Oct
2013
Vol 5:2
Ed.D. Website | Careers | Contact Us | Partners

In This Issue
  • Tara Taupier describes what she learned from her students of color to become a better educator. Jump to Article Summary
  • Macheo Payne discusses the disproportionality of suspension of black students compare to white students  Jump to Article Summary
Featured Articles

"Good Learning": Effective Teaching Practices  As Identified by Suburban Students of Color

Taupier
By Tara Taupier

 

 

After years of teaching in a mostly white, suburban high school and seeing predictable patterns of achievement, I began my search for a methodology that would help me to improve as an educator.  What I found was a preponderance of evidence that suggests traditional methods of education have historically denied students of color equal access to quality educational experiences that value their culture and knowledge.  Additionally, students of color who attend mostly white institutions must often contend with racially hostile schools.  However, critical and culturally responsive pedagogues have identified practices of successful teachers of students of color.  These practices have shown promise in overcoming the educational opportunity gap. I sought to add to the conversation on successful teaching practices by determining, which practices students of color identified as most effective.

            The significance of my research is that it examined effective pedagogical practices and conditions necessary for academic success for suburban students of color, from the perspective of the students.   The inclusion of voices of suburban students of color expands the conversation on critical and culturally responsive pedagogy beyond the current focus on ill-resourced urban centers.

           The data captured from the students allowed me to develop a conceptual framework that indicates the conditions necessary for their academic success. This framework also provides a model from which an institution's pedagogical practices and racial climate can be analyzed. This model suggests that what happens in the classroom is important for the success of students of color, but those practices must be matched with a campus wide positive racial climate and the existence of counter-spaces.

 

Figure 8 Conceptual Model for Student of Color Success            

 

            Figure 8 illustrates the combination of conditions that must exist in academic and social spaces on campus in order for students of color to experience academic success in a way that honors their ethnic identities and cultural knowledge. The four boxes list essential elements that are likely to lead to success for students of color. Each of these elements also represent an opportunity for secondary institutions to critically analyze their practices and campus

            Caring, while an element of culturally responsive and critical pedagogy, plays such a significant role in my research that I believe it must be identified separately. Without caring, the other aspects of successful pedagogical practices identified here will not exist. Caring is the umbrella under which the other successful pedagogical practices fall.

            Students of color succeed best in classrooms with teachers who care deeply about them and show such caring through holding high expectations for the students, spending time outside the confines of class time and engaging in conversations about the student's overall wellbeing.  In non-academic spaces, it is essential that students of color feel safe, welcomed and a part of the school culture. For this to occur there must be a positive racial climate on the campus as well as counter-spaces in which students can express concerns and frustrations with others who experience similar situations (Yosso et al., 2009).

Realizing academic success in a predominantly white suburban high school means that the students of color must be able to negotiate the impact oppressive institutional practices and racist interactions with fellow students have on them personally. The students in this study expressed a clear understanding of the stress they endure due to racial microaggressions they experienced on a regular basis when white classmates made racist jokes and complained about the students' of color behavior insisting they stop "acting black".  They expressed feeling alienated in classrooms by teachers who took a colorblind approach to teaching and learning.  Therefore, having teachers who employed critical and culturally responsive pedagogical practices provided the students with academic settings in which oppressive structures and practices were named, critiqued and challenged. Furthermore, creating counter spaces, such as the Black Student Union (BSU), helped students feel safety and acceptance in a mostly white institution.  The students in the BSU sought to improve the campus racial climate through educational assemblies and activities sponsored by the BSU.

            The students challenged deficit thinking about people of color, as eighteen-year-old senior Ruby explained, she liked "proving all them wrong". However, they also indicated wishing they had more tools to navigate academic environments instead of just ignoring the microaggressions and overt racist affronts. It is through the combination of academic practices and institutional structures that support equity among groups that success for all students can be realized.

            The students of color, who participated in the study, described teacher practices and curriculum choices that demonstrated agreement with current critical and culturally responsive pedagogy literature. Furthermore, the students' experiences with microaggressions and a negative racial climate on campus deepen the current understanding of what combination of conditions must exist for students of color to be academically successful in a way that does not require assimilation but rather honors their cultural identities and knowledge. 

 

 

 Tara Taupier
Tara Taupier is the Senior Director of Instructional Technology and Staff Development. She develops and implements sustained professional development opportunities for teachers in her district. The professional development focuses on promising instructional practices including culturally responsive pedagogy with technology integration. She is currently leading a cohort of 32 teachers who meet monthly to discuss instruction and learning using student data and research.  

She also oversees their student information system and IT department.


 


The Three Commitments: Critical Race Theory and Disproportionate Suspension of Black Males

Payne
By Macheo Payne
 
             Disproportionality of suspension of black male students compared to white male students, has been a persistent trend in U.S. public schools for over 3 decades. Evidence that shows black male students being suspended at 2 to 3 times the rate of their white male counterparts also shows that race is a dominating factor in this trend, even when controlled for poverty. Evidence showed black students being suspended primarily for disruption, which is a more subjective reason, and that white students are suspended primarily for more objective observable offenses like cutting, vandalism and smoking. These discrepancies revealed black students being punished more severely for minor infractions than white students. The purpose of this study was to examine classroom teachers with effective, low-referring practices in an effort to explain disproportionately high suspension rates of black males in schools.

            By exploring effective classroom practices that facilitate greater engagement and thus less disciplinary actions toward black male students this study sought to identify key elements that teachers use in the classroom toward that end. Research showed disruption, defiance and disrespect as the primary reasons black male students are sent out of the class and suspended at the highest rate nationally.

