This year has required a continuous self-examination and renegotiation of the role in which my position in society as a white teacher will impact my practice, and this week’s readings were helpful spaces to continue this process of reflection.
Helpful, though not always comfortable. However, if there is anything I’m realizing over the course of examining our nation’s educational history and discourse over the last centuries, it is that my comfort can no longer determine whether I engage with the systems of oppression around me. People of color (and of many other marginalized statuses) in our nation have endured far more than mere discomfort in the midst of systematic oppression, so discomfort is a rather small price to pay as a white educator. In fact, I am beginning to see that getting comfortable with discomfort is one of the most important things any of us can do as we become teachers. If I am the most “comfortable” person in my future classroom, I’m probably doing something wrong (or perpetuating the status quo). And so, the process of uncomfortable learning continues. Toni Morrison’s reading of racialized coding of language and the erasure of what she terms the “American Africanist” in literature was both profound and challenging. In her exploration of the construction of “blackness” and “whiteness” in literature, she notes how “for both black and white American writers, in a wholly racialized society, there is no escape from racially inflected language, and the work writers do to unhobble the imagination from the demands of that language is complicated, interesting and definitive” (1992, p. 12-13). As a literature student in K-12 education, I was not aware of this constant presence of racial hierarchy in language and, as such, was complicit in reinforcing it. I feel like it’s important for me to own my role the societal processes happening around me. To be unaware is to be decidedly not neutral. Ignorance does not beget innocence. And discomfort, the friction of realizing that language is not (nor has it ever been) ideologically neutral and, as Morrison describes it, that “readers and writers both struggle to interpret and perform within a common language shareable imaginative worlds” (1992, p. xii), is a challenge. That said, I really appreciate that Morrison’s perspective, and that of the researcher in “It’s Pretty Much White,” are not without hope. Indeed, Morrison notes that “[her] project rises from delight, not disappointment” (p. 5). The fact that she actually sees possibilities for anti-racist education in identifying the formerly ‘unseen’ role of the black community in traditionally ‘white’ literature gives me hope that the same might be possible in my own classroom. One of my concerns has been the fact that, often, we as teachers aren’t given control over which books we teach in the classroom. This has always seemed like a problem to me because certain books don’t strike me as anti-racist in any sense. But, again, I felt like Morrison’s perspective demonstrates that, even in the typical ‘canon’ of literature, we as teachers don’t have to analyze books in a ‘typical’ (ie. reinforcing racialized hierarchies) way. Borsheim-Black’s case study on a white teacher teaching To Kill a Mockingbird to white students in an anti-racist way was a helpful accompaniment to some of the thoughts and questions brought up by Morrison, then. In particular, I noticed the way the teacher in the study used questions about the students’ language to make “Whiteness” visible-- for instance, questioning simple choices of when white students used “they” versus “we” (2015, p. 417). I thought this simple, conversational way of making “familiar language strange” (p. 418) could be a great start in bringing issues of race to the table in the classroom, although I feel like I would need more training to really understand the process and do it well. There were a number of other helpful strategies presented in the research, including introducing racism at a variety of levels (ranging from interpersonal to epistemological) and in asking students to reflect on ways race has impacted their own lives. In some ways, however, I still don’t feel like I’ve done all the work that’s needed to be an effective anti-racist educator. I related to the teacher in the study when, “she expressed concern about whether her own ‘Whiteness’ could create ‘blindspots’ (hooks, 1994) in her pedagogy because as White people, “we don’t know what we don’t know.”’ (2015, p. 412). That said, I suppose at this point the important thing is to have begun the journey, and to be willing to learn along the way. Resource Link: Anti-Racist Pedagogy Resources - Although it’s an abbreviated list, this list of Anti-Racist Pedagogy resources from the University of Texas - Austin was really helpful! In particular, I think the news articles and excerpt from The New Jim Crow would be really helpful supplemental texts to classroom work. The academic articles are insightful as well, but would probably be less accessible for students in early high school or below due to the academic reading skills required. References: Morrison, T. (1992). Playing in the Dark. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, vi-17. Borsheim-Black, C. (2015). "It's Pretty Much White": Challenges and Opportunities of an Antiracist Approach to Literature Instruction in a Multilayered White Context. Research in the Teaching of English, 49(4), 407–429.
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AboutM.Ed English Ed. candidate at the University of Minnesota. ArchivesCategories |