Check Your Privilege

Creating a Culturally Responsive Classroom

Although I was incorporating diverse voices into my curriculum and instruction in a limited way, I was missing the connections to philosophy, assessment, and the learning environment that students need to experience a truly culturally responsive classroom (Ford, 2010). To do this, I needed to further educate myself and apply that research in a complete overhaul of my instructional units. My summer was spent reading and researching in an effort to locate literature that was both content appropriate and evocative. I sought out more poems by authors my students already loved such as Langston Hughes, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Maya Angelou. I discovered and attempted to acquire titles by authors such as Chinua Achebe, Pam Muñoz Ryan, and Peter Sís. I searched for literature that would provide a catalyst for discussions, be relevant, and feel accessible to my elementary students without limiting us to stereotypical viewpoints (Fiske, Cuddy, Glick, & Xu, 2002)—a trap that the contribution and additive approach seem to generate.

Then in my research, I serendipitously discovered Jacqueline Woodson (2014). As I devoured her newly published memoir, Brown Girl Dreaming, I realized that here was the link I had been hoping to find. Woodson split her childhood between Greenville, South Carolina (where our school is located) and Brooklyn, New York. Her story personified the events of the Great Migration as well as a more personal coming-of-age, but her modern aesthetic appealed to my young students. Her voice was accessible, friendly, and deeply passionate. I was fortunate enough to hear her speak at the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) convention in the fall and began to completely rewrite my spring instructional units around her material. Along the way, I pulled in additional context for my students (and noted a striking lack of resources). I knew that for them to truly appreciate Woodson’s work, they needed context throughout the year, not isolated examples from limited pieces. As I continued to try to incorporate more voices using nonfiction texts, excerpts from primary source letters and documents, and images from artists and photographs, I noticed students becoming more engaged and beginning to ask more relevant and pointed questions about the works we analyzed. My favorite, “Why isn’t this in our social studies book?” was a wonderful jumping off point for discussion. They were beginning to have transformative experiences with the information. Although there were many factors limiting my students’ worldview that I could not control through the literature, I was able to pull them into new experiences and force them to examine their preconceived ideas and biases.

When we began our unit on Injustice and Civil Rights, I paired Woodson’s poetry each day with a song selection that was connected to the theme, time period, or content of the poems. I tried to limit our focus to certain poems so that we could dig into the historical background as well as the literary analysis and make strong connections. The music opened up an emotional component that was absent in previous years. Whether it was the power of her words, the closeness of her childhood home, or the immediacy of hearing her speak in the videos they watched, students responded dramatically to Woodson.

I began the unit with Woodson’s, “my mother and grace,” and “journey” while the students listened to Pink Anderson (a Blues singer born one county away from our school) singing “I Will Fly Away.” The music set the mood, and Woodson’s words transported my students. That introduction was followed by lessons that compared Woodson’s “Gifted” with Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask” while Nina Simone’s “Young, Gifted and Black” played in the background. One of the most powerful lessons began with a read-aloud of Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman” followed by Woodson’s “The Revolution” and “What Everybody Knows Now.” When I then played Tracy Chapman’s “Revolution”—my students were entranced. Their thoughts bubbled over as they discussed the tension between resistance and compliance and the consequences of each stance, debating Woodson’s line, “Easier to stay where you belong” in “What Everybody Knows Now.”

The ideas that there were multiple ways to resist the confines of a segregated society and that Martin Luther King, Jr. was not the only “fighter” in the struggle were driven home to them in “the training.” The line at the end of that poem became a rallying cry in my classroom. My students cheered the passion in Cousin Dorothy’s exclamation that she can remain “Sweet Dorothy” as long as nobody spits on her, but that “if they do, this nonviolent movement is over!” They learned that it was the participation and risk taking of many now nameless citizens that brought an end to segregation.

After reading Woodson’s “the training,” they then read and created found poems from Bruce Hartford’s, “Notes from a Nonviolent Training Session” (Hartford, n.d.) (See Appendix). The words they selected clearly showed their appreciation for the effort and self-control exerted by the protestors. For example, “But remember, sing to your enemies. This is not a game.” in one student’s poem clearly shows her understanding of the impact marchers were striving to make on their audience. Another student wrote,

Nonviolence is fine jazz, and

Is never the same.

It is the ensemble of pride, and

Violence is shame.

He was able to combine what he had learned about the elements of jazz music (improvisation, collaboration, and syncopation) with the goals of the nonviolent protest movement. Using music and nonfiction texts (such as the notes), I was able to provide the students with a deeper well of knowledge that they were then able to use when crafting their written responses. The found poems were a powerful assessment tool. I was able to evaluate their understanding of both the methods of nonviolent response to injustice and their appreciation of the courage and determination of those in the nonviolent movement.

