Although I never had the words to describe it, I knew I was different from my peers as a child. As the child of Indian immigrants, I sought ways to cope with the pressure to assimilate and conform while growing up in all-white schools. There were few role models that looked like me outside of my family, and the only cultural representations I saw were insulting stereotypes that made fun of Indian culture. Over time, I found comfort in friends who looked like me and had a similar immigrant upbringing, but it was that feeling of difference that helped me connect and identify with other people sitting outside. the dominant culture.
I feel this same sense of difference in a student who recently transferred to my school from a predominantly black school in Milwaukee. Shortly after he arrived, I emailed his mother to get her opinion on how he was adjusting to her new class. She told me that, although she enjoyed the new school, it was a culture shock from her previous school. Understandably, coming from a majority-black school in the city, where all the students look like you, to a majority-white school in the suburbs can be a difficult adjustment for a student to navigate.
Her transition has made me rethink my classroom culture and my role as an educator in creating that culture. I long believed that building a strong classroom culture and holding all students accountable to that culture was the right way to teach. Now I’m not so sure.
A story of two students
Acclimating my new student to the classroom reminds me of a situation I encountered a few years ago. I had a couple of students, both girls, one white and one black, who loved to chat with each other whenever we stood in line for lunch. Despite numerous reminders about what a line should look and sound like, or where its points were, they always found their way back to each other. When I asked them to stop talking, I got two very different reactions. The white student looked at me apologetically and promised to stop while the black student questioned me or pointed out that others were also talking, assuming that I was deliberately attacking and punishing them.
These responses led me to very different reactions, which were informed by what I thought of each of them as students. It was easy to accept the white student’s apology as genuine and thank her for it, while the black student’s more passionate response escalated into a situation that led to arguments, loss of recess, and, ultimately, a phone call home. None of the students changed their behavior and these incidents continued throughout the year, so why should I have cared about their different approaches?
Once I took a step back and thought about these responses through the lenses of culture and race, I began to question how I handled the situation. Was I reacting differently to the black student because she was black or because of how she responded to me? Would I do the same thing if the white student responded to me the same way her black friend did? Soon, it became clear the extent to which the cultural patterns I had adopted from my teaching and school experiences in white schools centered behaviors and cultural patterns that the school deemed appropriate, and further marginalized students who chose not to play along. I’ve been more attentive to this in the years since, but with my new student, I’m seeing it repeat itself.
The culture our choices create
To be fair, my new student isn’t doing anything I haven’t seen from fifth graders during my 18 years of teaching. He likes to hit any surface that makes noise with his pencil. He shouts questions and answers every time he thinks of them. He loves his new Chromebook and would happily spend the day with a headset on, listening to music while he works. But much of this interferes with the expectations and agreements our class has established, and I now realize how much a student’s identity matters when it comes to understanding his behavior as well as his peers’ reactions to him.
While I consider their motivations, I am also continually aware of the needs and perspectives of the rest of my students and how they view my interactions with them. When he violates a classroom expectation, I can understand his need to do so as an act of self-preservation and resistance or expression of individual identity, and I can allow him some flexibility. But at the same time, I wonder what message the rest of the class receives and how they process what they see.
Does this confirm a bias in your own mind about who breaks the rules and who misbehaves? Have I better served my new student by allowing him that freedom, or have I reinforced a sense of difference and otherness? There doesn’t seem to be an easy or even correct answer to any of these questions. However, understanding these choices and how these decisions can undermine and exclude our Black students gives us the opportunity to reinvent our practices and create more equitable schools.
Find the right path
In recent years, I have used parts of the book. “Sealed” by Jason Reynolds and Ibram X Kendi to help my fifth graders understand the origins of racism and slavery in America. In the book, Reynolds and Kendi describe segregationists, assimilationists, and anti-racists. The basic framework is that segregationists don’t like people who are different from them, assimilationists will like you if you act like them, and anti-racists will like you for who you are. This framework has helped me analyze my choices and see ways in which schools continually undermine students who do not fit into the dominant culture.
While we work to prevent the active segregation of students within the school building, much of what schools try to do is assimilate everyone into white, middle-class culture as a path to achievement. While I can understand this approach, I wonder if this assimilationist approach to racial and cultural differences perpetuates racial disparities in outcomes in our schools. At the very least, it seems to me that it does not meet the needs of my new student.
As someone who has acculturated to those norms, I feel a responsibility to try to create something new that doesn’t simply assimilate students of color into white culture, but accepts them as they are. But what kind of culture is that? I’m not sure where the path leads.
Make the commitment
My school District has been committed to addressing equity over the past few years. We have investigated historical racism and systematic marginalization, examined our own identities and biases, and explored anti-racist and culturally relevant curricula and pedagogies. We can look at our data and see that we continue to underserve Black students and we can talk about systems and structures that do not support those students. However, within the confines of the culture in which I work, that training has not given me the tools or opportunity to make decisions in everyday situations that create a less biased and less racist classroom culture.
For my white colleagues, the lack of opportunities to interrogate this culture and explore the racial contexts of the decisions they make each day is an ongoing challenge. Despite our commitment to this work for many years, I continue to hear from Black students at my school. who see white teachers as racist. I do not believe that my colleagues harbor racial animosity or actively discriminate against Black students, but as defenders of a system that asks students of color to subjugate their identities to fit into a culture that does not always welcome them, we all bear responsibility.
For my part, I cannot help but see the role and impact of race in the way I manage my classroom. I recognize that schools often force students to assimilate into the dominant culture and that I am guilty of feeding it. Knowing what I know now, I am trying to establish a paradigm shift that focuses more on inclusion and less on reinforcing dominant cultural practices. In the past, when a new student arrived, he might have said something like, “I don’t know what things were like at your old school, but that’s not what we do here.” Now I ask, “What was your old school like and how did it work for you?”
It is my hope that this paradigm shift represents a significant step toward co-creating an inclusive classroom culture that affirms the individuality and multiple ways of being of each of my students. If nothing else, it feels like a small act of resistance that my younger self wanted.