            By examining this issue through Critical Race Theory (CRT), this study acknowledged the impact of racism in education, and sought to identify strategies to address manifestations of institutional racism (disproportionality of suspension) that may provide teachers and schools with the tools at the classroom level to substantially reduce or eliminate the disparity of suspension. Using the CRT tenet of 'challenging the assumption of race neutrality' or the myth of colorblind institutions, this study identified race as a critical factor to examine in the classroom, where disproportionality of suspension is initiated with the out of class referral. 

Instead of further documenting how and why disproportionality occurs, this study uncovered potential clues that point toward solutions to eliminate this problem. By identifying teachers with successful discipline practices and examining elements in those classrooms, I looked at discipline strategies that keep students in class and revealed common discipline practices that accomplished this effectively. The findings may serve to inform teachers who wish for more effective classroom management of black male students. By investigating effective classroom discipline practices with black male students, this can support the elimination out of class discipline referrals and disproportionality of suspension of black male students in classrooms and schools.

Because black males are suspended more than any group, and are the most likely group to be incarcerated, being suspended from school has been linked to being the greatest predictor of involvement in the juvenile justice system, more than poverty indicators, or poor academic performance. These indicators represent a higher likelihood of incarceration for black males and connections between suspension and academic failure suggest that disproportionality poses a significant race-based equity problem in education. 

            This study explored the ways in which effective teachers practiced effective discipline, termed in this study as the three commitments, in their classrooms. Through interviews, and classroom observations, I was able to explore how effective teachers employed discipline practices for black male students. Using CRT, I looked at race as a factor in classroom discipline practices. Specifically, this study examined how teachers challenged race neutrality or colorblindness in their classroom.

            The result was a set of research findings that revealed how black males were effectively and creatively engaged in an intentional effort to keep them engaged in the classroom, learning.

The key findings revealed the effective elements termed the three commitments. The first commitment, the courageous commitment represents an important reframing of disproportionate suspension of black male students as a black male behavior problem to a teacher and institutional problem. These teachers emphasized learning and engagement and eliminated all non-emergency, non-safety reasons for out of class referrals. By focusing on learning over rule compliance, teachers avoided the power struggles common in classrooms with black male students. The teachers sorted and managed disruptive or challenging student behaviors in a way that kept students in the classroom and kept avenues for academic reengagement open. Teachers formed and implement discipline policies that were student-centered and designed to meet the educational learning objectives for student success and implemented in a way that allowed for adjustment based on student capacity. Teachers provided adequate support to students to meet the expectations of behavior in the classroom, setting them up for success, not failure.

 

"I view them as the product of whatever I am teaching them so I want them to learn as much as they can in my class because I feel like that's a reflection about me as a teacher."

- Math Teacher

 

This quote reflects the courageous level of responsibility and ownership of the students' learning. These practices support the teacher in having more responsibility in keeping black males in class and learning despite systemic issues of race and bias demonstrated in the literature.

The second commitment, the emotional commitment, revealed important connections between teaching and emotional maturity. While it is reasonable and arguably unavoidable for teachers to experience a range of negative emotions in teaching, the teachers in this study utilized a wide array of tools to manage their own emotions and redirect their students' emotional behavior. The teachers connected a greater awareness of inequity and racism as having a real impact on their students and their emotional disposition in their classroom.

 

"My students are really angry, upset and don't know how to articulate it... so what I do is I try and help them articulate why they are angry and use that anger and divert it into action [in the classroom]."

- Social Studies Teacher

 

The teacher in this quote reflects on how he allows and redirects anger, an emotion that frequently derails students away from learning and right out of the classroom. Emotional commitment on the part of the teacher through emotional attunement, relationship building, and emotionally struggling with their own practice, supports a much more equitable approach to teaching that greatly minimizes teacher bias and cultural mismatch in the classroom.

The third commitment, the commitment to social justice is a significant finding because it addresses a key CRT tenet of challenging race neutrality, the notion that eliminating racial bias and disparate outcomes by race can be achieved by ignoring race and pretending that students are not treated and impacted differently because of their race. The findings indicate the opposite. They indicate that teachers who keep students in class and reduce or eliminate disproportionality of suspension through deliberate action that is informed by a personal history and awareness of inequitable practices and systemic discrimination. The teachers in this study revealed that they are aware of the inequitable forces coming to bear on their black male students.

 

"I think that there are so many reasons, rightful, just reasons why they are angry that if I could learn how to take that anger and help them articulate why they are angry and then give them a little bit of understanding of the social, cultural, political, context of this country, that anger could be used to fuel (the student) kicking ass and getting an A."

- Social Studies Teacher

 

This quote demonstrates how the teacher holds the phenomenon of social injustice while simultaneously balancing it with supporting personal responsibility of the student in the learning process. Through race-based strategies and a deep personal commitment to the students these teachers communicated a commitment to override the oppression through their classroom teaching. These teachers formed close personal connections to the work and to the students. The influence of background beliefs, personal commitment and an explicit mission to override the oppression of black male student drove these teachers to perform well in a challenging environment.

Most significantly, this study can be used to frame disproportionality of suspension of black males as an adult problem, and a symptom of institutional racism, using the CRT lens of challenging race neutrality and using the 'expansive view' to measure equitable systems. By holding institutions, principals, teachers, and all adults involved accountable, this study aims the intervention toward the system and the adults, not the students. When the adults take responsibility, they wield the power and can build the capacity to eliminate disproportionality and address racism explicitly through practice. This ultimately can have a powerful effect on future research on this topic and in classrooms across the country.

 

 

 

 

 
 Macheo Payne

Dr. Macheo Payne graduated from the SFSU Doctoral Program in May 2013.  As a Senior Director for Lincoln Child Center, Macheo directs the training department as well as the Oakland Freedom Schools program. Lincoln is a mental health agency that serves children and youth in their schools and communities.

Macheo is also an adjunct professor at Cal State East Bay in the MSW program & the Sociology Dept.