“Educate Your Heart Before Your Mind”: The Counter-Narratives of One African American Female Teacher’s Asset-,Equity- and Justice-Oriented Pedagogy in One Urban School

Abstract

This article narrates one African American female teacher’s asset-, equity-, and justice-oriented pedagogy with foci on culturally responsive pedagogy and authentic caring in teaching in an urban school from the joint perspectives of community cultural wealth, funds of knowledge, and funds of identity. Drawing upon humanizing counter-narrative research methodologies, this article foregrounds traditionally oppressed groups’ repressed voices concerning culturally responsive pedagogy and authentic caring for improving culturally and linguistically diverse students’ academic achievements. These findings show how culturally responsive pedagogy can facilitate students’ learning cognitively, culturally, and politically. Furthermore, this research illustrates how authentic caring—the supportive reciprocal rapport between teachers and students—helps to increases the students’ academic achievement but also fosters teachers’ implementation of the asset-, equity-, and justice-oriented pedagogy. Finally, the implications for facilitating urban school teachers’ asset-, equity-, and justice-oriented pedagogies and the praxis for critical transformative pedagogy are discussed.

Keywords

asset-,equity-,and justice-oriented pedagogy culturally responsive pedagogy community cultural wealth funds of knowledge funds of identity authentic caring

Introduction

Throughout the United States, educators have witnessed inequalities in American schools for decades and the alarming achievement gap arising from the widening socioeconomic disparity (Howard, 2015; Howard, Rodriguez-Scheel, 2017; Ladson-Billings, 2006; Milner, 2013, 2015; Ravitch, 2016). Students in urban schools are more vulnerable to receive a substandard education (Ukpokodu, 2016). For instance, Oakes and Lipton (2007) found that overall urban schools do not challenge students beyond low-level knowledge mastery. Other scholars have described the pedagogy of poverty (Haberman, 2010), drills and skill routines (Shor, 1992), coloring curriculum (Schmoker, 2001), and worksheet assignments (Ukpokodu, 2016) rampant in urban schools. All these phenomena have contributed to the severity of academic achievement gaps between urban and suburban schools, especially the widening disparity between White students and students of color (Zhu & Peng, 2019).

The antidote to the low-level curriculum has been to increase teacher workload and heighten measurable performativity and teacher accountability (Ingersoll & Collins, 2017). Unfortunately, these efforts have deteriorated urban teachers’ morale and contribute to persistently high teacher attrition rate (Ingersoll & May, 2016). Under such circumstances, it is important to learn more about how urban school teachers, particularly those of color (Farinde et al., 2016), learn to teach in multicultural educational landscapes. Although students in American urban schools are becoming increasingly culturally and linguistically diverse, the teacher workforce is still essentially homogeneous, characterized by White, female, middle-class, heterosexual, and only knowing or teaching in English. Consequently, there is a racial and cultural mismatch between the students and teachers in urban schools. Studies have shown that teachers of color can be more adept at motivating and engaging students of color (e.g., Evans & Leonard, 2013). To remedy the racially biased conception on teacher quality, which persistently excludes teachers of color from the urban settings (Rogers-Ard et al., 2013), this study provides a series of narrative accounts about an African American female social studies teacher. This participating teacher uses the asset-, equity-, and justice-oriented pedagogies in one urban middle school in the southwestern United States.

Asset-, equity-, and justice-oriented pedagogy serves as the praxis for critical transformative pedagogy (Lopez & Olan, 2019; Souto-Manning, 2019). It aims to disrupt teachers’ deep-rooted, deficient views of students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds and empower students’ learning cognitively, culturally, and politically. Oppositely, deficit-based pedagogies consider minority students as incompetent, unmotivated, and struggling in learning due to their inadequate cultural capital for schooling (Ladson-Billings, 1998). Diametrically, asset-based pedagogy considers minority students as capable learners by utilizing their community cultural wealth, funds of knowledge, and funds of identity. In particular, I framed asset-, equity-, and justice-oriented pedagogy around five main constructs in this article: community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005), funds of knowledge (Moll, Amanti, Neff, & Gonzalez, 2005), funds of identity (Esteban-Guitart & Moll, 2014a), culturally responsive pedagogy (CRP; Gay, 2010), and authentic critical caring (Valenzuela, 1999, 2016). Finally, I draw some implications for fostering asset-, equity-, and justice-oriented pedagogy in more broad educational contexts.

Within the niche of critical scholarship in urban education, the overarching research question that guided this study was “How does the urban school teacher (e.g., one African American female teacher) initiate the asset-, equity-, and justice-oriented pedagogies in her teaching context?” To address this main research question, two sub-research questions are further posed:

Research Question 1: How does this teacher maintain CRP and authentic caring in the culturally and linguistically diverse classroom?

Research Question 2: How does this teacher incorporate community cultural wealth, funds of knowledge, and funds of identity in her daily practice?

Theoretical Background

I situated this study’s theoretical background within the milieu of asset-, equity-, and justice-oriented pedagogy as defined by Souto-Manning (2019). In a broad sense, asset-, equity-, and justice-oriented pedagogy refers to a critical, emancipatory pedagogical approach that aims to affirm and empower culturally and linguistically diverse students’ daily knowledge, skills, and lived experiences conducive to academic success in schools. The “asset” component refers to teachers adopting an affirmative rather than a deficit perspective on students who come from diverse racial, ethnic, and cultural communities. This includes students’ original languages and cultural backgrounds are respected in schools. The “equity” component demands that teachers foster all students’ academic success/competency by bridging the achievement gap between White students and students of color (Paris, 2012; Paris & Alim, 2014, 2017). Under the umbrella of asset-, equity-oriented pedagogy, there are five interrelated theoretical strands: community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005), funds of knowledge (Moll et al., 2005), funds of identity (Esteban-Guitart & Moll, 2014a), authentic caring (Valenzuela, 1999, 2016), and CRP (Gay, 2010). These elements combine to cultivate the praxis for critical transformative pedagogy (Lopez & Olan, 2019; Souto-Manning, 2019) and assist in the development of asset-, equity-, and justice-oriented pedagogy in teacher education (see Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Integrated conceptual framework of the asset-, equity-, and justice-oriented pedagogy.

