the boy who was raised as a dog

Stress is good for humans. It helps us grow and develop, get stronger and adapt in ways we never would be able to without it. Most of us experience healthy stress throughout our lives: dealing with parents and siblings; navigating school; dating; serious relationships—all these and more are sometimes painful, but always rich, opportunities to realize our full potentials.

Of course, stress can also harm if it is too intense or if we don’t have the capacity and/or support to deal with the level of stress with which we are faced. Children who are abused or neglected or who witness violent crimes are often overwhelmed and unable to process the trauma. The results are dramatic, especially if the trauma occurs in the first few years of life, because crucial cognitive and psychological growth can be interrupted causing serious gaps in brain development. It is a testament to the human animal’s resilience that such damage is mostly reparable—but only if the child is treated appropriately within the structure of a loving, stable home and a knowledgeable therapeutic environment.

Bruce D. Perry is a therapist and researcher who can provide the appropriate therapies and he has done so for many children. From sexual abuse, to profound neglect, to former Branch Davidians, Perry has worked with a lot of kids and has collected some of the stories in a book, The Boy Who Was Raised As a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist’s Notebook: What Traumatized Children Can Teach Us About Loss, Love and Healing (2007), written with journalist and science writer, Maia Szalavitz. Along the way, Perry educates us about trauma, its effects on children, and what he and his team have learned about successful intervention.

Reading this book as a teacher thinking about the trauma that my students may have endured before they came to my classroom gave me pause. If they have undergone such stresses, then helping them to learn means helping them deal with all that. It also means acknowledging that students’ reactions to what seem like an ordinary situations may not be at all ordinary to them because they trigger traumatic memories. Providing a consistent, caring environment for them becomes all the more important.

As teachers, we have to be careful not to approach our students from a deficit perspective. What students lack is less important than what they have, which is always more than we can know. At the same time, understanding some of the environmental stresses can help us deal with them. For me, Perry’s work provides some more understanding of the brain’s development and gives me yet another reason to meet my students where they are. If, sometimes, that means teaching fractions to Calculus students, so be it; if it means helping students over emotional blocks, that’s fine, too. I’m a teacher; I teach, doing whatever is needed to help my students toward their goals. This book helps me think about my work in new ways and for that I am grateful.

Uri Treisman rocks

Uri Treisman, already well-known for his work improving the success of Calculus students, continues to impress me. (And—I had the chance to meet him last summer—he’s a nice guy.) In this talk at the WestEd Board of Directors’ 2010 Forum, Treisman talks about the work Carnegie is doing on developmental math at the college level. He makes many smart points, often backed by research and data. One of my favorite parts of his talk is that he frequently refers to actual student feedback—a radical notion, by definition.

the importance of listening to students

Good teaching is as difficult to define as other arts and the debate over how teachers should be evaluated and what it should mean is raging all over the country. While reading a paper on teacher evaluation put out by Accomplished California Teachers, I realized that, though the study is useful and the recommendations good, it misses a fundamental issue. Too often, in the discussion among professionals about teaching and learning, we neglect the voice of students.

That’s one of the reasons I like the draft study done by James W. Stigler, Karen B. Givvin, and Belinda J. Thompson, “What Community College Developmental Mathematics Students Understand About Mathematics.” In it, they try to eplore what students get wrong and what they don’t and why. They listen carefully and respectfully to students, thoughtfully writing about what they find.

One of the most profound questions that students pose when asked to solve a problem during the interview is, “Am I supposed to do it the math way, or just do what makes sense?” The question reveals a fundamental disconnect between what students experience in their lives and what they experience in the classroom. Not a revelation: the disconnect is completely consistent with my experience listening to community college students in developmental math classes. Any teacher paying attention is aware of it. However, as I read this question and the rest of the study, I began asking a series of different questions:

• Is the math we teach connected to students’ lives?
• Is the math we teach connected to our own lives?
• Are we, as math teachers, so indoctrinated into a mathematical perspective that we force the connections between math and our lives?
• Would it be beneficial to math students for teachers to call out the cultural framing that we are bringing to the subject and that we are trying to help them assume?

