What does it mean to know?
A hopeful dilemma in the education of adolescents

Lalitha Vasudevan Adolescent Literacy Consultant

School is a risky proposition. Parents, guardians, and caregivers willingly adhere to the legal decree that they daily send their children off into the care of relative strangers and, in some case, to spend their days within the walls of concrete and steel structures that are more reminiscent of containment units than learning environments. If we follow the inquiry tradition of "making the familiar strange," we might ask of our K-12 education system: Who are they to do this? That is, who are teachers? And, perhaps equally important, how do they come to know their students? These questions are of great import throughout a child's schooling experiences, and especially relevant to the education of adolescents.

In this article, I draw on my experience working with a group of African American adolescent boys to highlight questions about and suggest ways to rethink what goes into knowing in a school. In particular, I include data from a conversation with one of the boys, Cyrus, and position it adjacent to ongoing conversation that educational scholars have been having about the impact of relationships between students and teachers on the teaching and learning contexts in which students spend most of their days. Central to the work of the Carnegie-funded planning grant in which several of us have been involved is the question of knowing in schools. I offer the following excerpts as guideposts for the conversation that will continue throughout the year.

 

School could become, in fact, a place where students learned about the world and then resolved, collectively and creatively, to change it! (Jordan, 1995, p. 7)

Now black people like Romeo, TJ, Jamal, me, Shawn ... we're ... black and stuff like that and we come from different neighborhoods ... and we have different kind of ... visions of what kind of teachers we would have, like we would think that out teacher ...would be a black teacher that would kinda do the same things you do, that would know about the streets and stuff like that

 

What is the hope for schools? Perhaps it depends on who we ask. In this age of accountability and increasingly high stakes, a conversation about possibilities and imagination is looked upon with disdain, or at least with wishful longing as the "real" business of schools takes precedence. I could go on about who decides what's real, and how the decisions about school priorities are made, but that is a column for another time... Here I want to point to the ways in which Cyrus's first comment above resonates with and adds flesh to June Jordan's hope on the left. This was not a "race-focused" conversation, but, like many others we had, was a conversation in which one of the boys invoked race in discussions about schooling experiences and often in response to the question: "How was your day?" In addition to reminding me of the inseparability of race with identity, these conversations reminded me of how central an open engagement with the multiple dimensions of race is to a knowing relationship between students and teachers - adults and youth - particularly in urban contexts. So, to my earlier questions, I add: What does it mean to know?

 

I began with these children expecting deficits, not because they or their background were deficient - I was definitely against such a view - but because I did not how to see their strengths. (Ballenger, 1999, p.3)

[S]ometimes we end up with the wrong kind of teacher like Ms. Wilson... because she's white ... but she's kind of like a fairy tale kind of teacher, ya know? Says things like ... you ever saw this commercial where it was this white family and they just think everything looks so happy, you know? The kids clean their rooms, they got straight A's, you know... all that stuff like that? That's what she thinks of... That's what she is kinda is looking at.

 

Another risky proposition is writing about race. I enter this proposition in part based on the responsibility implicitly placed on me by the work and research that I do and have done, and partly because I trust my audience to inquire with me in these matters. Cynthia Ballenger's words are resounding to me even now, reading them several years after initially encountering them. I placed her thoughts alongside Cyrus's continued musings on his then-current sixth grade teacher. In addition to raising questions for me about what my role as a researcher/adult/teacher was in helping his own process of inquiry, the juxtaposition of his words with Ballenger's make visible the disconnect that is often manifested in schools as miscommunication or low expectations. The distinction of "difference" from "deficit" continues to be a thread worth exploring and disrupting, both in the perceptions of students and teachers. We might ask ourselves: Who do we engage as we attempt to know?

 

My bottom line conclusion is that teachers' perceptions, expectations, and behaviors probably do help to sustain, and perhaps even to expand, the black-white test score gap. The magnitude of the effect is uncertain, but it may be quite substantial if effects accumulate from kindergarten through high school. The full story is quite complicated and parts of it currently hang by thin threads of evidence. Much remains on this research agenda. (Ferguson, 1998, p. 313, quoted in Cazden, 2003, p. 39)

[A teacher] first has to ... you know, try different things. ... Out teacher does the same boring stuff all the time. It's just that I think ... the way a child is - no... the way a teacher is ... can reflect on how the student does in their classroom. ... That's what I think, in my opinion. ...                 If you have a teacher like that ... you tell a teacher that your friend got shot or something like that you want a teacher that can talk about it with you ... not a teacher that just says, "oh, that's bad," you know? Y'see what I'm saying? Someone who could relate to the problem. ... I think if you could find a teacher like that you could probably do better in the classroom.

 

As a design team, we have spent the last several months designing an intermediate literacy implementation proposal that maintains (and deepens) the tenor of reflection and inquiry found in Cornerstone's current work. We are faced with the challenge of respectfully integrating what we know about adolescence and literacy, generally, with the characteristics that are distinct to the districts and schools that will initially be involved. Is it true that what we know about the ways that students and teachers - and, more broadly, young people and adults - get to know each other is in conflict with the urgency for traditional markers of achievement? Or, perhaps, we should be asking ourselves a different question: How can we orchestrate a way of looking at schools that is simultaneously differentiated in attending to the balance between nurturing and challenging in the multiple contexts that intersect in the school lives of adolescents: i.e. academic, peer, community, etc.

As this column evolves over the course of the year, I hope to come back to several of these questions with greater depth in an ongoing discussion and exploration of the issues at play in the teaching and learning of adolescents. I look forward to a dialogue about these issues beyond the space of this column, as well.

 

References:

Ballenger, C. (1999). Teaching Other People's Children: Literacy and Learning in a Bilingual Classroom.

Ferguson, R. (2003). Teachers' Perceptions and Expectations and the Black-White Test Score Gap. Urban Education. 38(4).

Ferguson, R. (1998). Teachers' perceptions and expectations and the black-white test score gap. In C. Jencks & M. Phillips (Eds.), The black-white test score gap (pp. 273-317). Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.

Jordan, J. (1995). June Jordan's Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint.