Equitable Teaching Enhances Achievement Opportunity for the Students We Share

• In Event: The Students We Share and the Teachers We Need Between the US and Mexico

Abstract

Opportunities to learn are not evenly distributed across schools and classrooms for the students we share between the US and Mexico. Achievement opportunities for these 9 million students in primary and secondary classrooms are weaker than for their more privileged peers. Entrenched institutional challenges in both countries undermine transnational students’ opportunities to learn. In this paper, I synthesize theory and empirical studies to address “equitable teaching” to enhance achievement opportunity for the students we share between the US and Mexico. I define equitable teaching as high-quality instruction that resonates with students’ lived experiences, values, and cultural knowledge, practices, and identities (Jensen, Grajeda & Haertel, 2018; Jensen, Pérez Martínez & Aguilar Escobar, 2016). I provide illustrations from research on equitable teaching in classroom in both countries, and conclude with a series of recommendations for US and Mexican stakeholders to collaborate in pursuit of an equitable teaching agenda.

Equitable teaching includes but is more than universal aspects of good instruction (Jensen & García, 2019; Jensen, Mejía-Arauz &Aguilar Zepeda, 2017), such as asking analytic questions (Saunders, Goldenberg & Hamann, 1992), providing clear behavioral expectations (Emmer & Stough, 2001), or engendering warm, respectful, and enthusiastic relationships with students (Roorda, Koomenm, Spilt & Oort, 2011). Equitable teaching is instruction, lesson planning, teacher-child relationships, and parental engagement that connect meaningfully with what children know and do outside of school—with family, friends, and others in their communities. It integrates the cultural practices and identities of the “students we share.” Equitable teaching is meant to be both effective (universal) and meaningful (cultural). I see these two values as mutually reinforcing—as different sides of the same coin.

Equitable educators for the students we share understand the significance of raising children to be bien educados (Bridges et al., 2012; Reese, Balzano, Gallimore & Goldenberg, 1995; Valdes, 1996). They seek to eliminate deficit ways of perceiving Mexican immigrants and their children by providing connected and communal activities and interactions in classrooms to enhance achievement opportunities for all students. Connected interactions integrate the everyday practices of students (including their language practices) into classroom activity, and nurture critical awareness of the ways society privileges some and excludes others (Banks & Banks, 1995; Ogbu, 1992). Communal interactions provide routine opportunities for transnational students to initiate discussion and collaborate freely with peers to enhance their awareness of language and culture, and to engage in disciplinary learning across the curriculum. Communal interactions foster interdependent (work with others and identify with their success) as well as autonomous (deliberate decision-making) academic participation among students.

To implement equitable teaching practices, I provide tailored recommendations for educators, teacher educators, researchers, and policymakers in both countries. Arguing for actions to support more equitable teaching is a call for greater collaboration with educators to understand and to improve classroom teaching--a shared responsibility of us all. Equitable teaching is a distinct way of being to connect academic learning with the lives, hearts, and minds of the students we share. It simultaneously upends tradition in teaching and learning while preparing all students for professional success and civic engagement in the 21st century.

Author

• Bryant Jensen, Brigham Young University