Glove Up! The Constant Battle of Being a Culturally Responsive Educator

• In Event: Sheraton Roundtable Session Seven
  In Roundtable Session: Educators and Graduate Students: Simultaneous Education and Academic Work in Whiteness Environments (Table 11)

Abstract

Context & Purpose: I have been repeatedly painted as the villain for merely refusing to maintain the harmful status quo I observed in my schools. Gloria Ladson Billings (2021) reminds us that teaching in a culturally relevant manner is highly political work, and the problems we witness as educators are likely gateways to bigger, more problematic ideas. Ladson-Billings (2021) defines the components of culturally relevant pedagogy as student learning, cultural competence, and socio-political/critical consciousness (p. 9). This work can produce massive changes within the ecosystem we call public education, yet resistance to change will often produce reactions to culturally relevant pedagogy that are passive aggressive at best and openly violent at worst.

Theoretical Framing and Analysis: I am the stereotypical English teacher in America. I am a white woman, raised in a small, Midwest town and a middle-class upbringing. Yet, I valued cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005) from a very young age, and made moves in recognizing linguistic and resistant capital, specifically, in my classrooms, which drew suspicions from my colleagues and administrators almost immediately. I saw gaps between the goals of my students and I built bridges to proficiency to assist in their ability to navigate a changing world (Ladson-Billings, 2021, p. 52). Even after getting fired from this first job, I pursued further critical education with my MA program. This led to deliberate choices involving representative literature in my 6th grade classroom in another district that many saw as “risky.” Despite state and national recognition, many educators refused to teach alongside me as my co-teachers due to my “highly political classroom.” My ostracization was magnified further when I transitioned to a high school role in rural Iowa and witnessed blatant use of racial and homophobic discourse by staff and students, along with troubling ideological frameworks of accepting microaggressions amongst students. After encouraging and empowering students to challenge this behavior with our administration, I was characterized as an instigator and resigned after only nine months. Currently, as a PhD student, I have noticed teaching with a critical paradigmatic frame is seen as admirable but not necessary, and openly discriminatory positivist approaches are not only encouraged, but celebrated. After being labeled as “politically charged” by my last course team, I resigned from my TA post, finding that yet again, “work designed to challenge us to reconsider what we mean by ‘good’ teaching” was not the kind of work the system really wanted (Ladson-Billings, 2021, p. 53).

Scholarly Significance: This work will highlight the open resistance of academic leadership and the current system to socioculturally informed pedagogical methods. It highlights how harm is seen as a byproduct of those who choose to do critical work while teaching. It not only recognizes this harm exists, it illustrates it is intentional as a method to maintain the biased status quo of our field. Thus, educators and ed-prep students teaching with a culturally relevant pedagogy need to be prepared to face these consequences.

Author

• Britt Jungck, Iowa State University
  Presenting Author