Clearly, I’m not going to answer the first three questions here. People make variously good and bad arguments about math’s “utility” that are usually circular, starting from the assumption that math applies to most, if not all, the natural world. Rather, I think we must continue to ask them of ourselves and of our curriculum. The question of perspective and acculturation is complex and probably unanswerable. Philosophers of science, much smarter and more capable than I (e.g., Karl Popper, Imre Lakatos, Thomas Kuhn, and Paul Feyerabend) have been arguing about it for years without full resolution.

But the last question is easier for me. Cultures around the world do math, so math seems to be a fundamentally human activity. However, that math is not usually what we’re teaching. As such, I firmly believe it is helpful for students to see that the math we teach in our classrooms is a cultural construct and not necessarily “natural”; in fact, the math in our modern textbooks is a carefully contrived version of math. It is made to appear smooth, a straight line of development from numeration, to fractions, to factoring, to graphing, to functions, to differentiation, to integration, and beyond. If students don’t see how smooth and “obvious” it all is, then it is their fault. And when the story isn’t quite so smooth, we just pretend it is — “don’t you see?”

Acknowledging the culture of math and its interplay with the other parts of our culture is an important step to demystifying math and to being intellectually honest, toward having students realize that they can bring all their intuitions, experience, and knowledge to bear on problems, both in and out of math class. At the same time, it helps remind us, as teachers, to listen to students, because their experience of math is part of what math is in our classrooms. More, their experience of math will survive us, long after we’re retired, helping to create the culture of math in the world to come.

As teachers, we have spent years mastering our content and working to be better teachers. Yet, students still sometime disparage our work and/or our chosen field of study. Working with as many students as we do, it is often hard to see what we can learn from the next batch. Truly listening to our students takes effort and focus. I frequently fail to do it well, but every time I do, I am rewarded with a better connection and a better class. Listening to our students is part of the art of teaching. We fail to listen at our own, our profession’s, and our culture’s peril.

the wealth our students bring

I find TED talks slightly annoying, bastions of self-satisfied, white (how many people of color do you notice in the audience?), upper-middle class intellectualism (I’m using the term intellectualism as a form of oppression practiced on those deemed uneducated, unthinking, and uninterested in “Ideas”).

Still, there are some good talks in the series. If you haven’t seen the one entitled “Do schools kill creativity?“, by Sir Ken Robinson, then you should, especially if you’re a teacher. One of my favorite bits in the talk is his story about a now-famous dancer, who as a fidgety, irresponsible girl was taken to the doctor to see what was wrong. The doctor reputedly said to the mother, “Your daughter’s not sick; she’s a dancer.” That doctor recognized the talent and ability in that child and helped bring it out, if only by referring her to the right place. The more we, as teachers, can do that, instead of forcing all our students into the same boxes, the more we will be happy as teachers, the more our students will succeed, and the more our society will benefit from the wealth of contributions we all have to bring.

But there’s another piece to this issue. The answer is not just to say that all poor students are studying the wrong thing. I’ve seen too many math students, who appear destined to fail, turn their difficulties into success to think that all struggling students should be referred to another field of study. Rather, I see it as my job to help my students use the skills and abilities and experiences they bring to the classroom to become successful math students. When we do that, we are achieving the highest goals of democratic education by fostering  people that bring their whole selves to the collective issues we face. Considering the complexity of the problems in the global society, we need all the help we can get.

sentipensante

I read books on pedagogy because I want new teaching ideas, because I’m looking for new perspectives on teaching, and because I’m interested in emerging research in education and related fields as cognition and neurology. Frequently, books on teaching invigorate and inspire me. Sometimes they depress me. They almost always make me thoughtful and humble in the face of the enormous task and responsibility that we teachers have to educate our students.

