general population of students also learns best when lessons are relevant and culturally responsive (Kumashiro, p28) but it is especially important to keep these ideas at the forefront with Indigenous and other racialized students. They their families have ample justification to question whether the judgement of a non-indigenous or white, European teacher is in their best interest. When a teacher is considering the well-being of a student, she has to listen and respond to the student, taking in the student’s experience of the lessons and making an effort to determine its effect. It makes it less likely that she will force unwelcome perspectives or impose her own culture on her students.
The conventional student-teacher relationship requires the student to have trust in the teacher. I think we earn that trust when we show that we respect our students. Jennifer Wemigwans teaches a course through, York University called Pedagogy of the Land, in which we are considering Indigenous ways of knowing. The course proposes valuing ways of understanding that are outside of the Western focus on knowledge acquired through logic and scientific process. It has been a great struggle for me to give serious consideration to the limitations of my belief in the best ways to learn, but ultimately I have come to separate things that people believe (that they learned through unscientific methods), and the process of learning in unscientific ways. In effect, the fact that I don’t experience visions or extra sensory perception, doesn’t mean that feelings are irrelevant. This separation has helped me to perceive ways that I include emotion, intuition and anecdotal experiences in building knowledge and to draw a connection to the concept that Wemigwans calls “Heart knowledge” (Wemigwans, 2016). It gives me an example of something important to me that I came to know through exposure to a First Nations teaching. I feel the importance of this kind of experience because it removes my interest of the body of knowledge of aboriginal peoples from the abstract. The course focus is on learning from the Land which allows a teacher to step back and have less control over the student’s experience. This objective is unconventional but it allows the student to assume the control and therefore lessons the dependence on trust in the teacher. Because a teacher needs to empower students, I think that there is potential for these methods to impact the way I employ student-centered learning. I hope that, as I come to know more about teaching through methods that are culturally appropriate to FNMI people, I will become a teacher who grows in her ability to include all of my students’ needs and perspectives in their educations.
Pedagogy of the Land is one of several courses that York University provides to students that assist us in examining and deconstructing our biases to prepare us to become teachers. I certainly considered myself to be not racist, not classist, and not homophobic before beginning these courses. From White Racist to White Anti-Racist, by Tema Okun, provoked me to look more closely at aspects of racism and to re-examine my understanding of myself as an anti-racist or ally to other marginalized people. Her article is useful in identifying and addressing some problematic viewpoints. Okun acknowledges that a person can support racism despite good intentions and that there is a series of steps between racist and anti-racist, each of which shows learning over the previous steps, and identifies new obstacles. She describes the steps that one must go through: “I cannot go from the perception and experience that “I’m normal” to the perception the perception and experience that “I’m opening up” without first going through the stages of ‘what are you?, ‘be like me,’ ‘denial and defensiveness’ and ‘guilt and shame’” (Okun, p.2) My personal experience contradicts her insistence that all stages must be experienced, but I find her examination of the stages useful in understanding the limitations of some ideas. In particular, the Acknowledgement stage includes enthusiasm about “celebrating diversity, without understanding the power dynamics of racism” (Okun, p10). I think that schools often fall into superficial inclusion of multiple cultures out of fear of addressing sensitive topics or directly discussing race. When we don’t continue up the ‘ladder’ we leave our students with an incomplete understanding of their role in changing society if they are part of the dominant culture, and we leave the conferred dominance of one or more groups unchallenged. Celebrating diversity without addressing power imbalance is not very helpful and can be more alienating for students who have been marginalized.
While we are responsible for children’s school environment, and we are expected to be moral guides for our students, teachers must always respect a family’s desire to teach children their own moral and religious understanding. Some teachers are inclined to avoid subjects that are personally important because of the risk of offending parents. We need to help students develop an awareness of power imbalance as it relates to these important and sensitive topics, but as people of influence working with other people’s children, we must be very cautious about what we say and do. Our students, as well as their parents will be in various places on the ladder that Okun describes. I foresee having discussions with parents who question my behaviour when I’m trying to discuss a nuanced issues with their children. It will be very important to develop positive relationships with the parents of my students to facilitate these discussions. Okun’s writing has helped me be able to understand why these conversations are necessary for all of us.