There are two reasons for integrating these three theoretical conceptualizations. First, community cultural wealth, funds of knowledge, and funds of identity have intimate relationships—all of which interrogate the mainstream educational scholarship characterized by the deficit view on the community culture and lived experiences that students of color bring to schools (Esteban-Guitart & Moll, 2014a, 2014b). Second, these three constructs are consistent with the fundamental tenets of the methodology employed—the sociopolitical epistemological stance on teachers’ roles, caring, and pedagogical practice. Accordingly, the three aforementioned concepts collectively act as the integrated theoretical backdrop of this study.

Community Cultural Wealth

From the perspective of critical race theory (CRT; Decuir-Gunby et al., 2018), Yosso (2005) problematized the traditional concept of “cultural capital” coined by Bourdieu and Passeron (1977), which narrowly focuses on the cultural poverty and institutional disadvantages ostracized by the elite and privileged groups (Yosso & García, 2007). To address this deficit view, Yosso (2005) conceptualized community cultural wealth and listed six types of its kind that students of color accumulate in their communities and they bring to schools (Yosso, 2005):

Aspirational capital refers to students’ audacity to persist with their hopes and dreams for the future, even in a broad array of barriers. For instance, Carey (2016) reveals that students of color who come from lower income family accumulated aspirational capital to go to college.

Linguistic capital refers to multiple language and communication skills that minority students learned in their homes and communities. For example, many Hispanic and Latinx students can speak both Spanish and English. Apart from English, many Asian immigrant students are fluent in their cultural heritage languages.

Social capital reflects the different layers of networks and varying community resources those minority students forged with their peers and other social contacts. This kind of social capital can provide instrumental and emotional support to function well in society. For instance, minority students have formal and informal communities to support their learning.

Navigational capital means the skills of maneuvering through different social institutions. For example, minority students have learned the different social norms and rules, which evidenced by the navigational capital, stipulated by social institutions.

Resistant capital refers to the knowledge and skills that minority students developed by combating personal, institutional, and cultural challenges arising from social inequality. A telling example is that many minority students have achieved their academic success by challenging a multitude of obstacles.

Familial capital embodies the enriching cultural knowledge nurtured among generations of families, which characterizes the unique family histories, memories, and cultural traditions. For instance, students from Latinx families have distinct familial capital.

Funds of Knowledge

Drawing on Vygotskian and neo-sociocultural perspective in teaching (Moll, 2013; González, Moll, & Amanti, 2006), Moll et al. (2005) conceptualized funds of knowledge as the “historically accumulated and culturally developed bodies of knowledge and skills essential for household or individual functioning and well-being” (p. 72). In traditional Eurocentric curriculum that is dominant, the funds of knowledge concept proposed by Moll et al. (1992, 2005) problematizes the deep-rooted schism between “in school” and “out-of-school” experiences. The concept of funds of knowledge has the single assumption: Students are competent and therefore have their own distinctive body of personal, contextual knowledge, which is accrued from their life experiences. Meanwhile, the funds of knowledge approach fosters an emancipatory approach to validating, representing, and using the traditionally marginalized communities (Rodriguez, 2013). Funds of knowledge also challenge the pervasive deficit perspectives about minority children who often fail in schools (Hinton, 2015). Yosso (2005) summarized two widely held reasons for minority students’ academic failure: (a) Minority students are inadequate and incompetent for the normative cultural knowledge and skills and (b) minority students’ parents do not support their child’s learning nor have high academic expectations on their children. The funds of knowledge framing, which informs this study, interrogate the traditional assumptions that minority students possess deficient knowledge when they study in public schools.

Funds of Identity

Jovés et al. (2015) acknowledged that funds of knowledge are limited methodologically due to its narrow focus on household funds of knowledge. Therefore, they suggest that funds of identity can be seen as a way of overcoming the weaknesses by recognizing that individuals’ funds of identity can be in continuity and discontinuity with household funds of knowledge (Jovés et al., 2015). From the perspective of cultural psychology, the Vygotskian concept of funds of identity refers to “the historically accumulated, culturally developed, and socially distributed resources essential for a person’s self-definition, self-expression, and self-understanding” (Esteban-Guitart & Moll, 2014a, p. 31). A premise underpinning funds of identity is that learning occurs when pedagogies confirm students’ multiple identities and catapult them to invest their identities by drawing upon various resources (i.e., funds of knowledge; Subero et al., 2017). To a certain degree, learning makes up a recursive process of affirming and authoring students’ identities. As noted, the funds of identity construct, which is grounded in a multitude of cultural practices, artifacts, and lived experiences in various modalities, has the potential to bridge the gaps between students’ cultures, practices, and learning experiences in both formal and informal contexts (Esteban-Guitart, 2016; Esteban-Guitart & Moll, 2014b; Poole & Huang, 2018). In the arena of teacher education, the funds of identity open the possibility to mediate students’ varied identities by connecting home, school, and community (Esteban-Guitart & Moll, 2014a). Accordingly, students’ funds of knowledge are transformed into funds of identity when they actively and continually engage in different “identity texts,” which can be written, spoken, visual, musical, or in any forms (Charteris et al., 2018; Cummins & Early, 2010; Poole & Huang, 2018).