In Sentipensante (Sensing/Thinking) Pedagogy: Educating for Wholeness, Social Justice, and Liberation (2009), Laura I. Rendón challenges and attempts to rework the foundation of our ideas about education. She looks at her own education and the way she teaches, asking questions about why teachers do what they do and what kinds of knowledge and experience we value. Rendón goes on to propose alternatives that she believes lead to more wholeness in our students, more satisfaction for teachers, and better results for society. She writes explicitly that the alternative pedagogy she espouses is not for everyone, yet I argue that even if you are not comfortable with every aspect of her ideas, the questions she raises and the answers she proposes are valuable for every teacher.

Rendón lists seven “agreements” on which traditional education is based:

• the agreement to privilege intellectual/rational knowing
• the agreement of separation
• the agreement of competition
• the agreement of perfection
• the agreement of monoculturalism
• the agreement to privilege outer work
• the agreement to avoid self-examination

Interrogating and exploring each of these agreements, Rendón deconstructs them. Clearly, these ideas are not the only foundation for education; Rendón argues that they frequently cause more harm than good. She discusses alternatives to these agreements: community, collaboration, spirituality, intuition, humanness, multiculturalism, and inner exploration are some of the words she proposes as part of the discussion.

Rendón also talks about the community/individual dichotomy, criticizing traditional education for privileging individual work, over community. I may be overstepping a little—but I think very little—when I say that she sees this emphasis as being responsible for many of society’s ills and as contributing to the achievement gap for many groups of students, students whose culture of origin teaches them to value community more than the individual. Cultures are, of course, not so simple; they are not focused only on individuals; nor are they solely focused on community, but are rather on some continuum in between. Cultures are also dynamic, changing their focus in response to social, political, and historical forces. Rendón is aware of this complexity and includes its as an aspect of her alternative pedagogy.

The fundamental dichotomy in the book is, as the title suggests, that of thinking versus feeling. Rendón tries to deconstruct that dichotomy, arguing that the distinction between them is less clear than many think. Recent research supports the idea that intuition, feelings, and other “non-rational” factors are an integral part of our cognitive processes. The integrative approach, breaking down the distinction between body and mind, is an important part of understanding how our students actually learn. Thus, Rendón’s pedagogy tries to sythesize and include all parts of our students’ humanity, as well as our own.

Rendón asks some important questions about the way we teach:

• What is the epistemological foundation and what the ontological assumptions underlying our pedagogies?
• What are the goals of our pedagogies?
• What are the strengths and limitations of our pedagogical models?
• Who is engaged by our pedagogies and what are the forms of engagement?
• What is the positionality of the instructor?
• What is the focus of the curriculum?
• What is the foundation of the classroom context?
• How are our pedagogies transformative and liberatory in nature?
• What are the spiritual elements of our pedagogies?
• What is our philosophy of assessment?

As I read these questions, I wonder how many of us, as teachers, ever ask ourselves such questions about our work. How many of us have a philosophy of teaching and education? Maybe it is many or most. But I know I benefited from thinking about these questions, whether I agree with Rendón’s answers or not.

Toward the book’s end Rendón raises another important question: “How do we work with those who resist and trivialize our work? Perhaps one answer is to let go of outcome.” I think there is wisdom in this. Working with our colleagues, who may not share our views about education, we are challenged to respect differences even as we fight for what we know is right. Sometimes it is necessary to acknowledge that someone you respect and admire does not view the work of educating students in the same light that you do. Changing people is rarely an effective strategy. It can be wiser to let such differences coexist. I believe this respectful acknowledgement is part of what Rendón is writing about in this section.

At the same time, “letting go of outcome” can be use as a reason not to invest too much in the effort for change. If letting go of outcome means we let go of responsibility, then this approach will not yield results. The status quo protects the status quo and will not change without organized, determined efforts for change.

