I am not proud to admit this, particularly considering I have spent over 10 years working with English Language Learners, but two questions I too rarely considered were:
- Who are my students seeing in the materials we work with in my classroom? And…
- How are the people they see portrayed?
It wasn’t that I wasn’t aware that most of the authors we worked with in my English class were white European or American males; it was that I bought into a pretty common belief about these books and these authors: they tell us universal truths. Sure, the authors may all have a similar cultural, linguistic, and racial background, but everyone can relate to the themes they write about. After all, we are told, that’s what makes great literature…well…great…
Then, I had the awesome opportunity to lead a Cross-Cultural Studies course and revisit some of the material I worked through when I was first working toward my own ESL endorsement. I don’t know if it is age, experience, or a bit of both, but the material hit me differently this time around. I started to realize in a pretty serious way that changes needed to be made in my own classroom and that falling back on the “universal truths and themes” argument was just not good enough.
While this continues to be a journey for me and many others, it is an important one to make for the well being of our students and, frankly, our society. As I work with many professional teachers, I hear many express how they feel they can’t do much as individuals. However, I really do think as leaders in education we hold a great deal of power and responsibility. As cliché as it may sound, we can make small changes that make a big difference.
With this in mind, I want to share three practical suggestions (with examples) meant to increase representation and create a more culturally responsive classroom. The first two suggestions also show not only how to consider issues of diversity, but also how to hit key ELA content standards as well!
First, it is important to consider ways to explicitly address issues of diversity with students (and even fellow teachers). I think the TED Talk by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The Danger of a Single Story, is a great place to start. This talk works specifically to address stereotypes in a very honest but approachable way. I used this particular TED Talk to craft an ACT/SAT style assessment, an online Discussion Board, and a way to build schema for my freshmen reading students. Can you tell I dig this talk?!
To explicitly discuss diversity, I find it’s also helpful to think about what works well with the curriculum that already exists (as we often have little control over core curriculum as classroom teachers…a discussion for another time!). For example, in our Freshmen Seminar class we already had two test prep activities focused on Jackie Robinson and Julie Krone: both broke major barriers related to race and gender respectively. I used these core texts as a springboard to dig a bit deeper into diversity and “firsts” with my students. I developed this active reading activity on Newsela focused on the essential question: (How) can sports help fight stereotypes? After actively reading, students practiced organizing ideas according to text structure and other key content goals in Microsoft Teams, and we had an helpful discussion over our remote synchronous learning time! (Tip – for discussions like this, it is often helpful to let students write out some responses ahead of time. It gives students some “think time” and you some insight about how you may guide the discussion. For more tips, visit this document mentioned later in the post.)
In addition to explicitly discussing issues like stereotypes and privilege, it is important to have diverse representation be just “something you do”. It’s great if you want to talk about Martin Luther King Jr., but it’s not so great if you only talk about him and/or you only talk about him in February! A big goal I had for myself was to use this awesome tool from Tolerance.org to start thinking more critically about the everyday sort of representation I hope to achieve in my classroom. In turn, for example, when it came time to work on our Career Unit in my Freshmen Seminar reading class, I worked to find some articles on Newsela and built this activity about people with different backgrounds living out their dream jobs. In addition to some active reading practice on Newsela, I also gave my students some practice with inference using this form through Microsoft Teams. This is actually the lesson I used to get certified as a Newsela Teacher Trainer, so if you are interested in more details, please feel free to check out my Newsela Teacher Trainer video submission.
Finally, while you may not have the power as a classroom teacher to change your district or beyond over night, it’s important to at least start a conversation. Again, as I worked on my Newsela Teacher Trainer submission, I developed “Starting a Conversation about Diversity in the Curriculum and Classroom” geared toward starting a dialogue about creating a more culturally responsive and representative classroom.
This is definitely still the start of this quest for me, but it’s a path I am glad I am traveling!