Literature Review

CRP

In recent decades, researchers have conceptualized a series of culturally oriented pedagogies in urban education, such as culturally appropriate, culturally congruent, culturally responsive, culturally compatible, and culturally sustaining pedagogies (Aronson & Laughter, 2016; Ladson-Billings, 2014; Ladson-Billings & Tate, 1995; Paris, 2012; Seriki & Brown, 2017). In most cases, scholars use CRP and culturally relevant pedagogy interchangeably in mainstream literature. Ladson-Billings (1994), who was among the first scholars to coin the concept, defined CRP as “a pedagogy that empowers students intellectually, socially, emotionally, and politically by using cultural referents to impart knowledge, skills, and attitudes” (p. 382). Ladson-Billings (1995) further contended the following three tenets constituting CRP: “(a) [s]tudents must experience academic success; (b) [s]tudents must develop and/or maintain cultural competence; and (c) [s]tudents must develop a critical consciousness through which they challenge the status quo of the current social order” (p. 160). Similarly, another pioneer of CRP Gay (2010) defined CRP as teaching “to and through [students’] personal and cultural strengths, their intellectual capabilities, and their prior accomplishments” (p. 26), as such CRP is premised on “close interactions among ethnic identity, cultural background, and student achievement” (p. 27). Researchers have utilized CRP as a theoretical framework to analyze the opportunities, tensions, and challenges inherent in the culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms (e.g., Castagno & Brayboy, 2008; Milner, 2011, 2017; Nieto, 2010).

To date, CRP has been widely incorporated in different content areas, such as science and mathematics (e.g., Hernandez et al., 2013) and disciplinary literacy learning in history (e.g., Kucan & Cho, 2018), and early childhood education (e.g., Durden et al., 2015). Some scholars (e.g., Allen et al., 2017; Cochran-Smith, 2004; Villegas & Lucas, 2002) have advocated integrating CRP into teacher education programs. Following this line of inquiry, Truscott and Stenhouse (2018) examined the relationship between teacher disposition and CRP. More recently, scholars (see Hammond, 2015; Maniates, 2016) have related CRP to brain research to promote authentic academic engagement and rigorous learning among diverse students.

The challenges of adopting or implementing CRP are also noted in the literature. From the lens of the multilevel learning problem, Neri, Lozano and Gomez (2019) posited teachers’ resistance to initiate CRP from limited understanding and belief in the efficacy of CRP and a lack of strategy necessary to execute it in their educational settings. Young (2010) revealed the stubborn structural issues related to teachers’ cultural bias, racism, and the lack of support in the school environment that hinder teachers to implement CRP.

Care-Based Education

Anchored at the intersection of Kantian ethics and the consequentialist-feminist ethics, Noddings’s (1984, 1988, 1992, 2002) seminal scholarship on ethics laid a solid foundation for the research on care-based education (Caine et al., 2019; Te Riele et al., 2017). From Noddings’s (1988) perspective, ideal and ethic teaching is built upon caring relationships and trust. Noddings (1984) contended that intersubjectivity is one constituent of the ethic of care, and she conceptualized the dyad of “one-caring” and the “cared for.” Noddings (2002) further distinguished “caring about” and “caring for.” “Caring about” refers to turning one’s attention to other people’s lives, including unfamiliar people or those who live far from each other (Noddings, 2002; cited in Shevalier & McKenzie, 2012). However, although arising from “care about,” “caring for” occurs in ongoing face-to-face relationships, where one intimately experiences the issues and the consequences (Noddings, 2002; cited in Shevalier & McKenzie, 2012).

Noddings (1984) proposed two types of practices to achieve care. The first is “engrossment,” meaning unconditional and nonselective attention to the “cared for.” The second is “motivational displacement,” in which “our motive energy is flowing toward others and their projects” (Noddings, 1992, p. 16). Noddings (2002) further recognized four elements of care-based education: modeling (e.g., modeling well-rounded competency), dialog and attention (e.g., true listening, attentive to students’ needs), practice (e.g., whole-group discussion), and confirmation (e.g., capitalize on students’ knowledge on cultures and communities) (Shevalier & McKenzie, 2012). Despite its usefulness in framing student–teacher relationships through the ethical lens, Noddings did not take the sociocultural context and the embedded racial dynamic into account (DeNicolo et al., 2017; Rolón-Dow, 2005). Moreover, Noddings’s work did not persuasively explain the multitude of context-dependent factors that contribute to the diverse understanding and acts of care (Barnes, 2018), which are inevitable influence by the sociocultural milieus.

Drawing upon her ethnographic study of Latinx youth in urban settings, Valenzuela (1999) identified two kinds of caring: aesthetic and authentic. Aesthetic caring, as argued, merely centers on the instructional relationship between teachers and students. Valenzuela concluded that, “[t]eachers are committed to an institutional ‘fetish’ that views academics as the exclusive domain of the school” (p. 73). On the contrary, authentic caring fosters reciprocal relationships among teachers and students. This caring requires teachers to extend their traditional responsibilities and to validate students’ diverse cultural backgrounds and values (Valenzuela, 1999). As noted, authentic caring constitutes CRP and is an ethical act that “binds individuals to their society, to their communities, and to each other” (Gay, 2010, p. 45). Considering their interdependence, Shevalier and McKenzie (2012) consider CRP as the ethical- and care-based approach to urban education.

Method

Research Method

Critical race counter-storytelling method was selected for this study. It consists of recounting the experiences and perspectives of racially and socially marginalized people (Milner & Howard, 2013). Counter-stories reflect the lived experiences of people of color to raise critical consciousness about social and racial injustice (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002; Yosso, 2006). Validating the multiple sources of stories and voices as valuable data, counter-storytellers challenge majoritarian stories that either omit or distort the histories and realities of the traditionally oppressed communities and racially stereotypical portrayals (Yosso, 2006). Framed by the principles of CRT in education, counter-stories can serve the following functions for educational equality: (a) build community among those at the margins of society; (b) challenge the perceived wisdom of those at society’s center; (c) nurture community cultural wealth, memory, and resistance; (d) facilitate transformation in education (Yosso, 2006).

