We Teach Who We Are

By Christina Brown

Teaching is a most personal and political act, not simply a job, career, or vehicle for sharing one’s subject.   I think that it is impossible to separate the act of teaching from who we really are and the self that enters the classroom. As Parker Palmer inquires in The Courage to Teach, “Who is the self that teaches? How does the quality of my selfhood form—or deform—the way I relate to my students, my subject, my colleagues, my world?” Too many students are learning in classrooms where their educational experience is “deformed” by educators who have not explored the relationship between who they are and how and why they teach.  For teachers, students, and school communities,  we must explore, “who  the self that teaches” is.

When we engage in self-reflection, we must acknowledge the multiple identities that compose the self. I enter this work as an African-American woman as my primary identity. However, I must acknowledge that there are other aspects of identity influencing my work and the way students see me. To understand identities’ impact, I differentiate between cultural competence, defined as the ability to work effectively across cultures, and culturally relevant pedagogy.  Culturally relevant pedagogy “empowers students intellectually, socially, emotionally, and politically by using cultural referents to impart knowledge, skills, and attitudes”. Cultural relevance requires that one be in touch with his or her own culture and the “self that teaches.”

The cultural miscommunications that can lead to plane crashes underscore the importance of cultural competence. Cultural differences between captains, crew, and air traffic control can prevent the clear communication that averts crashes. The way culture can mediate communication around issues of power and authority can prevent people from using direct language when planes are running out of gas or instruments are being misread. “Why is the fact that each of us comes from a culture with its own distinctive mix of strengths and weaknesses, tendencies and predispositions, so difficult to acknowledge? Who we are cannot be separated from where we’re from- when we ignore that fact, planes crash”. When we ignore that fact in education, children fail, languish, and their ability to reach their full potential is limited.

Our work with students is as least as complex as navigating a plane through the sky. We must ask ourselves: How do our students tell us that they can’t learn the way we are teaching? How do they tell us when we have misunderstood? Will we filter what they say through the lenses of culture, adultism, race, and gender that can prevent them from being heard?  Sometimes, it might be possible that talking back to the teacher is a sign of resilience–not a deficit. The expulsion rates for African-American males are three times the rate for White males. This data is a stark reminder of the need to improve our communication across race and gender in our schools. When we do not reflect on how our own background and issues of language, culture, power and authority impact how we speak to and learn from each other in our classrooms, we limit our ability to do our best work as teachers and our students’ ability to soar or simply survive as the current education crisis for African-American males demonstrates.

I grew up in a large Northeastern city and first slept outside at the age of 30. It was not part of my urban cultural belief system that one would voluntarily sleep outside on the ground. It was not part of my skill set to know how to “camp.” My parents had never conveyed that this was something that I should want to do. Vacations were to be spent at hotels; parks were to be driven through; and there was no point in experiencing the world differently. My conception of outdoor culture as different than my own was similar to how people may experience differences and otherness across race, class, gender, culture and sexual orientation. When one has little experience with other groups, one tends to fall back on stereotypes and  personal backgrounds to create a reality that allows one to feel comfortable with one’s current level of exposure and understanding.

I first experienced the culture of the outdoors during an Outward Bound experience as a middle-school teacher, white-water rafting in Utah.  My sense of otherness and the distance out of my comfort zone was vast. I struggled as I asked myself, “How do I open up to this experience and learn? How do I go to the bathroom in the woods?”   I had a great deal to learn about this new culture; its language, ways of doing things, and belief system were new to me. I needed to develop cultural competence so that I could interact effectively with people who value camping and the outdoors even if I wasn’t sure why anyone would choose to sleep on the ground. I had to learn to be comfortable with my instructors and my environment so that I could learn. They had to respect me as an individual with experiences different from their own. They would have done a disservice to me and their program if they had dismissed me as a “city girl” who didn’t belong in their classroom, blamed my parents for doing such a poor job of preparing me for “school,” or lowered their expectations for me so I survived the trip but didn’t learn their curriculum’s skills and knowledge.

The instructors helped me become a proficient camper and learn crucial skills such as tying knots. Failure to tie up your boat correctly can result in dire consequences if it floats away and you are left without transportation options or supplies.  Tying knots was required curriculum.  For each skill, the instructors conveyed its importance and confirmed our ability to perform it independently. They also made sure that our learning connected to a larger purpose. We understood that the reason we were working so hard was because rafting Utah’s Green River and witnessing the beauty of the Lodore Canyon was a privilege worth the price of learning to tie a knot and a limited hygiene schedule.  “Curiosity is what we need.  We don’t have to let go of what we believe, but we do need to be curious about what someone else believes.  We do need to acknowledge that their way of interpreting the world might be essential to our survival” (Wheatley 35). My trip broadened my interpretation of the world and allowed me to share the outdoor culture with my students, many of whom were also new to it, in ways that acknowledged its value and the benefits of being curious.