Sentipensante challenges me to rethink my teaching, my relationships with my students, my scholarship, and my institution. It is about breathing room and taking a moment to recognize my students’ and my own humanity. Courage and perseverance are necessary to change one’s practice—let alone one’s institution—to include such space. Rendón’s book may start you on such a path.

from fish to infinity

In a New York Times opinion piece, Steven Strogatz does a great job of articulating both the power and abstraction of numbers. It’s something I try to talk about in my classes — probably with less success than Strogatz. I often use the example of shepherds keeping track of how many sheep they have by creating piles of stones. The usefulness of carrying around a number, say “24,” rather than 24 stones, to express how many sheep one has is pretty self-evident. At the same time 24 applies equally well to sheep, bombs, dollars, stones, people, and more, which presents a potentially dangerous abstraction; that is, we don’t really want to treat 24 dollars the same as 24 people.

Strogatz writes about this issue and more in the article. His goal is to discuss “the elements of mathematics, from pre-school to grad school, for anyone out there who’d like to have a second chance at the subject — but this time from an adult perspective. It’s not intended to be remedial. The goal is to give you a better feeling for what math is all about and why it’s so enthralling to those who get it.”

If future installments are as well done as the first, the project will be useful for the math-interested and not.

(Thanks to Alisa for the heads up.)

outliers

Outliers (Malcolm Gladwell, 2008) is subtitled The Story of Success, because Gladwell sets out to look at successful people, how they achieved that success, and what factors outside their control helped (or hindered) them on the way to success. He looks at professional hockey players and other athletes. He looks at Bill Gates. He looks at school children and lawyers. From my perspective his conclusion is that every successful person has a series of advantages and/or opportunities that don’t come to most of us; there is some unearned, usually structural advantage—often several of advantages—that successful people have that the rest of us don’t. Therefore, Outliers is a thoroughgoing critique of idea that meritocracy exits.

For example, in Canada, where many professional hockey players grow up, children’s hockey is organized by age group. If you will be 12 during the calendar year, whether in January or June or December, you will play in the 12 year-old league. If you turn 12 in December, compared to children born in the first few months of the year, you will be 10 or 12 months behind in development. So, when it comes time to select the best of the 12 year-old league, you’ll be at a significant disadvantage, because you’re likely to be less physically developed than most of your peers. The best of any particular age group tend to get more playing time, more coaching, and just play more hockey. Thus, when you get to the 13 year-old league, not only are you behind your peers physically, but also in terms of experiencing and training. This gap widens at every age group—is it any surprise that most of the Canadian national hockey team is born in the first three months of the year? According to Gladwell, the great majority are.

This is a great illustration of an arbitrary advantage, given to some and not to others, that leads to the difference between success and failure at something, in this case hockey. Gladwell describes similar structural and systemic advantages and disadvantages in all kinds of situations until, after telling a story about a “brilliant immigrant kid [who] overcomes poverty and the Depression, can’t get a job at the stuffy downtown law firms, makes it on his own through sheer hustle and ability,” he says: “I hope by now that you are skeptical of this kind of story . . . . [S]uccess doesn’t happen that way. Successful people don’t do it alone. Where they come from matters. They’re products of particular places and environments.” Successful people are “a product of the world in which they grew up.

Gladwell goes further, explicitly critiquing the way our culture clings to “the idea that success is a simple function of individual merit and that the world in which we all grow up and the rules we chose to write as a society don’t matter at all,” thereby wasting huge a amount potential talent:

Because we so profoundly personalize success, we miss opportunities to lift others onto the top rung. We make rules that frustrate achievement. We prematurely write off people as failures. We are too much in awe of those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail. And, most of all, we become much too passive. We overlook just how large a role we all play—and by “we” I mean society—in determining who makes and who doesn’t.

Gladwell implicates us all. “To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages that today determine success . . . with a society that provides opportunities for all. ”

Societal responsibility for helping our children succeed and for helping all people realize their potential is an important message. If Gladwell had left I there—pushing us to accept our responsibility and calling out to change the arbitrary nature of success in the current structures—the book would have been a useful and even profound call to improve education and opportunity for all.

