Identity Archives

Educational DNA (October 2018 #1)

What Is Your Educational DNA?

With a new school year underway, I am thinking about new beginnings. It is not unusual for our educators, students and families to consider this time as an opportunity for fresh starts – a reasonable and hope-filled thought of wiping a slate clean of past incidents, behaviors or patterns. With this thinking also comes a risk of over simplification that erases the impact of our history. I believe history should be respected – even painful or challenging history. Specific to our work as educators, I contend it is impossible to consider how schools reproduce biases and inequities for our current youth without considering how the institution that is school has played out in our own lives. Psychologist Carl Jung suggests, “until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.”

Specifically, as we consider our histories, I push us to consider our educational history – or more complexly, our educational DNA or the educational values, beliefs and expectations espoused and modeled by our families, tribes and cultures (informed by their own educational experiences) and the educational messages and practices we actually have experienced in our own schooling. The work of exploring our educational DNA is constant and continuous identity work that pushes us to explore and interrogate our individual and collective histories to better understand our schemas and cultures, values and biases as they show up with and around us each day – consciously and unconsciously. Towards the goal of making the unconscious conscious (or the invisible visible), we at SF-CESS ask our partners to name “the skin they are in” as well as to unpack their equity and leadership stance in any given situation. As participant facilitators, we constantly ask the same of ourselves.

So, this “new year” I wish to make transparent my own reflection of my educational DNA and equity stance – in the skin I am in. I offer this – not only to challenge you to do the same, but also (hopefully_ to Illustrate how constant and continuous personal identity work (as it relates to our professional work) requires imperfection, incompletion and vulnerability – conditions that continue to be counterintuitive in our school and leadership models. While this reflection comes on top of years of exploration and interrogation, it looked very different when I first started and is sure to look different in the future after additional the mistakes, successes and reflection I have yet to have.

On My Educational DNA… An Incomplete and Ongoing Reflection

I am a product of public schools. As a product of public schools, I both have been overtly a benefactor of the racism and sexism historically and systemically embedded within our educational system’s design, and simultaneously a target of its inherent, complex and regenerative classism and homophobia. My experiences growing up as a working poor, gay, Lebanese/ Italian student in white male skin has served to construct and instruct my perspective of the work in which I now find myself.

White and male, I heard explicit and implicit messages that conveyed expectations for me to succeed in school (e.g. “You’ll make a great doctor,” lawyer, etc.). Yet gay and closeted (and despite well-established statistical evidence that suggests at least one LBGT student can be assumed to be in any class of 30 students), I heard the consistent message in classrooms, cafeterias, schoolyards, and halls that school was not a safe place for people like me – and therefore, not a place for me. My “dual” identity gave me the privilege of being in the room, unknowingly undercover, as those around me discussed their intentional hatred for and fear of a group of people that included me.

My parents wanted me to excel in school even though they struggled to find their own access to my formal education in a system that had not always served them. My mother earned her GED, and thanks to the GI Bill, my father attended night school for his Associates Degree – but never left his role as a factory worker.

I attended a college-prep high school that predominantly served wealthier students from the East Side of Providence, RI. The assumption and expectation was that my family, from the west side, would be the primary support for my journey to college. I was to be the first in my family to attend a four-year college right from high school.

After repeatedly trying to meet with my counselor to begin my college application process, I finally caught her in passing. She told me she did not have time for me; “Besides,” she reasoned, “your family cannot afford college.” That year, I had scored in the top 10-20% of standardized tests.

Finally, after years of hearing and rebelling against the message that school was not for me, I listened. I cut 80 days of school in my Senior year. No one seemed to know. No one checked on me. No one called my family. No one failed me. Invisible, ignored and de-humanized, I heard that my education did not matter; I learned that I did not matter.

My family’s message about the importance of education was consistent. Their messages about school were different, as they saw education coming from not only school, but also home. While they recognized that the two did not always align (school was for book knowledge and home was for life lessons), they did expect us to be respectful and obedient in both places.

