{"id":382,"date":"2011-11-23T09:21:30","date_gmt":"2011-11-23T09:21:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/testv69.demowebsitelinks.com\/LiminalConsultingWP\/?p=382"},"modified":"2025-03-17T09:22:08","modified_gmt":"2025-03-17T09:22:08","slug":"why-teacher-diversity-matters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/testv69.demowebsitelinks.com\/LiminalConsultingWP\/why-teacher-diversity-matters\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Teacher Diversity Matters"},"content":{"rendered":"
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When I first became a teacher, honestly, I didn\u2019t think race mattered.\u00a0 As a child who grew up in single-parent, low-income household, when I first graduated college, I felt I was the \u201cmodel\u201d of the American Dream.\u00a0 As a homeowner, mother, wife, college graduate, there were many reasons for why I didn\u2019t challenge the paradigm that I was the exception.<\/p>\n

Yet, as I entered into my first teaching jobs and even more importantly as I moved into graduate school and reflected more on my background and experiences, I learned to see the privileges I benefited from, including, coming from a family where my great-grandmother and her siblings were college educated, and that my mother, raised in a middle-class household taught me to see our poverty as an anomaly which I was duty-bound to overcome. How did this occur?\u00a0 First through personal experience.<\/p>\n

In my first teaching job, I taught in a school in a small mostly rural area that was not too far from a large naval installation.\u00a0 As a result, our school had more diversity than most in the area.\u00a0 Among our demographics were Samoan students, who by-and-large were affiliated in one way or another with the Navy.\u00a0 In my third period class, of the 16 or so students (as a writing class, we had a classroom cap of 19 students), over a quarter of my students were Samoan, with a couple of African American students while the rest were White.\u00a0 As the year progressed, I was concerned because half of the students struggled, most of all my Samoan and Black students.\u00a0 They were disaffected, uninterested, and seemed to resist even the slightest amount of rigor.\u00a0 When I engaged my colleagues to inquire about ideas regarding the different approaches, insights into the kids and their backgrounds (I did not live in the community), and additional supports for my instruction, many times I was told things like: not every student will pass; they are failing themselves, you are not failing them; you\u2019re doing everything that you can.\u00a0 For me, these were insufficient answers.\u00a0 Why were my students failing?\u00a0 Why was it such a struggle to help them find a way into the course and why were these efforts failing them?<\/p>\n

In contrast was my second period class, many of whom were in band and\/or orchestra, many of whom were passing with high As and Bs, almost all of whom were White, with a few Asian (non-Samoan) students.\u00a0 When I asked others about students\u2019 behaviors, because often I found students challenged my authority, or in some cases tried to make me \u201clook\u201d stupid, I was told to\u00a0expect<\/em>\u00a0them to challenge and that as high achieving students, though annoying and at times not respectful, that was simply a characteristics\u00a0these\u00a0<\/em>kids brought to school with them.\u00a0 My question always was what is the difference between these two sets of kids?\u00a0 Would they ever tolerate the same behaviors and approaches to the classroom from students in my third period class?\u00a0 How did the differences in the ways we interacted with the students, as well as our expectations for them impact their performance and overall interactions in school?\u00a0 Don\u2019t all kids want to be successful?\u00a0 Didn\u2019t they all have ambitions and dreams, even if they didn\u2019t share them with me?\u00a0 If so, why would we see behaviors and interactions differently for one group and not another?\u00a0 Didn\u2019t they all deserve the same opportunity to fulfill their dreams and ambitions, and wasn\u2019t that indeed my job to help them try?\u00a0 I didn\u2019t find the answers.\u00a0 Instead I found an ample amount of labels to describe students, most of whom are minority, some of whom grew up in poverty, some others of whom may be labeled with a behavioral disability, and many of whom are disciplined and suspended in school.\u00a0 To be clear, this is does not only apply to students of color.\u00a0 Any student who does not fit the mode of behavior and expectations, which differ at the different levels of school: elementary, middle school\/junior high, and high school, are caught in a web of school marginalization that sometimes leads to failure and\/or drop out.<\/p>\n

As Arne Duncan said in the fall of 2010, it\u2019s important to have a diverse workforce in the classroom that reflects the diversity of our nation.\u00a0 In many cases this is racial\/ethnic and even language diversity.\u00a0 In many other cases this includes gender.\u00a0\u00a0 My understanding of this came years after I stepped out of the classroom.<\/p>\n

