Teaching in Color: Contemporary Perspectives, Challenges, and Recommendations for 21st-Century Teachers of Color

• In Event: Does Color Know Color? A Historical and Contemporary Examination of Teachers of Color

Abstract

Teacher education programs and school districts across the country, writ large face tremendous challenges in helping teachers gain the skills needed to teach all students effectively (Banks, Cochran-Smith, Moll, Richert, Zeichner, LePage, Darling-Hammond & Duffy, 2005). While these challenges have always existed, they take on renewed impetus in the contemporary education context. This context is defined by high stakes accountability, deeply entrenched educational gaps in achievement between students of differing racial, cultural, linguistic, learning and economic backgrounds, and a sustained and growing mismatch between the background and experiences of aspiring and preparing teachers and the larger K-12 student population. While clearly not unique to this particular time period, a primary solution proposed for tackling this dilemma in the contemporary context, is to recruit and retain more people of color in the teaching field. The argument, here, is that students of color have increased levels of achievement when their teachers come from the students’ racial, cultural and/or linguistic background (Villegas & Davis, 2008).
In this commentary I consider the role teachers of color play in a contemporary education context and some of the pressing challenges they encounter when seeking to provide an equitable and effective education for their students. The first part of the presentation examines the existing literature on preparing teachers to teach in culturally relevant/responsive ways— pedagogic approaches (Gay, 2000) that many scholars recognize as informed by and related to knowledge associated with teachers of color (Ladson-Billings, 1995; Irvine, 2003). This discussion will address the strengths, obstacles and contradictions that teachers of color, along with those working with them, face when seeking to do this work. Extending from this context, the second part of the presentation explores some of the additional dilemmas that teachers of color face when teaching in a contemporary context. I focus specifically on the challenges related to teachers of color acquiring and appropriate using critical sociocultural knowledge, or what I refer to as knowledge that is needed to understand how race, and other sociocultural factors impact the teaching and schooling process (Author). Recognizing that it is vitally important that teachers acquire and draw from this knowledge if they are to teach in equitable and effective ways, I will illuminate several key constraints—individually, educationally and societally—that stand to curtail these processes.

Author

• Keffrelyn D. Brown, The University of Texas - Austin