Meeting #1     10/19/21

This semester, we are using Christopher Emdin’s “For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood … and the Rest of Y’all Too” to examine our pedagogy in relation to teaching to the whole student. In this text, Emdin draws on his own past experience as an urban student along with his current roles as a scholar, researcher, and urban teacher educator to offer lively, absorbing discussion of the ways in which those teaching urban youth can, “ … excavate the institutional, societal, and personal histories they bring with them …” (2016, p.15), in order to develop pedagogies and practices that can facilitate student success and joy in learning.

For our first meeting, we discussed the chapter, “Camaraderie: Reality and the Neoindigenous” Some quotes from the chapter that we centered our discussion around included:

Pg. 19: “The reality is that we privilege people who look and act like us, and perceive those who don’t as different and, frequently, inferior.”

Pg. 21: “To be in touch with the community, one has to enter into the physical places where the students live, and work to be invited into the emotion-laden spaces the youth inhabit.”

Pg. 23: “Addressing the issues that plague urban education requires a true vision that begins with seeing students in the same way they see themselves.”

Pg. 27 “Reality pedagogy is an approach to teaching and learning that has a primary goal of meeting each student on his or her own cultural turf. It focuses on making the local experiences of the students visible and creating contexts … that positions the student as the expert in his or her own teaching and learning …”

Pg. 30 “… it begins with the acceptance of the often overlooked fact that there are cultural differences between students and teachers that make it difficult for teachers to be reflective and effective …”

We shared the view that this approach is challenging in our setting but is well worth striving to implement to the greatest extent possible. We also wished that there could be faculty-wide reflection and commitment to Reality Pedagogy, rather than just small pockets of faculty trying to do this work. It would clearly be easier to be effective if there were a cohesive, campus-wide approach.

We agreed that integrating students’ perspectives and experiences into our coursework is an achievable goal, to some extent. One area of challenge that came up was related to our expectations about students’ use of  Standard Academic English in their writing, and how important is it to evaluate students on such usage. One faculty member who mostly teaches ESL students, shared that, initially in her classes she strives to create a “discourse community” in which informal exchanges of writing and conversation are emphasized. Later, as trust and supportive peer-to-peer and student-to-professor relationships emerge, more time is spent on adherence to the conventions of Standard Academic English.

Another participant, herself an immigrant, shared her own experiences as an undergraduate working multiple jobs while attending school. She sees these experiences as having helped her to have insight into the students’ experiences and life contexts. Such insights guide her choices not only about what to teach but also about how to integrate social interaction and collaboration into her classes and how to create class policies that reflect an understanding of and responsiveness to the challenges most of our students face in their daily lives.

We also discussed the need to create a classroom environment where people of very varied cultural backgrounds and life experiences can feel safe, respected, and heard. Part of this is recognizing the emotion-laden nature of teaching and learning and honoring and welcoming the emotions that may arise in the classroom. This also means partnering with the students to choose course content and themes that are relevant to their lives and making their experiences and perspectives a central part of our coursework.

Having explored, through this chapter, some of Emdin’s foundational definitions and goals we agreed that next time, we’ll focus on a chapter that gives some concrete recommendations for pedagogy and practice.

Meeting #2     12/7/21

For this meeting we focused on the chapter “Coteaching”

Coteaching is one of the seven “tools” of reality pedagogy that Emdin has developed. We began by watching a brief video that offers a helpful overview of five of the seven tools: Cypher (or Cogenerative Dialogue), Coteaching, Cosmopolitanism, Context, and Content.

We then discussed our responses to what Emdin proposes about Coteaching, and what implementation might look like in our classrooms.

One challenge that was raised was the relinquishment of a certain degree of control that this approach asks of the teacher. The, comfortable for some, “mantle of the expert” must be shed much of the time in this approach because students’ own experiences and life contexts are centered. We felt that, if the teacher is able to shift their positionality in relation to the students in the ways Emdin calls for, there would likely be substantial benefits for student engagement and learning. One participant pointed out that many students are reluctant to participate in class because they’ve internalized a notion of themselves as not having much of value to share and of not being qualified to exercise agency over what is taught and learned.

One education professor who teaches a course on music and movement methods for the early childhood classroom, described some ways in which she designs her class so that the stories, songs, and dances of students’ home cultures are integrated into coursework and assignments. Students become the teachers to their classmates and to the instructor, thereby broadening everybody’s cultural knowledge and investment in the class.  Of course, this approach also makes her classes much more fun and engaging!

We concluded by agreeing that, while co-teaching is unlikely to replace more teacher-centered pedagogies in most of our classes, it certainly could be used some of the time to enhance and expand what is taught and learned. Technology tools such as blogs, on-line social annotation software, and programs like Jambase and Flipgrid, that make learning more participatory, can also shift teachers’ and students’ identities, and move toward a conception of shared responsibility for and interest and investment in course content.