In 2001, at the end of my first year in my second teaching job, I left the K-12 classroom a few years after I entered.\u00a0 Essentially, I stopped teaching because not only were my students unable to handle the racial tension that having their first Black teacher presented, but my school and more importantly my school district had no idea how to support me in this transition.\u00a0 When I sought assistance, I received none.\u00a0 When I complained about my principal\u2019s handling of the situation, first and foremost I was told it was not racial, though I was the only Black teacher in a teaching staff of over 100, and that he was simply a bad principal\u2026allowed to keep his job while he threatened mine.\u00a0 My response, go to graduate school.<\/p>\n

In the intervening years, I have learned that teaching and learning is profoundly a social event.\u00a0 At the base of this event are all of the assumptions, stereotypes, beliefs and values that we each, student and teacher, brings into the classroom and that this does not apply only to the subject of instruction, but to the nature of what is means to be \u201cteacher\u201d and \u201cstudent\u201d and how fluid these roles and definitions are as they interact with our understandings of what it means to \u201clearn\u201d and to \u201cteach.\u201d<\/p>\n

When we have implicit or explicit lower expectations those are communicated.\u00a0 When we ignore the tensions of having someone \u201cin charge\u201d when people typically see them as \u201cthose who take orders,\u201d that also makes a difference.\u00a0 What minority teachers\u00a0can<\/em>\u00a0(because not all do) bring to the classroom is a better understanding of the social, psychological, and personal stakes that minority students are presented with when they enter the classroom.\u00a0 To learn is a risk.\u00a0 Not only must students trust that the teachers will guide them with the students\u2019 own best interest at heart, but there is always the fear of losing or moving away from those who are familiar whether they include family, language, or culture, and in that, students also risk elements of their own identity in an education system that continues to maintain a colorblind paradigm.\u00a0 As a social event, we are all subtly and not, impacted by the relationships we develop and \u201cteaching\u201d and \u201clearning\u201d that occurs.\u00a0 To actively and implicitly learn that you are a member of a group that has historically occupied the bottom rungs of society,\u00a0necessarily\u00a0<\/em>means that you learn that you are of lesser value.\u00a0 To overcome this, minority teachers\u00a0can<\/em>\u00a0help to dispel the myths, stereotypes, and assumptions that White and middle class teachers bring into the classroom about\u00a0those\u00a0<\/em>children who are\u00a0not like<\/em>\u00a0themselves.\u00a0 They can also better explicitly teach students how to connect to a curriculum that often marginalizes if not entirely excludes them,[1]<\/a>\u00a0the contributions that minority groups have made to the founding and strengthening of this country and in turn the contributions that today\u2019s students of color can make to us all.\u00a0 These are certainly not elements that appear on a standardized test, yet they are important, nonetheless.\u00a0 Lastly, as Sonia Nieto\u2019s wide body of work on \u201cmulticultural education\u201d points out, all children want to see our eyes light up when they enter the classroom.\u00a0 Isn\u2019t that our responsibility to show\u00a0all students<\/em>?<\/p>\n

[1]\u00a0In this time of celebrating Thanksgiving and the upcoming holidays, consider\u00a0what<\/em>\u00a0we are celebrating.\u00a0 In the case of Thanksgiving, it\u2019s important to recognize that is not a celebration for all.\u00a0 In the case of Native populations (whether they identify as Native American or American Indians) we are celebrating the impending demise, intentional and accidental, to entire populations of people in the service of building a country literally on the backs of enslaved and impoverished people of color, who for the most part, were not even considered citizens.<\/p>\n

NOTE: This blog was first published on the West Wind Education Policy, Inc website on November 23, 2011<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I first became a teacher, honestly, I didn\u2019t think race mattered.\u00a0 As a child who grew up in single-parent, low-income household, when I first graduated college, I felt I was the \u201cmodel\u201d of the American Dream.\u00a0 As a homeowner, mother, wife, college graduate, there were many reasons for why I didn\u2019t challenge the paradigm […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":383,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-382","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/testv69.demowebsitelinks.com\/LiminalConsultingWP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/testv69.demowebsitelinks.com\/LiminalConsultingWP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/testv69.demowebsitelinks.com\/LiminalConsultingWP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/testv69.demowebsitelinks.com\/LiminalConsultingWP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/testv69.demowebsitelinks.com\/LiminalConsultingWP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=382"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/testv69.demowebsitelinks.com\/LiminalConsultingWP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":384,"href":"https:\/\/testv69.demowebsitelinks.com\/LiminalConsultingWP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/382\/revisions\/384"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/testv69.demowebsitelinks.com\/LiminalConsultingWP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/383"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/testv69.demowebsitelinks.com\/LiminalConsultingWP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=382"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/testv69.demowebsitelinks.com\/LiminalConsultingWP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=382"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/testv69.demowebsitelinks.com\/LiminalConsultingWP\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=382"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}