Keith Edwards distinguishes between unearned entitlements, opportunities that everyone should have, and conferred dominance, those that no one should have. (Edwards, p.41) This distinctions suggests ways to think about what differences we accept and challenge. Like Okun, he describes stages of development in understanding of race. “Development from self-interest to altruistic to blended underlying motivation is not only central to an individual’s desire to work toward social justice, but also key to influencing individual effectiveness in those efforts.” (Edwards, p.43) These stages apply to other areas of equity and inclusion where there is an imbalance of power, such as class, gender and ability groups.
Edwards and Okun’s transitional stages help us to understand the process of ally development. Ally development has a large role to play in the process of addressing bullying in schools. Anti-bullying campaigns identify the bully, the bullied and the bystander, and work to activate the bystander to support the bullied. These programs are ubiquitous but have not been effective in ending bullying in schools. Perhaps if we can help the student body through the process of becoming effective allies we will have greater success. Students are more likely to “be more effective, consistent, and sustainable” allies (Edwards, p.41) when they recognize their own interest in stopping the bullying.
Teachers and administrators might also look to A Cultural Production Approach to Anti-oppressive Inclusion to inform the multicultural school experiences that we promote for our students. It suggests that culture is constantly made and remade through…specific interactions” in contrast to “liberal multiculturalism [which] demands stable definitions of cultural groups that are presumed to be homogenous and unchanging” (Ruben Gaztambide-Fernendez p 14). Celebrating the food and festivals of many groups can be an informative and fun way to begin building connections between people. When the objective is to build respect for people inclusive of their differences from ourselves, we need to continue to learn about each other until we can understand and accept or welcome differences in values and beliefs as well. A classroom culture begins when individuals arrive, and changes as we learn about each other and each person’s multiple identities. The cultural production approach respects and validates the individual’s expression of his or her multiple identities, so it offers us an understanding of culture that resists stereotypes.
This work , the work of an activist teacher, is difficult because it consists of so much more than learning the right thing to do and doing it form that point on. It’s an engagement with constant reconciling of opinions and perspectives, sometimes those that are closest to a person’s sense of identity. So its socially challenging, delicate work that requires a person to be her most respectful, to be at her best. While we cannot predict that teachers can consistently achieve this high expectation, as teachers, we can commit ourselves to trying. Just as I have wanted teachers and schools to do their best for my children, I intend to do the best I can for all the children who I have the opportunity to teach. As my students and I develop our critical consciousness, we will improve our ability to treat each other with respect and make the world better to live in.
References
1. Kumashiro, K. (2000). Toward a Theory of Anti-Oppressive Education Review of Educational Research (January), 70 (1), pg. 25-53
2. Dion, Susan D., Johnston, K., Rice, C., M. (2010). Decolonizing our schools: Aboriginal education in the Toronto District School Board. (Toronto).(Section 1.1, Chapters 2 & 3)
http://ycec.edu.yorku.ca/files/2012/11/Decolonizing-Our-Schools.pdf
3. Wemigwans, Jennifer, (2016, Sept. 24) York University Lecture.
4. Tema Okun, (2006) From White Racist to White Anti-Racist: The Life-Long Journey. dRworks
http://www.dismantlingracism.org/uploads/4/3/5/7/43579015/white_identity_ladder_2013.pdf
5. Edwards Keith E. (2006) Aspiring Social Justice Ally Identity Development. NASPA Journal 43(4)
6. Gaztambide-Fernandez, R. (2011). A Cultural Production View of Approaches to Anti-Oppressive Inclusion. In Through Inclusive Curriculum. Toronto: OISE/UT, pp. 13-14.