As my education advanced and my social skills matured, assumptions about my background perpetuated. Simply by looking at my skin color and hearing me talk, those around tended to be quick to assume my history – including the assumption that I came from a family more affluent and formally educated than was true. It was less frequent that these assumptions were checked, and as a result, I once again found myself amidst people who discussed my life (welfare/ food stamps, working class values, multiple-language families, worthiness to have certain privileges such as recreation, transportation and food) without actually realizing I was in the room.

So much of our Educational DNA is determined by the skin we live in. In America, the skin we live in is defined first and foremost by race; it also is so much more. It has been my experience that unexamined, the skin I am in can be baggage weighing me down; examined, the skin I am in serves as a source of great pride and strength – of liberation. Exploring the skin I am in both excites and frightens me. That is the first thing I need to remember.

The skin I am in is so much more than the skin you see, and yet the skin you see is so much of who I am. Even in all my complexity, the institution that is public education automatically and inequitably favors me as a white man. Furthermore, I purport, that regardless of my espoused and sincere values and beliefs, I always have the option to discount my less visible target status by embracing and taking advantage of my skin privilege. Absent intentionality, I ultimately will. Thus, I must commit to the continuous self-examination and consistent work towards serving as an ally, agent and accomplice across difference.

My professional stance has evolved from a culmination of experiences – my own, my family’s and those of the people with and for whom I work. Beyond my own formative years as a child and student, my professional identity is challenged and transformed by the stories of my students, colleagues, and families. These experiences influence my decisions, results and reflections. I carry them with me whenever I walk in a room.

What I know today is that I am committed to the equitable education of youth – specifically and first for the benefit of those who are not provided equitable access & opportunity (most often our black, brown & poor students). Growing up in a working poor family taught me the value of humility as an essential leadership trait. AND ALSO, given the repetitive & predictive data in our schools & communities across difference, I believe I need to build on and from my actual experience & knowledge gained over nearly 30 years of service, study and results.

Thus I, in the skin I am in as a queer, white man, bring to my work a tension of recognizing that I always will know less than I need to know – particularly in service of communities to which I do not belong – especially across race, language & gender, AND ALSO that, I feel urgency to use what I do know to vigorously & unapologetically interrupt & transform inequities when they are in front of me and constantly work with and for others to create conditions for them to do the same.

So, what is your educational DNA?

Awareness (March 2014)

In what ways does your community deepen its collective and individual awareness?
How do you intentional build community and trust in your school? How do you intentional build community and trust in your classroom? What is common or different?
To what extent and purpose is your adult community committed to adult instruction and reflection? What does that look like?

School reform is complex. It is more than any one “right” curriculum, standardized assessment or legislation can solve. Furthermore, given the history of power and privilege in America and American institutions such as our education system, even the most effective curriculum, assessment and instruction must be supported by dynamic conditions in support of constant inquiry, interruption and improvement – transformation.

A wise, local funder supporting a family engagement project of ours told us, “Don’t tell me that this family engagement plan will improve math scores.” She had done enough of her own homework not only to recognize that many conditions and systems are needed to impact any such improvement – and authentic family partnership was a one such condition, not a direct cause for accelerating success and improvement for students.

With a mission to interrupt and transform our current reality in public schools, SF-CESS’ work intends to name, model and help create these conditions. In the next weeks, Monday Musings will review the four stages (Awareness, Interruptive & Catalytic Experiences, Meaning Making, Action & Assessment) and related conditions we consider necessary for teacher – and school transformation. This week, the focus is Awareness.

“True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing” – Socrates

Awareness

Before we can transform who we are or what we do in any intentional way, we must know not only where it is we wish to go, but also from where we started. We must be aware not only of our current reality but also of our own stance and schema of this reality – in the skin we are in.

Schools spend tremendous time and resources assessing the current reality for their students and exploring prescriptive efforts to change those results – yet the patterns of who is served and not served in our schools persists across every corner of this country. Understanding our current reality requires an understanding of our history and how it impacts (intentionally and unintentionally) our present situation. Educators and families and the larger community (including legislators) must learn about and discuss the history and design or public education in relation to our current results. And as long as our equity gaps are inseparable from racial demographics, we need to speak openly and courageously about the legacy of slavery and the reality of race and power in America (and our schools) as well.