Unfortunately, rather than change society to acknowledge the talent and skill of more of us, for Gladwell the solution seems to be to deny ones culture in the name of being successful by the standards of our current structures. Looking at Korean Air pilots and their historically disproportionately high crash rate, Gladwell literally argues that “to be a success at what they did, they had to shed some part of their own identity,” a deep respect for authority that he admits “runs throughout Korean culture.” Similarly, for Marita, a twelve year-old girl in a special school called KIPP (Knowledege is Power Program) in New York City. “[T]he cultural legacy she has been given does not match her circumstances . . . . Her community does not give her what she needs. So what does she have to do? Give up her evenings and weekend and friends—all the elements of her old world—and replace them with KIPP.” That is, Marita needs to give up her culture because her culture isn’t giving her “what she needs.”

This attitude is classic cultural deficit reasoning (see the work of Tara Yosso and my entry on a lecture she gave in San Francisco). The idea, often put forward by well-meaning liberals, is that the poor (usually non-white) unfortunates, who don’t have the advantages that middle-class white kids have, can be saved by assimilating, by learning and adopting white middle-class culture. That this ignores the strengths, abilities, intelligences, and experiences the rest of the world brings to every situation doesn’t seem to register. This perspective looks at what people don’t have (i.e., they don’t have middle-class white culture), rather than what they do have (i.e., cultures and practices and abilities all their own). It also ignores the racism, sexism, classism, and other oppression that people outside dominant groups endure and the way that identity is fundamentally shaped by those forces.

A much better approach would recognize that everyone comes with strengths and weaknesses and would celebrate the incredible diversity of our cultures and abilities. It would foster talents we currently don’t even call talents. Creating true opportunity for more people to be successful in our culture means acknowledging the wealth that all people bring to school and work and politics and life.

a brief exam

Now that the school year is over, I find myself looking for some conclusions, or lessons learned, or at least some reflections. It’s an indulgence on some level, but I’m enough of a believer in the “examined life” to make an attempt:

I dove into a more overtly political world in the last year and, as a result, I’ve written much less here. I’m still writing—perhaps more than before—but instead of writing about what I read, I prepare for public statements and speeches. I summarize arguments and send out mass emails and construct positions. It is a very focused style, rhetorical and argumentative and to help myself I’m studying speeches by politicians like Presidents Obama and Lincoln.

Those choices are, of course, quite conscious; they are leaders I’d like to emulate in some ways. While I do not pretend to have the intellect or ability of either men, I do try to learn from them. I’m impressed, in particular, by the way Lincoln prepared and the careful way he argued. Sometimes he made fine distinctions that may not play as well in today’s faster, sound bite politics, where a subtle point is hard to make, but the power of his logic and his tendency to evoke first principles are important.

I’ve also been reading about organizing and framing and the political process more generally. There’s a whole set of skills and abilities that are unique to the political world and that I have never before worked to develop. I’m beginning to see it as a perspective, a way of seeing the moves that people make, the postures they take. I’m learning how to respond. And, fortunately, I’m comfortable disagreeing with people while still respecting them.

This process of acquiring new skills and a new lens through which to view the world is akin to going to graduate school. Also like graduate school, I’ve been conscious of a desire not to lose the person I was when I entered the process. So far, I don’t believe I have. In fact, in many ways the heat of political pressure only drives me closer to my core values: it’s always about the students for me. They are the reason I put myself through the pain of interminable meetings and other minutia of the political process. And I’m reminded of those values every time I go to the classroom. There I am part of the miracle that we call teaching and learning, through which people create new lives and begin to see themselves in new, more powerful light.

The challenges and growth I’ve experienced in the last year are part of my own process of seeing my self and my life in a new way. Where it will lead I cannot say—which of course is part of why we get up every day: to find out what will happen. My life is full and rich with learning. I can ask for little better.

the art of critical pedagogy

Let us begin by rethinking the position that urban schools are failing. . . . When one set of schools [in high-income communities] is given the resources necessary to succeed and another group of schools [in low-income communities] is not, we have predetermined the winners and losers. . . . Urban [low-income community] schools are not broken; they are doing exactly what they are designed to do.