Making Deeper Connections

As they began to comprehend the power of these “everyday” people, I then helped them connect with more current struggles. When the protests in Baltimore over the death of Freddie Gray turned violent while we were reading the book, my students sympathized with the frustrations felt by the young people involved and debated the approaches they might take in similar situations. They certainly did not all agree on a particular response, but not a single child said anything about “observing as a bystander”—a comment made the previous year when students were asked how they would respond to the events of Bloody Sunday. All were actively and passionately engaged in analyzing the issues.

Their responses also surprised me with a new awareness of the influence of media bias. We debated the use of the word riot versus the word protest, and the students marveled at the different image results returned by Google using the two different terms. We discussed how “who” tells the story often determines “how” the story is told. It was a very nuanced and revealing discussion for these 10- and 11-year-old students as they came to the realization that stories about different groups of people may be dramatically influenced by the bias of the person telling the story. Our lessons during this time included reading and discussing Woodson’s “graffiti” and “music” after listening to Tupac’s “Changes” and a PRI.org (a National Public Radio site) story on Omar Offendum. Offendum is a Syrian rapper who uses his music to reflect on the Syrian Civil War. The students analyzed lines from his song “Destiny” as we discussed what they knew about the conflict and how those issues of freedom and control related to struggles for equality here in the United States. It was fascinating to watch as my two Syrian students engaged their classmates in discussions about how their families were directly affected by the war even though they had immigrated to the United States years before the conflict began.

In response, my students created question trees (a series of questions using Bloom’s Taxonomy as a guide) on the topics of giftedness, rap, and street art. The students also viewed several examples of street art and designed their own pieces based on themes from the poems that they found powerful. We compiled these questions and visual art pieces into a hallway display that students added to over the course of the unit. Changing the hallway bulletin board—typically the teacher-designed showcase of student work—into a living piece of art that morphed with each new poem provided another outlet for students to process their thoughts and feelings about the issues raised in the poems, songs, podcasts, and articles. It also provided another opportunity for me to informally assess my students. I could easily see what issues were “trending” or that students were struggling with as they added their questions and illustrations to the board.

The unit’s culminating activity required students to analyze the speeches of several Civil Rights leaders—including Dr. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Shirley Chisholm—then craft and perform their own speeches on a social justice issue about which they were passionate. We connected those historical responses to injustice to our modern society by watching and discussing the video of Daniel Handler (known by his pen name, Lemony Snicket) announcing Jacqueline Woodson’s National Book Award using a racially offensive joke. We then read Woodson’s response, the thought-provoking essay titled “The Pain of the Watermelon Joke.” With this fresh evidence of injustice as an example, every student dove into researching and writing about their own topics. I looked out gratefully over my classroom when the students stopped as they peer-edited speeches to discuss a particular point or marvel at an astonishing fact. They were truly invested in their work on issues that varied from gender inequality in pay to lowering the voting age to disparities in funding equity between various high school sports. They were considering many different perspectives. They were internalizing the missing voices and designing ways to literally speak those truths.

Reflecting and Moving Forward

As the students reflected in writing on their work at the end of the unit, they made powerful comments such as, “I learned that the Civil Rights Movement had more than just Martin Luther King” and “The most important thing I learned was that we should always care for others and not to hide your true self.” The speeches and reflections clearly demonstrated that the students’ attitudes had shifted, and they were now finding relevance in the historical events and stories and beginning to apply the lessons learned to current issues of injustice. As one student so eloquently summed up the unit, “Bad things were here, are here, and will remain in the world, but we must try to stop them.”

This year, I will continue my curricular revisions with an increased focus on writers, scientists, artists, philosophers, characters, and leaders from a variety of dynamic backgrounds. We will include the voices of modern thinkers such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Malala Yousafzai. There will be a continued push to remind my typically privileged students to consider whose perspectives they are not hearing, to question who is benefitting from the silence, and to continue to search for those who are missing. We will be incorporating the performing arts into our work as we attempt to bring to life those words using our bodies, voices, and emotions. As I continue to educate myself about creating transformative experiences for my students and moving toward a social action approach, I am developing more confidence in my ability to incorporate more of these strategies and techniques. I must push myself as an educator to fight the tendency to use safe and traditional texts.

Exposure to the concepts of privilege, class, race, and societal norms in a supportive, investigative, and empathetic environment can only help my students realize their role in our society as it is today and give them the tools and desire to make positive changes in the future. As teachers of the gifted, it is essential that we open up that feedback loop and pour in far more diverse experiences. Literature offers us the perfect opportunity to engage all students in analysis and reflection on the roles and opportunities of various members of our society. This will hopefully result in a richer, more just, and more authentic education for all children.