In other words, counter-stories can be adopted as a methodology that empowers people of color cognitively, emotionally, and politically, which is embodied by the African American teacher participant in my research. According to Yosso (2006), there are at least three types of counter-stories: autobiographical, biographical, and composite. Composite counter-narratives, which draw on multiple forms of data to recount the experiences of people of color [sic] (Yosso, 2006), contextualize this critical qualitative study. The researcher created the personal and professional counter-narratives collaboratively with the subject of this present study.

Participant and Context

Jenny (pseudonym), a female African American social studies teacher in a southwestern U.S. urban middle school, was the participant of this research. Jenny was born and spent her early years in Georgia. She moved to Texas in 1994. Jenny finished most of her K–12 education in public urban schools. For this reason, Jenny narrated that she was lucky to attend school in a district that was culturally diverse, which provided the opportunity for her to experience people from diverse cultural backgrounds. During her college years, Jenny was initially a vocal performance/music education major but later pursued teaching as a profession, which was influenced by her mother. When she finished her first year at a public university in Texas, Jenny realized that music was not her passion. She also had friends who majored in music and who could not find jobs. Considering all these factors, Jenny decided to study to become a public-school teacher. Finally, Jenny spent the rest of her undergraduate education at another public university in Texas, where she majored in interdisciplinary studies. When she took part in this study, Jenny had taught history for 9 years in an urban middle school in Texas which traditionally serves Black and Latinx students.

Data Collection

This research adopted a storying and restorying method (Craig, 2007) to collect the multiple sources of data from the participant (Jenny). The first source of data were four semi-structured interviews with Jenny, which included face-to-face and online formats. During the interview sessions (each lasting from 30–50 min), Jenny narrated her personal growth experiences, teaching experiences in urban settings, and how she initiates CRP and establish an authentic caring relationship in culturally and linguistically diverse classrooms. In this study, I also critically explored how Jenny incorporates community cultural wealth, funds of knowledge, and funds of identity in her daily instructional practice. The second source of data comes from Jenny’s narratives, reflective journals, and email correspondences during the study with me. These data files served as powerful tools in analyzing, and reflecting on Jenny’s substantiation of the asset-, equity-, justice-oriented pedagogy. Meanwhile, the research team members and I triangulated the aforementioned sources of data in this study.

Typically, as the researcher in counter-narrative case study, I must be cautious about the over-generalizability of the research findings. However, Jenny’s asset-oriented, culturally responsive, and care-based teaching experiences contributed to a thick description (Geertz, 1983) of how one minority teachers navigate the dynamics between the multiple layers of educational contexts and her commitment to urban education. Her fine-grained counter-narrative provides an avenue for audiences, who work in the similar urban educational contexts, to experience the narrative resonance—how they trust the counter-narrative truth and empathize with what Jenny’s knowing, doing, and being in her communities.

Data Analysis

This study adopted a three-dimensional narrative approach (Connelly & Clandinin, 2006), which caters to the three commonplaces of experience which include, temporality, sociality, and place to analyze the multiple sources of data. This research unfurls on a past-present-future continuum (temporality), foregrounds human interactions (sociality) and unfolds in the distinguishable contexts (place). Three analytical tools—broadening, burrowing, and storying and restorying (Connelly & Clandinin, 1990)—helped me to analyze and weave the representative narratives that we gathered together. With the assistance of these interpretive devices, I transitioned the interim field texts into the research texts (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000). Through broadening, I situated Jenny’s upbringing to her family background and the major schooling experiences. By engaging in burrowing, I then repeatedly examined what emerged to the surface when she narrated her teaching experiences about her motivation, commitment, CRP, authentic caring, and the broad sociopolitical milieu in which she worked. Storying and restorying allow me to situate the asset-, equity-, and justice-oriented pedagogy that Jenny enacted in her educational contexts by exploring the community cultural wealth, funds of knowledge, and funds of identity that Jenny’s students accumulated in their communities.

To enhance the trustworthiness of the findings, I invited an additional researcher to analyze the data independently and engage in detailed discussions with me to help my analysis. When we disagreed, we conducted member-checking by inviting the participant Jenny to comment on the data interpretations. Meanwhile, we triangulated and cross-referenced different sources of data. In this way, we improved the comparability of evidence and the reliability of data interpretation. Finally, we double-checked the accuracy of the three-dimensional process of analysis to increase the reliability and validity of this project.

Ethical Considerations

Before the formal inception of this project, I received IRB (Institutional Review Board) approval from the university. First, I informed the participant of the purpose, benefits, potential risks, and the research procedure of this study. I told the participant that she could exit from this study at any stage. The participant signed a consent form, which guarantees the anonymity of the participant’s biographic information. Furthermore, I also stored all the data collected from this research project in a private and safe place, which were only accessible to the research team members approved by the IRB review committee.

Researcher Positionality

As the researcher, I must reflect on my personal and professional experience here, aligned with what Milner (2007) contended as dangers seen, unseen, and unforeseen might emerge when the urban educational scholars do not pay enough attention to their own and others’ racialized knowing, doing, and being. For this reason, I constantly reflect on how my personal experiences, my relation to others, and my engaged reflection affect my research stances in this study.

I was an Asian international graduate student who was pursuing my PhD degree in curriculum and instruction with a focus on urban teacher education in a public, research-intensive university in the United States when I undertook this study. Since 2013, I have been engaged various projects on urban school reform and urban teacher education, through which I accumulated rich research experiences on these topics. Currently, I am a tenured faculty member in a research-oriented university in China, which has a long tradition of teacher education. My own sociocultural and professional backgrounds might affect the distinctive perspective that I adopted in this study. To minimize the subtle influence of my prior personal perceptions, especially the unconscious bias related to this research topic (e.g., stereotype perception and threat), I was cautious about the risks of over-generalization of the conclusion and reifying stereotypes of African American teachers in the United States.

