By Diana Azcarate Barreto ‘19
The inaugural cohort of the Master of Arts in Urban Education program spent the fall semester observing seasoned Shelby County Schools (SCS) educators engage with students across the city of Memphis. Through our clinical field experiences, we gained a true sense of the challenges teachers surmount on a daily basis as they work tirelessly to help students excel academically while tackling the many standardized test requirements they face each school year.
Before we entered SCS classrooms, we spent the summer learning, discussing, and thinking about the works of John Dewey, Paulo Freire, Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky, Gloria Ladson-Billings, and the Rhodes Urban Education Summer Institute visiting scholar, Kevin Kumashiro. The cohort was challenged to contextualize our own experiences in public education throughout the course of these studies. A majority of the inaugural cohort attended public high schools in Tennessee, and our experiences were similar.
“I hated [my high school] at the time, but now I look back and I’m like, ‘Wow, it was phenomenal,’” says Olivia Glenn ‘19, a student teacher currently placed in a first-grade classroom.
Understanding our personal experiences in public education was merely one effect of these conversations. The works of Dewey, Freire, Ladson-Billings, and Kumashiro pushed us to think about what public education should be, and what it currently isn’t. While Dewey argues public education should be the institution that reproduces a benevolent society, Freire asks us to use education to upend the oppressive structures of society. Ladson-Billings agrees with Freire, and adds that education should be culturally relevant and take into consideration the experiences students come to school with and incorporate them into the curriculum. Finally, Kumashiro breaks down the structural policies that have normalized standardized testing and placed teachers, not policies, as the culprits in a shaky institution that is not beneficial to students.
Needless to say, as future teachers we stepped into our assigned classrooms with a critical lens, eager to see the decisions that teachers across the SCS district make day-to-day to ensure that every student is learning effectively.
Culturally Relevant Pedagogy
The Master of Arts in Urban Education program has at its basis a social justice orientation. One of the most resonant concepts throughout the coursework of the program is culturally relevant pedagogy, and we expected to see it used more in our field experiences.
“The first thing I learned about education is culturally relevant pedagogy, and that it is the most important way for students to learn how to learn,” explains Anne-Elizabeth Garrard ‘19, who was placed in an English middle school classroom.
But creating a classroom where culturally relevant pedagogy is the norm is more difficult in practice than in theory. Anne-Elizabeth observed a few attempts by her clinical educator to be culturally relevant. “My teacher sneaks it into the examples that she gives to help students figure out vocabulary. I was expecting to see it more than it’s being used, because there is so much opportunity for it.”
History classrooms are perhaps the best environments to make connections from the past to the present. However, in the seventh-grade social studies classroom I was placed in, I witnessed missed opportunities for such connections to be made.
That was frustrating for me. For instance, the inspiration for the lesson that I came up with about slavery, Islam, and Christianity was from the previous week in class. The students had just finished a unit on the slave trade, and the clinical educator didn’t really connect it to anything in the present. There were some comments that the students made that could’ve easily been developed into a broader conversation about the legacy of slavery, but she didn’t. I don’t know if it was because of time, or maybe she didn’t want to get too deep into it, but I feel like that’s a huge disservice to the students. I think they can have those deep conversations, that they’re ready to have them, even at 12 years old. They want to have those conversations.
Cultural Relevance in a Standardized Testing Environment
There are several constraints that prevent teachers from making culturally relevant instruction a reality in the classroom. I suspect that time is one of the biggest obstacles. Although the social studies curriculum is not scripted, it is a subject tested at the end of the year, which means social studies teachers feel pressured to move at a fast pace to cover everything that might be tested.
Subjects like mathematics and English language arts are regularly tested, and the instruction of these subjects is increasingly reliant on scripted curriculum. In our summer courses, the cohort spent some time thinking about how following a script to teach could impede critical instruction.
Notes Olivia, “I was surprised at the lack of scripts being used. It’s usually really heavy in math instruction, and I think that stops teachers from doing something that could be culturally relevant, because they have to use the examples from a book.” While she has not seen scripted curriculum used heavily in her classroom, she points out that even minimal use prevents cultural instruction in the smallest ways.
On the other hand, Anne Elizabeth shares a different insight. “I’ve talked with my clinical educator about this a lot, and she likes the curriculum and thinks it’s challenging, with good probing questions and a good basis—I agree with her totally. There's just an absence of supplemental material and there are holes in the material, which would provide the context.”
Context is everything. The importance of context to reading comprehension is one of the first things taught in our classes. Yet, the curriculum materials in public schools do not provide much context, which means teachers must do the work to provide it. “The eighth-graders spent one week on a lesson that was supposed to last a day,” Anne Elizabeth adds. “The curriculum itself is not bad. It’s just how it’s being taught and the confines of time around it—it’s a disservice to students.”
Scripted curriculums are viewed as a solution to low test scores. Apart from the problems of time constraints and the lack of supplemental materials, the cohort noted that scripted curriculums assume every student will understand each example or reference made in the exact same way. This type of curriculum is not practical, as each classroom has students with varying learning styles and educational needs and the curriculum is not all-encompassing.
“Something that I've seen my mentor teacher do a lot, that I want do in the future, is to make space to have small groups,” says Olivia. “When everyone else is working, at least two times a week you can pull out a small group of students who you know are struggling with something specific and give them extra attention.”
Spending the past semester in classrooms across SCS has helped us understand how to navigate working with curriculums that present time and knowledge constraints. By learning how to incorporate culturally relevant pedagogy in school contexts that rely heavily on scripted curriculums, we are confident that our resourcefulness will make us better educators in the long run.