This in the second paragraph of Jeffrey Duncan-Andrade and Ernest Morrell’s brilliant book, The Art of Critical Pedagogy: Possibilities for Moving from Theory to Practice in Urban Schools. It’s brilliant because it is based in the experience of actually teaching our country’s youth, on working day in and day out with high school students in Los Angeles and Oakland. Most of the book is Duncan-Andrade and Morrell detailing several educational projects on which they’ve worked, describing their experiences as they try to put their belief in critical pedagogy into practice, and explaining what they learned.

As grounded in experience and practice as they are, Duncan-Andrade and Morrell know the theory, too. In chapter two, they give the best overall summary of the work and writing of the major names in critical pedagogy—Freire, Shor, Darder, McLaren, Giroux, hooks—I’ve seen. In addition, they discuss the efforts of a few “lived examples of critical pedagogy to emphasize that critical pedagogy is more than just a teaching strategy—it is a personal, financial, political, emotional, and spiritual commitment to prioritizing the needs and liberation of people who are suffering under various forms of oppression”: Carter G. Woodson, Lolita Lebrón, Franz Fanon,Reies López Tijerina, Audre Lorde, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Subcommandante Marcos. (If this list and the words used to describe these people intimidate you, you’re a normal human being. The authors make it less intimidating as they describe how they put those words into practice in the work they have done and continue to do.)

Before they do that, they lay out their understanding of the urban public school context in which students try to learn and in which teachers try to teach. They argue that “urban school failure is tolerated because deep down our nation subscribes to the belief that someone has to fail in school,” belief supported by racist and classist ideology. Currently, the line is that “educational failure is the result of cultural deficiencies on the part of the student, the family, and the community—de facto, educational attainment is attributed to cultural superiority or assimilation into culturally superior ways.” Regardless of the reasons, the result serves the dominant culture in our country, because “some people must fill the least desirable places in society, and it is important that they feel they deserve to be in those positions or, at the very least, that there is a formal mechanism to justify their place there.” The attack on students’ esteem and confidence is self-perpetuating and circular: if you’re made to feel stupid, you do worse on tests because of your lack of belief in yourself.

But, according to Duncan-Andrade and Morrell, the equation of performance in school and intelligence is false. For, if

school achievement were an accurate measure of intellect, achievement patterns would more closely mirror the random distribution of intellect that genetic scientists report in human populations. Instead, the results of schools are quite predictable. . . . With remarkable consistency, schools serving low-income, non-white children disproportionately produce the citizens who will spend most of their adult lives in the least desirable and least mobile socioeconomic positions (prison, low-ranking military positions, and service labor).

The few urban students who do well are “asked (sometimes tacitly, sometimes explicitly) to exchange the culture of their home and community for the higher culture of the school in exchange for access to college.” Therefore,

urban education reform movements must begin to develop partnerships with communities that provide young people the opportunity to be successful while maintaining their identities as urban youth. This additive model of education focuses on the design of urban school culture, curriculum, and pedagogy that identifies the cultures and communities of urban students as assets rather than as things to be replaced.

This “approach provides pedagogy and curricula that lend immediate relevance to school in the lives of urban youth. It also works to break the cycle of disinvestment of human capital in urban communities by crating graduates who recognize their potential agency to improve urban centers, rather than seeing them as places to escape.” Duncan-Andrade and Morrell see critical pedagogy as a win-win for students, teachers, and society as a whole, because “rather than presenting the community as a place to rise above, schools must equip themselves to draw from the knowledge that students bring with them to school—knowledge that is often not in their textbooks but is acquired from the streets, family cultural traditions, youth culture, and the media.”

They are critical of the results we’ve seen so far from multicultural education because it has “failed to deal with the conditions of modern urban life.” They argue persuasively “for pedagogical practices situated in critical analyses of the role of urban schools in social inequality.” We should “shift the rhetoric of failure from young people and caring teachers onto an inequitable system designed to concretize failure in poor communities.”

Finally, Duncan-Andrade and Morrell “believe that urban students should go to college at rates equal to their more affluent counterparts” and that a

schooling environment that foregrounds the relationship between education and the most pressing conditions in the community, an education with relevance, is most likely to produce notable increases in college eligibility. . . . [T]he desired outcome in critical pedagogies in urban education is multiple and . . . it must impact academic achievement, identity development, and civic engagement. . . . To often, we believe, critical pedagogies focus on the rhetoric of social critique to the exclusion of the development of sophisticated literacy and numeracy skills.