As an urban education scholar, I consider urban education in the United States as an “elephant in the room” issue, which not only hinders minority students’ opportunities to access quality public education but also deteriorates their career and life opportunities. At the surface, there is a deep-rooted achievement gap between students who have different races/ethnicities and socioeconomic status. However, at a deeper level, the intractable achievement gap exemplifies the “education debt” that the American public educational system owes to many students it has poorly served. According to Ladson-Billings (2006), the education debt encompasses historical debt, economic debt, sociopolitical debt, and moral debt. Furthermore, the achievement disparity arising from the education debt reflects the economic, institutional, civil, and cultural gaps structurally and systematically inscribed in the American society for centuries.

Findings

Through an iterative thematic analysis of the multiple sources of data, I distilled four-story fragments that succinctly embody Jenny’s asset-, equity-, and justice-oriented pedagogy, which represents the praxis for critical transformative pedagogy, across her shifting teaching landscapes. Meanwhile, these narratives are meaning-oriented and capture the participant’s nuanced perception of CRP and authentic caring. In the following sections, I presented some illustrative themes and the accompanying counter-narrative excerpts from Jenny.

Vignette One: “I Told Them if I Could Do It, They Could Do It Too”

At the beginning of this project, Jenny narrated her upbringing fraught with a myriad of financial challenges, which shape her resilience in life:

I was born to a single parent mom in a small town in Georgia. There were many times growing up that we moved around repeatedly [sic]. It got to the point where I would just leave my boxes packed because I knew that there was a possibility that I would be moving. I never went hungry, but I do remember many times not having lights on when I got home from school. I would have to do my homework by sunlight, and once night came, by flashlight. There were a few times I remember coming home and being told I was moving and would stay up all night to get it finished. It was not because my mother was not a good mother. However, working in the field she was in [sic] did not always help pay the bills. (Personal narrative, 2016)

Despite long-standing poverty in childhood, Jenny did not feel stifled by the webs of her life struggles. By disclosing her personal growing experience, Jenny showed her vulnerability to the students and tried to gain empathy from the students in her classroom, most of whom also came from lower socioeconomic families. Jenny would like to share her individual experiences, which were remarkably similar to many of her students. In this way, she explained how she created emotional connections with her students.

I also am honest with my students about the fact that I grew up with a mother who lived on social welfare, and we move around constantly. It allows them to know that I care and understand what they are dealing with. (Personal narrative, 2016)

Although overcame many odds along with her personal life, Jenny always harbored optimism and used her personal struggling experiences to inspire her students:

When I graduated in 2008, I could go back and wear my cap and gown in front of the classes I interacted with and proudly told them [Jenny’s students] that I was officially the first person in my class to graduate from college. I was a low-income student. I came from a single-parent family, and [my] mom [lived] on social welfare . . . All the problems that people said would keep me out of college didn’t stop me. I told them [Jenny’s students] if I could do it, they could do it too. (Interview, 2016)

As indicated, Jenny did not succumb to the odds she encountered or let lower socioeconomic status divert her life trajectory. Although bounded with many challenges as she described, Jenny still obtained her college degree. Jenny expressed how she positively spent her life and showed grit and resilience to her students. In her capacity as a middle-school history teacher, Jenny encouraged her students by sharing her personal and college-going experiences with them. Jenny established authentic caring relationships with her students and gradually cultivated the mind-set of asset-, equity-, and justice-oriented pedagogy:

The students that other teachers have given up on, but just need someone to tell them they could do it. (Email correspondence, 2016)

Jenny told of a life-changing experience later in her life in that she had not considered an elementary school teaching career until she was a teaching assistant in an urban high school in Texas. She remembered how many of the students in that school had various problems in which the school’s teachers had to deal with:

These kids were drug dealers, teenage moms, caretakers for siblings and parents, gang members, and dealing with a host of other issues plaguing our schools . . . I was hooked immediately [sic]. (Personal narrative, 2016)

However, when confronted with that tough situation, Jenny “was hooked immediately [sic]” (personal narrative, 2016). In this scenario, Jenny reflected,

Even though many of them were not that much younger than I was at that time, they just wanted an ear, someone who cared, someone who could help them cope with their situations. (Reflective journal, 2016)

First, Jenny focused on not adopting a deficit perspective on her students. Although many of her students had some learning (e.g., lower motivation, lower engagement) and social problems (e.g., drug addictions, teenage pregnancy, and gang membership), Jenny stated how she never gave them up and established authentic caring with her students—the “I-Thou” rather than the “I-It” teacher-student relationship from Buber’s (1958) ethical perspective. According to Buber (1958, 1965), “I-It” typifies that utilitarian subject-object relationship, in which “I” consider “It” as the object and take advantage of “It” to meet his or her end. In summary, in the “I-It” relationship, the individuals treat the world and others in a hasty manner. However, in the “I-Thou” relationship, “I” directly encounter the totality of “Thou,” in which all the parts, characters, and uniqueness are affirmed as a whole (Buber, 1958, 1965; Shim, 2008). In the “I-Thou” relationship, the individual deals with the work and the people authentically and ethically.