Given that the experience gap between so many of our educators and their least reached students includes an educators success within the very system they are challenged to change, schools also must be places where individuals can engage in ongoing inquiry and learning about their own histories – in the skin they are in – that inform their schemas (believes, mindsets, values, stances, etc.), which play out in their daily interactions and decisions.

This type of inquiry and learning is frequently de-prioritized or dismissed as “touchy-feely activities”. When done well, this characterization could not be further from the truth.

When done well, this work does invite us to engage our affective domain – an essential component to work in today’s educational system. Why should we not create space to do affective work given that the current reality – if looked at with honesty – should cause outrage, sadness and fear? Still, such work is a leap from business as usual for many schools, so time and attention need to be committed to creating the conditions for the honest exploration of our histories and current realities – individually and collectively.

We have learned that some conditions and their related strategies support and develop individual and shared awareness. While not exhaustive, these include Intentional Community and Trust Building as well as Instruction and Reflection.

Intentional Community and Trust Building
To move a school culture from the limited paradigm of head and hands work only to that of including the work of our hearts and histories requires a deeper level of honesty and risk taking. This requires an investment in developing community and trust between individuals and as a collective. There is a litany of resources for developing trust and community, the least of which include:

Calibrating and using a common purpose for the community – this work occurs at many levels, from the organizational mission and vision to objectives and goals for collective meetings and work.
Developing, agreeing on and actively using community and discourse norms and expectations – perhaps more important is also agreeing on and actively using responses when norms or expectations are not met.
Agreeing on definitions for the community’s common language – it is especially important to share understanding of power language such as accountability, collaboration, culture, engagement, equity, leadership, respect, etc.
Engaging in meaningful and intentional and meaningful trust building work – this needs to occur regularly in a manner and should model the community and trust development needed with our students and families.
Providing ample time and reflective prompts for regular and meaningful storytelling about our experiences, values and beliefs – these could include simple think-pair-shares, panel and fishbowl presentations, or larger group discussions such as Socratic Seminars.
Developing and using transparent decision-making and conflict-resolution practices – decisions and challenges arise normally in-group dynamics and conflicts frequently arise because of how we respond.

Instruction and Reflection

We can no longer reinforce cultures in which it is unacceptable to say, “I don’t know”. Our learning must include data discussions and direct instruction in the areas where community knowledge is limited or isolated and reflection of our history/ histories – as a system and as individuals. Effective efforts include but are not limited to:

Engaging in regular equity-centered data based inquiry – one of the few benefits to NCLB is that our schools and districts have gotten very good at collecting, disaggregating and doing quick analyses on its data. What still lacks is collective and courageous community discourse about the results and their root causes. These conversations require time, care and strong facilitation.
Including the expertise of others – while it is true that public education’s systems do not naturally foster the trust and empowerment needed for educators to develop answers to their dilemmas, it also is important to recognize that as educators, we don’t always know what we don’t know. Just as important as it is to support peer-led professional inquiry and learning communities, we must create communities in which outsiders and outside expertise are welcomed to provide direct instruction and diverse perspectives – especially when our insiders have not demonstrated sufficient knowledge or representation to serve students unlike themselves.
Naming and reflecting on the skin we are in – simultaneous to deepening our awareness of our current reality and systemic design, we must reflect on our own experiences in this system and our resulting operant theory or schema for how we navigate within it – from our values and beliefs to expectations and biases.
Expecting and fostering humility – given the vast representation of dominant culture within our schools, many are challenged to adopt the humility necessary to fully embrace the multiple and divergent experiences, perspectives and truths about school and the conflicts these may surface between our espoused and operant theories of action. Towards more equitable schools, humility is not a sign of uncertainty or weakness, but rather a necessary leadership quality that should be modeled and supported and evidenced in how a school looks at core systems from hiring to collaboration to supervision.

Google Child (January 2014 #4)

What does it take to educate equitably, as Lisa Delpit puts it, “other people’s children” when it means making visible and diminishing the privilege (and edge) of our own children?