These academic skills frequently come “at great personal and social costs that include alienation from family, language, community, and progressive social values.” Therefore, Duncan-Andrade and Morrell’s work focuses maintaining a sense of community and culture for students, while still promoting rigorous academic skills, by setting those skills in the community and cultural context. Literally, they ask the students what problems or questions are important to them and then develop the curriculum around those issues.

All this made connections for me with the writing of bell hooks, especially in Where We Stand: Class Matters in which she talks about her experience of going to college and being alienated from her home culture by the college culture and the resulting disorientation of being caught between two the two. (For more, see my entry on hooks’ book.) The connection is expected, since Duncan-Andrade and Morrell begin their work with hooks and other related writers as the foundation upon which they build. Indeed, they are trying to do the work that such writers recommend.

As I mentioned above, after contextualizing their work, Duncan-Andrade and Morrell spend the bulk of the book describing their work with students in urban schools. In the final chapter, “Toward a Grounded Theory of Praxis,” they try to draw conclusions from their experiences, point to areas that need more research and exploration, and make suggestions about teacher education. Importantly, they also talk about love. In a section called “Pedagogy, Love, and Revolution” they write about “revolutionary love” and its potential to change both students’ lives and the larger world. From my perspective, real love—that includes celebrating successes and correcting errors and facilitating the development of the person each student wants to be—for your students is the foundation of good teaching. It doesn’t mean that you like every student the same or that every student likes you. It means that you love them and treat them with the respect and compassion you treat all your loved ones. It means that you treat your students the same way you treat your own children. This is a beautiful, dangerous, and somewhat radical stance—and that is right where I want to be.

gansta, wanksta, rida

“All the research shows the same thing: the bottom line is that good teaching is about relationships. The best teachers come in to their classrooms every day ready to be vulnerable to their students. Therefore, to be a great teacher is to deny your human instinct to protect yourself.”

These words from Dr. Jeff Duncan-Andrade, Professor of Raza Studies and Educational Administration at San Francicso State University, during his standing-room only talk at the City College of San Francisco on February 25. The title of the talk—“The Gangsta, Wanksta, Rida Paradigm: Urban Youth Culture and Learning”—is a reference to common elements he found in the best teachers in his study of urban schools. The few great teachers are “ridas” in that they “ride” with the community. On the other side are the handful of “gangsta” teachers that don’t like the students they work with and act as barriers to, rather than enablers of, those students. In the middle and on the fence are the “wankstas” who mean well and do a lot of talking about what they are going to do for students, but rarely, if ever, follow through.

Duncan-Andrade sought to normalize the teachers he studied who produced student success by every measure, including good grades, high test scores, increased self-confidence, and sustained engagement with school and learning. “Being successful with our students is not heroic, not exceptional. We make it heroic to excuse ourselves” when we are not successful. According to Duncan-Andrade, great teachers have or create the following five qualities:

• Critically Conscious Purpose — great teachers are teachers because they want their students to change the world
• Duty — great teachers understand that it is a privilege to teach, that they serve the students and their communities, and that the students are more important than the job
• Preparation — great teachers meticulously prepared for class and take a great deal of ownership for their work and for the success of it in the classroom
• Socratic Sensibility — great teachers know that they don’t know, are self-critical without doubting their ability to succeed
• Trust — great teachers engender the trust of their students, choose solidarity over empathy, and know that loving their students means holding them to high expectations

Duncan-Andrade is author of The Art of Critical Pedagogy: Possibilities for Moving from Theory to Practice in Urban Schools. He has lectured around the world about developing classroom practices and school cultures that foster self-confidence, esteem, and academic success among all students. His research interests and publications span the areas of urban schooling and curriculum change, urban teacher development and retention, critical pedagogy, and cultural and ethnic studies.