For some students, the culture and the purpose of school are as far away as Utah’s Green River and the culture of the outdoors once were for me. As educators, we need to support students as we provide opportunities for them to push beyond their comfort zones and learn, especially for students for whom a love of school and learning is not yet part of their experience. The consequences of not embracing students as they are, as my instructors did for me, can be destructive for the student, teacher, and classroom. “Not learning tends to take place when someone has to deal with unavoidable challenges to her or his personal and family loyalties, integrity, and identity. In such situations, there are forced choices and no apparent middle ground. To agree to learn from a stranger who does not respect your integrity causes a major loss of self. The only alternative is to not-learn and reject the stranger’s world” (Kohl 6). If I had been approached as a “city girl” who didn’t belong outdoors, I would have remained one. Learning to teach who we are helps us to create schools whose culture is such that all students “choose” to engage in the intellectual enterprise of learning from and with us.

As an educator, I have struggled with the students who didn’t even attempt assignments. Despite frustration, I need to be willing to examine my teaching and ask why.  While working in a high school with a large population of student mothers I engaged these young women in conversations about reading to their children. One student, Tiffany, explained that she did not read to her child because “Reading is for white people.”  This comment reminded me that despite sharing a racial identity, a chasm of experience and class separated our worlds. To hear Tiffany describe a world where she consciously chose to limit her son’s exposure to books to prevent the encroachment of whiteness on her progeny was heartbreaking. However, the necessity of listening and exploring issues of race and literacy together so we could possibly find a different reality was clear.  Tiffany and I were able to find common ground by talking about the kind of future she wanted for her child and the need for her to work towards her own school success and to create literacy opportunities for her child. By the end of the year, Tiffany and her child had visited the public library on more than one occasion. We also explored the history of slavery’s prohibition of Black literacy to provide another context for Tiffany’s thinking about issues of race and reading. Students have myriad reasons for choosing not to engage in school, unless we talk to them and help them define school as a place of opportunity that can help them to construct a future of their choosing they may not be able to access any academic content.

The stories that we share with students help them to see themselves in the world and in our classrooms. “Narratives … have a discursive function and as such are powerfully implicated in the identity formation of African Americans as learners and intellectual beings. Not only are stories passed down from generation to generation about the meaning of literacy and the meaning of the denial of literacy, but these narratives show African Americans who they can become”.  We must provide students with counter narratives to stereotypes that create new ways of seeing themselves.  I developed my own counter-narrative while camping. Rather than cling to the belief that Black people did not camp, I imagined myself as a runaway slave on the Underground Railroad: the ultimate high-stakes camping trip. This became the counter narrative of the possible: people from my culture with whom I could connect in the outdoors, who had done more with so much less, helped to silence several prima donna complaints. The counter-narrative I presented to Tiffany was that reading can’t just be for white people if enslaved Africans risked life and limb for the privilege. As teachers, we must present counter narratives that allow students to see their potential, seek strengths rather than deficits, and present models of what is possible.

Effective teachers realize that students react to the teacher’s multiple identities. In addition to the way I see the world, there is the way the world sees me.  “By claiming not to notice [race], the teacher is saying that she is dismissing one of the most salient features of the child’s identity and that she does not account for it in her curricular planning and instruction”.  If you can’t see my color, then you can’t see me. If you can’t see your own color, then you can’t see the world in which many of your students live as they struggle to understand themselves in a multicultural world.  In the earlier story I shared of Tiffany, who was struggling to understand literacy separate from the racial construct she had created around it, a teacher, whether white or black, who did not “notice” race would limit his or her ability to teach her. As educators we must learn to be comfortable with the fact that the multiple identities we each carry impact how our students see us and how we see our students.

Taking the time to uncover the self that teaches is a journey into self-exploration that leads to paradigm shifts, seeing new perspectives, and appreciating once unfamiliar vistas.  “We must learn to be vulnerable enough to allow our world to turn upside down in order to allow the realities of others to edge themselves into our consciousness” (Delpit 47). This vulnerability to explore what we don’t know we don’t know is at the heart of the self-reflection that effective teaching requires.  As educators we must practice self-reflection, cultural competence, and culturally relevant pedagogy so we can successfully teach who we are with the students we have.