This past weekend, my colleague Micia and I facilitated a professional development session with one of our middle schools. The purpose of this mid-year retreat was for the staff to engage in reflective and collaborative practices that would allow them to more honestly and urgently take up the inequities facing their students. For this school, for this year, they identified their least-reached students as their English Language Learners. The guiding Essential Question for the day was, “What do our ELL students need us to know, do and be in order to most equitably educate them?”

Less than a decade ago, this middle school was the worst performing school in the entire school district. After three years of consistent leadership and very focused transformation efforts, the school is now considered a good school… a good option for all diverse families of San Francisco. Fortunately, the school has not eased up and strives to be an excellent and equitable school.

Historically in San Francisco, school improvement opens up new possibilities and new situations that bring both benefits and challenges. In particular, one situational shift for improving schools is that they become more attractive to families who have been privileged enough to choose alternatives school wasn’t so good. There is the potential for greatness from a richly diverse student population – especially when a school can build from the strengths of its various cultures and educate students to collaborate and excel within and because of their diversity. Unexamined however, radical shifts in a community’s demographics also can lead to unintended, unanticipated and undesired results.

The school we worked with on Saturday currently faces these challenges. As a school that has made tremendous progress in serving its predominantly brown, black and poor students, closing the racial achievement gap has become a major part of its identity… and program. And because their success is now inviting white families and upper middle class families back to their community, they are feeling the pressure of dominant culture seeking to minimize the efforts that serve other students over their own, and to prioritize decisions and design that will better serve their own children. Experience suggests that focusing on what our most privileged children need in isolation – or even committing equal resources to these new and welcomed students – will come at the expense of the students now being better-served than in the past.

For many, the challenge of equity is that it requires us to prioritize. The problem of equity and limited resources is that priorities define not only who should get more, but also who should get less.

Back to the retreat: we challenged teachers to consider their own experiences, beliefs, values and priorities based on their own experiences (or as we say, based on the skin they are in). We suggest that we need to understand from where we are coming to better influence where and how we hope to change. We facilitated a piece of work in which we asked teachers to read a series of student profiles (short descriptors for how a student might see herself or how shy might believe she is seen). Each teacher was to identify the one profile that best represented themselves when they were students. After grouping by their self-identified profile, they discussed the strengths and challenges for their archetype and recommended to the larger group ways to best educate the student of this profile. One of the fourteen profiles was written specifically for this school:

“I am a Google child. Really. My Dad works for Google and he drops me off at school on his way to catching the Google Bus. My parents questioned whether or not to send me to public school and decided this one was good enough and could save us a lot of money for other things. We have to make sure the school is constantly giving me the education I deserve – but overall it is worth it and that is why we stay.”

During the session, no adults were able to identify with five of the student profiles and a handful created their own. This simply served as a reminder that these underrepresented students are part of the school and led to the challenge to consider how their voices and needs would be considered. The Google child profile was one of the unselected profiles.

At the end, we debriefed the process. Two members of the community – a white woman and a white man (both who previously had identified courageously their own connections to privilege in relation to their own students) had very strong reactions to reading the Google child profile. They found it to be judgmental and negative. The language of the feedback soon came to equate this Google child with white children (sometimes replacing the word “Google” with the word “white” – even though race was never mentioned in the profile.

What does it mean when we automatically associate success (i.e Google child) with whiteness? How is it actually about white, dominant culture? But also, how might this be another reproductive way of conveying low expectations for those who do not represent or are not represented by dominant culture?

Even though some of the other thirteen profiles clearly had similarly risky language attached to them (other profiles included an English learner, a queer student, a teacher’s pet, and a student contemplating dropping out), there was not a consistent sense of resistance to how the students were represented – and throughout the day, there was quite a bit of ease talking about these “other” students. But when dominant culture people felt as though their privilege was being made visible, the rules seemed to change. This reaction feels like an important issue on which this school – and all of us – should keep some focus. Some questions that continue to sit with me:

While on the one hand, it seems natural that a parent would want only the best for her child, on the other hand one also has to question the role of those families who only participate in a community when it is good. How should we negotiate this tension in PUBLIC education?
What does it take to educate equitably, as Lisa Delpit puts it, “other people’s children” when it means making visible and diminishing the privilege (and edge) of our own children?