Vignette Two: “My Biggest Mission Has Always Been Reaching the Unreachable”

After working as an elementary teacher for 4 years, Jenny transferred to an urban middle school where she currently teaches history. Regarding the wide achievement gap in American public schools, Jenny said that, in contrast to giving up on students as some urban school teachers do with deficit view, she always encouraged her students and celebrated her students’ success at every step. Jenny stated how her students finally became successful learners with confidence, as expected below:

During my first year of teaching, I had one student called Anthony (pseudonym). Anthony has never excelled in school and came in with a defeatist attitude. He knew one day that he wasn’t going to [sic] pass my class or pass the test. I just told Anthony to trust me, we would get him there. Anthony had bumps throughout the year, but I praised every success he had. If it was him jumping from 20 to 50, we celebrated it. If Anthony answers a question right in the small group, we celebrated it. I shared his success with his Mom. When it came time to take the standardized test at the end of the year, Anthony passed the test and exceeded my expectations. (Personal narrative, 2016)

In this illustrative teaching story, Jenny persuasively showed how she transformed a struggling student into a high-achieving one. From the lens of CRP, Jenny enabled her students to experience academic success, which constitutes one foundation of CRP. Another contributing factor is the “I-Thou” relationship that Jenny formed with Anthony. From the transformative humanizing pedagogy (Lopez & Olan, 2019; Souto-Manning, 2019), Jenny did not consider Anthony as a stumbling block to her teaching or an empty vessel to be filled (“I-It” relationship). Rather, she expressed Anthony’s intellectual growth by celebrating his academic improvements in each step.

Apart from being committed to improving students’ academic achievement, Jenny also cultivated her students’ cultural competency and critical consciousness in her teaching:

I have to take into consideration some social issues that my students of different races are experiencing. My minority students are sadly all dealing with issues in our country that keep them in a marginalized status. For example, they learned about the Blacks/Police brutality, Latinx immigration, and legal status. I make sure I take all of those into consideration when I’m teaching. (Email correspondence, 2019)

From these quotes, we can find that Jenny did not technically focus on delivering the subject knowledge; she also integrated many sociopolitical issues, such as Black/Police brutality, Latinx immigration, and legal status in her classroom. In this way, Jenny’s students gradually grew their critical consciousness. One tenet of CRP is that students should develop a critical consciousness through which they can challenge the systematic and structural inequity embedded in the current social order. Jenny talked about how race in her teaching:

I am lucky that I’m on a campus where most of the teachers that work with our students are minorities. However, I know that is not the case everywhere. (Interview, 2019)

For me, I believe that I have to constantly know what is happening and what it means to be black in America. I can’t exist right now and not know how myself and others in my family are impacted. That allows me to empathize with what others are dealing with in this country. (Interview, 2019)

As shown, Jenny realized that her racial identity—as a Black female teacher—that allowed her to “empathize with what others are dealing with in this country” (Interview, 2019), although most of the teacher workforce in the United States is homogeneous.

Vignette Three: “You Matter as a Whole Person When You Enter My Classroom”

In her narratives, Jenny frequently mentioned that she always tried to relate the history subject to her students’ divergent backgrounds. For instance, Jenny stated that even her Latinx students talked about how the Chinese came to the United States and worked in the transcontinental railroad construction project for the United States, which enabled her students to realize that diversity has persisted in America for a long time. Jenny also shared another story which focused on the 2016 U.S. Presidential election in the United States. One of Jenny’s students who originally comes from Honduras, begged her not to vote for then-presidential candidate Donald Trump because she was afraid of being deported if Trump became president. Her student also told her about unsettling events that were transpiring in her home country.

As her students encountered the intractable political situation as Trump was elected, Jenny did not give up her students and empowered her students’ learning experiences politically. Framed from Delpit’s (1995) standpoint, Jenny did not treat the minority students as “other people’s children” (p. xiii) but rather validated each student’s freedom and dignity to learn in the United States (Rogers & Freiberg, 1994). For this point, Jenny further shared the following:

I have one student called Wen Fan (pseudonym) from China. Wen Fan knows American history well and came to ask me about the Monroe Doctrine, something we will cover but has not yet. She is knowledgeable and the way she tackled history is amazing. I always try to encourage her in front of the class so this is an equal field for every student. I just let them know that I care about them. (Interview, 2016)

The big thing in my classroom is the K-pop. My students always asked me if I can play music while working in the classroom . . . I have one Asian student [Wu Tong (pseudonym)] who wants to start a photography business. That is his passion and he took a picture of me and my husband. Wu Tong is also interested in painting, and he did a lot of artistic work in my classroom . . . I allowed them to express their passions . . . My students who majored in hotel management decorated my office this year! . . . One of my students wants to become a rapper. I often asked him: “Can you please write some lyrics or a song for a wonderful class?” . . . I used their passions in their learning projects. (Interview, 2018)

As seen from the conversation, instead of adopting a deficit view on her minority students, such as Wen Fan (pseudonym) and Wu Tong (pseudonym), Jenny harnessed an asset-based view as defined by Yosso (2005), which validated the different cultural assets inherited by her students’ different ethnic groups. Jenny tapped into her student’s potential for studying history and constantly encouraged her students to bravely express their authentic voices. Jenny valued the multiple perspectives that the minority students brought to her classroom.

I had one student [Dacey (pseudonym)] who wanted to become a dermatologist. She said that there were not so many dermatologists in the city of Meadowcreek (pseudonym). What we do have are male and old. She said that was what she wanted to do because she wanted to take care of our skin . . . [Now] she is making YouTube videos on how to make natural products and different things to take care of the skin. (Interview, 2018)

After this conversation with Jenny, Dacey chased her career dream by gaining a degree in chemistry to help her with her dermatological goals. This story vividly shows how Jenny transformed her students’ funds of knowledge to their funds of identity. In her narrative, Jenny encouraged Dacey to take advantage of her household knowledge on natural products, chemistry, skin caring, and media production. By drawing upon these funds of knowledge, Dacey simultaneously invested in her funds of identity—to become a dermatologist.

