Their Words Matter: Black Male Stories That Influence a Teacher Educator's Instruction

• In Event: "Dangers Seen, Unseen, and Unforeseen": The Experiences of Black Male Researchers Interviewing K–12 Black Males

Abstract

According to Tate (1997), “stories help to build consensus, a common culture of shared understandings, and a more vital ethics” (p. 220). The stories of young Black males from 14 focus groups conducted by the author provided insight into the experiences they face every day in schools across a Midwestern state. In this paper the author uses the opportunity gap framework (Milner, 2012) as a lens to explain how the stories of the Black males informed his practice within his teacher education courses. The candid voices of the males helped to inform how the author incorporated their voices into his practice as a teacher educator.

As the focus groups commenced, the males opened up by using storytelling (Delgado, 1989; Ladson-Billings, 1998) to express their experiences. Peers listened intently, nodding in affirmation because they too had similar experiences. Three tenets of Critical Race Theory (CRT): permanence of racism, colorblindness, and myth of meritocracy were directly and indirectly discussed in a majority of the sessions. The author grappled with how his own negative schooling experiences informed his perspective on the males’ narratives.

The author used his positionality as a Black male, former elementary teacher who attended low performing urban schools to teach his teacher education courses. The frustration he felt about the experiences both he and the study participants faced and not being able to immediately change their situation caused the author to try to figure out a way that he could make change happen within his locus of control. The narratives of the males from the focus groups allowed a current perspective that would resonate with his current students, because the voices were representative of males whom they would potentially teach.

Instructional change began with looking at the weekly objectives and goals for from the author’s secondary student teaching seminar and elementary literacy methods course. Then the author integrated the five tenants of the opportunity gap (Milner, 2012): color blindness, cultural conflicts, meritocracy, deficit mindsets and low expectations, and context-neutral mindsets and practices into his lesson planning. Group discussion, case studies, videos, teacher observations, and self-reflection were all ways in which the author was able to share the experiences of the males from the focus groups and how the pre-service teachers would either affirm or push against the tenets in their experience within the course. Students appreciated learning from the current experiences of students, but were also shocked that schools were treating a group of students in the negative manner.

The scholarly significance of this paper shows how listening to Black males’ current experiences in schools can inform the delivery of course content to pre-service teachers so that they can hopefully reverse negative racialized schooling experiences of K-12 Black males. Additionally, this paper addresses how the experiences of Black males can be examined by use of tenants of CRT and bring awareness to how the opportunity gap can be integrated within the curriculum of teacher education courses.

Author

• Donald A Barringer, Michigan State University