Vignette Four: “You Have to Educate the Heart Before You Educate the Mind”

Throughout the communications, Jenny shared that she upheld one inspiring quote from the Greek philosopher Aristotle as influencing her educational belief: “Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.” Jenny tweaked this quote to “You have to educate the heart before you educate the mind” (Email correspondence, 2016). Regarding the importance of CRP and authentic caring, Jenny posited that

You have to know the environment and the community you are teaching. I talked with Geneva Gay a few years ago at a social studies conference. And she just got up and said: “You got to know your kids! You got to know more than just their names!” She [Geneva Gay] said: “Go to the church!” She even encouraged us to live in the neighborhoods of the students we are teaching. There is no more powerful than going to the grocery store and interacting with the students. (Interview, 2018)

Jenny wants to break the traditionally dualist perception of education: inside/outside schooling experience, heart/mind, “I-Thou”/“I-It” relationships. Jenny further reflected that

I’ve built those relationships with many students through my teaching career; not because I want them to pass a test, but because I want them to know someone cares about them, their well-being inside and outside the class. I am a middle school history teacher and apply the same belief of educating the heart before the mind. (Reflective journal, 2016)

Within the context of the complex web of standardized tests and accountability policies, Jenny still endeavored to surpass the U.S. policy (federal and state) constraints. Jenny said that students should not be merely test takers but should be critical thinkers and “be the best person they can be” (Interview, 2016). Confronted with the institutional and cultural challenges, especially the rampant standardized tests throughout the state, Jenny expressed that she wants to become “a light in the dark for education” (Interview, 2016) and tries to revolutionize her teaching in the multicultural learning communities (Nieto, 2010).

I also taught some Muslim students. They invited me to join in their festival celebrations. I also have some Catholic students who invited me to their churches . . . The classroom should be beyond the school walls because I want them to know that I care about them as an individual . . . I have students who represent so many different countries, languages and, cultures. Therefore, it is always a learning experience for me. (Interview, 2018)

Intriguingly, this asset-, equity-, justice-oriented pedagogy is reciprocal. Jenny admitted that this critical transformative pedagogy also energized her (e.g., “sometimes they teach me and keep me going.”) and made her teaching more effective (e.g., “my students perform pretty well. I do not have a lot of pressure.”).

Discussion

First, in the majoritarian storytelling scenario, typified by objectivism and ahistoricism (Dixon & Rousseau 2005), teachers of color voices are usually silenced (Zhu et al., 2019). Confronted with the enormity of neutrality, color-blindness, and meritocracy in teacher education (Sleeter, 2017), this study shows that Jenny’s counter-narratives on asset-, equity-, justice-oriented pedagogy, as a critical praxis for transformative pedagogy, can emancipate students’ learning cognitively and politically. Built on the Ladson-Billings’s (2006) notion “education debt,” Ellis et al. (2019) conceptualized “teacher education debt” as enquiring the humanization of teaching and social justice. In this study, asset-, equity-, justice-oriented pedagogy is conceived as a humanizing pedagogical tool that addresses the “teacher education debt” in the United States. In this study, Jenny capitalized on her students’ enriching community cultural wealth and the funds of knowledge/identity that they brought to the classroom. Meanwhile, Jenny adopted CRP and established authentic caring relationship with her students. All these instructional beliefs and behaviors constitute such pedagogy, which successfully transforms the struggling students that she teaches in the urban school. As shown in this research, this kind pedagogy not only facilitates students’ academic learning but also cultivates their cultural competency and critical consciousness.

Second, this research also shows that CRP and authentic caring are emancipatory praxis to address the ethical issues in urban education (Shevalier & McKenzie, 2012). Freire (1970/1990) conceptualized praxis as “the action and reflection of men and women upon their world in order to transform it” (p. 79). The asset-, equity-, and justice-oriented pedagogy is not a de facto strategy. Rather, it is an emancipatory praxis centering on students’ cognitive and emotional development. CRP is one essential component of the academic family of this pedagogy. Apart from CRP, teachers and teacher educators should also incorporate community cultural wealth, funds of knowledge/identity, and authentic/critical care, because these conceptualizations share similar underlying assumptions with CRP. As displayed previously, Jenny cultivated her funds of identity by drawing upon her upbringing and resilience gained in her college years. Regarding her culturally relevant pedagogy, she improved her students’ academic performance by confirming their funds of identities. Jenny also brought her students’ community cultural wealth, such as rap, natural products, chemistry, skin caring, new media production, Black/Police brutality, Latinx immigration, and legal issues, into her classroom. All these community cultural wealth and funds of knowledge not only planted critical consciousness among the students but also fostered the authentic caring relationship between the teacher and students. Jenny’s counter-narratives show that all the aforementioned concepts are connected. Therefore, educators have not only the responsibilities to improve minority students’ academic achievements but also their cultural competency and sociopolitical consciousness.

Third, this article reveals that counter-narrative, as a critical research methodology, helps to highlight historically suppressed voices of traditionally marginalized groups in urban educational settings. In this study, Jenny epitomized the traditionally silenced voice in public education. As most of the teacher workforce in the United States are White, female, middle class, and heterosexual (U.S. Department of Education, 2016), Jenny’s transformative teaching experiences inherently challenge the traditional racially stereotypical portrayals of Black minorities in American public schools and overall society. Recently, when I communicated with Jenny, I learned that my study reignited her enthusiasm for teaching. After being out of the classroom for 2 years, Jenny made a bold decision to resume her teaching career as a history teacher in a middle school. Jenny stated that when I sent her the stories I collected and my writing, she had just accepted the position to go back into the classroom. Arguably, the counter-narratives from Jenny also changed her professional trajectory.

There are also some inevitable challenges associated with the adoption of the asset-, equity-, justice-oriented pedagogy. In this study, Jenny encountered a broad array of insurmountable challenges that she had to tackle—increasingly diverse students, standardized testing, and teacher accountability. Jenny acknowledged that it was hard for her to incorporate so many of her student’s culture into the teaching because the curriculum she taught was dense, and she had a multitude of objectives to cover. Also, standardized tests were burdensome and some of her students need individualized tutoring. All these contextual factors collectively contribute to the hardship of implementing the asset-, equity-, and justice-oriented pedagogy. From Jenny’s personal and professional experiences, we can find that this humanizing pedagogy requires educators’ different domains of knowing (e.g., personal knowledge, contextual knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, sociological knowledge, and social knowledge; Goodwin & Darity, 2019), shared commitments (Souto-Manning & Winn, 2019), and disposition for equity, such as resilience, empathy, tolerance, and cultural sensitivity.

Implications

Although I situated it in an American context, this research has theoretical and practical implications for more broad urban education. First, these findings contribute to the traditionally marginalized and oppressed voices on critical pedagogies. How Jenny implements the asset-, equity-, justice-oriented pedagogy by drawing students’ community culture wealth, funds of knowledge, and funds of identity can help inspire urban school teachers in similar contexts. Second, the counter-narratives from Jenny counteract the deteriorating effect imposed by the current neoliberal educational reform context (Ravitch, 2013), which constantly disempowers and demoralizes teachers’ professional agency (Tsang, 2018). Within this performativity milieu, this pedagogy can be anchored as praxis by allowing urban school teachers to examine the difference between deficit-based pedagogy and asset-based pedagogy (Jackson & Boutte, 2018). This article illuminates the importance of cultivating critically conscious and authentically engaging teachers (Valenzuela, 2016). By contextualizing Jenny’s nuanced experiences of CRP and the authentic caring relationship with the students, this article calls for heightened attention to minority teachers’ critical transformative pedagogy within urban educational settings.

Although the racial and cultural differences frequently form tensions between White teachers and students of color are increasingly visible in the United States (McGrady & Reynolds, 2013), some urban school teachers are still color-blind (Bonilla-Silva, 2010) and did not recognize the problems of race and poverty associated with the education debt (Ladson-Billings, 2006; Milner, 2013). Sleeter (2012) delineated the marginalization of CRP in three aspects: (a) persistence of faulty and simplistic CRP conceptions, (b) too little research connecting its use with student achievement, and (c) elite, White fear of losing national and global hegemony. In this scenario, it is necessary to examine how teachers perceive, enact, and reflect on asset-, equity-, justice-oriented pedagogy in challenging urban school settings.

With this all being said, Jenny as a typical minority teacher in this study shows the readers how she overcame myriad obstacles and implemented the asset-, equity-, justice-oriented pedagogy to redress the challenges in her educational contexts. Furthermore, Jenny’s story may inspire more urban teachers to reflect on their professional identities and repertoires of instruction. For instance, CRP might act as a powerful lens through which urban teachers can examine the sociopolitical discourses contributing to the “achievement debt” (Ladson-Billings, 2006). Following this line, teachers can interrogate their deep-rooted assumptions that underpin their educational beliefs about and perceptions of students’ ethnic and cultural backgrounds. As shown in this study, the funds of knowledge and funds of identity that students accumulated for generations have the potential to bring about transformation in teachers’ deficit thinking. By researching into their students’ lives, teachers come to see beyond cultural stereotyping and recognize their differences. More profoundly, teachers can question the long-term historical, economic, sociopolitical, and moral contexts that contribute to the “educational debt.”

Limitations and Future Research Directions

This study has two aspects of limitations. First, this research project has a tiny sample, which limits the generalization of the findings and the conclusion gleaned from this study. In this study, we only focused on one African American teacher without considering Hispanic/Latino and Asian American teachers. Thus, this study cannot represent the whole picture of the minority teacher workforce in the United States. We did not examine the intersection of race, ethnicity, class, and gender in this study. For instance, we did not examine how Jenny’s gender affects her asset-, equity-, and justice-oriented pedagogy. Second, I did not examine the interactions between the participant’s asset-, equity-, and justice-oriented pedagogy with the multiple layers of the educational contexts (e.g., school, school district, and the societal circumstance). Although Jenny repeatedly acknowledged that the standardized test in her school district was the most challenging issue she had to cope with, we did not explore how other performativity-oriented teacher policy affects Jenny’s perception and adaptation of the asset-, equity-, and justice-oriented pedagogy.

For the future research direction, it is necessary to explore minority teachers’ racial identity (G. R. Howard, 2016) and resilience (Gu & Day, 2007) in urban educational settings, since urban school teachers frequently experience high teacher attrition rate (Zhu, under review). Specifically, future research will include Hispanic/Latino (e.g., the United States) and Aboriginal/First Nation (e.g., Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Alaska) teachers as participants to explore their racial and cultural beliefs and critical pedagogies in daily practices. It is viable to examine how these minority teachers enact their multiple ways of knowing, doing, and being in diverse classroom settings. Also, it is worthwhile to explore how teachers from the majority racial background can employ skills such as those that Jenny utilized to reach students (CRP and authentic caring, etc.). Regarding the methodology, it is recommended to adopt the longitudinal research methods to analyze how teachers of color improve students’ academic achievement by utilizing students’ community cultural wealth, funds of knowledge, and funds of identity. Meanwhile, apart from observations and interviews, visual methods, such as drawings and avatars, will be incorporated in future research. In this way, we can identify the interplay between racial identity, multiple contexts and objects, and teachers’ commitments to social justice. Another research direction is to examine the external influence of multiple educational contexts on teachers’ asset-, equity-, and justice-oriented pedagogy.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This study was jointly sponsored by the Peak Discipline Construction Project of Education at East China Normal University and the International Collaborative Grant of the International Study Association of Teachers and Teaching (ISATT).

ORCID iD

Gang Zhu

Author Biography

Gang Zhu is an associate professor at the Institute of International and Comparative Education, East China Normal University. His scholarship focuses on teacher education, urban education, and comparative education. His publications appeared in Compare, Journal of Education for Teaching, The Asia-Pacific Educational Researcher, and Frontiers of Education in China.

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