YEHYUN KIM: CT MIRROR

Three insights on anti-racist teaching from Carolyn

1. Invite school administrators to engage and observe your curricula and pedagogy so you can proceed with their support and feedback.

2. Having support networks is crucial to the ongoing process of anti-racist teaching and to get and receive ideas and feedback.

3. ELA classes present an opportunity not only to learn the formal elements of literary analysis, like plot, character development, and narrative, but also to introduce important historical context and depth animated by anti-racist principles.

Veteran teacher Carolyn Streets can still recall learning about slavery in middle school, and how her own knowledge and experiences differed so dramatically from the sanitized narratives being taught. “It was in stark contrast to what I knew about African Americans and their contributions to history. As an African American student, I knew there was tension in how standard textbook and curriculum drew false equivalents between its units on slavery- the feeling that ‘this is your only legacy,’and knowing that slavery is apart of American history, but it's not the complete history of my ancestors. Having ancestral voices eclipsed by artificial and biased texts struck a nerve with me.” 

Streets’ memory of feeling marginalized drives her to ask two important questions of her lessons: “Who is telling the narrative?” and “How do curricular approaches portray those narratives to kids in my classroom, particularly to those who come from historically marginalized communities? ” Streets reflects on the discussions as a fellow in the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute seminar “Teaching about Race and Racism Across the Disciplines” and how a color blindness approach to text can be counterproductive. We do not live in post racial society and students want to talk about their real world experiences. “I have never had a year go by without students raising questions on issues of race and equality.”

Streets’ pedagogical approach stems from the theoretical framework of Schema Theory emphasizing  building schema and background knowledge while employing an anti-racist pedagogy to traditional English Language Arts curricula. When it comes to enhancing curriculum or developing new units, Streets’ process begins by looking for what is missing. She considers the perspectives and voices of the text and works backwards from there to further develop a race-conscious approach that “supports learning, but also tells the true story of marginalized voices and challenges popular narratives.” Streets believes that anti-racists approaches matter in the conversation about racial justice and that teachers can use their classroom libraries to counter analytically distant critiques within that conversation. This approach includes diversified perspectives of race, gender, and orientation.  She thinks carefully about the outcomes and new perspectives of the learning objectives. Crafting her curricular approach is a collaborative effort as Streets works alongside administration examining standards and objectives in alignment with the written and taught curriculum. Navigating school spaces as an anti-racist educator takes courage and collaboration. “You have to have courage in your convictions, and clarity on how instructional moves culminating  in your teaching and learning and alignment between the written and taught curriculum is intact.” Streets feels lucky to work in a school environment that provides constructive feedback ensuring accountability, support, and freedom to approach the curriculum in new ways. 

For the 2020-21 school year, Streets plans to implement two critical approaches. First, through the Yale Teachers Institute, Streets developed a curriculum unit on Roll Of Thunder, Hear My Cry, a novel based on an African American sharecropping family in the South during the Great Depression and Jim Crow era. Seeking to analyze the text from a fuller and more radical point of view, she described the unit’s intent to “drill down into the historical underpinning of the text and examine the systems that influence character behavior.” Streets’ unit presents a different approach to reading the text by foregrounding the socio-political forms of power preluding the Civil Rights era and analyzing the antecedents of these forms of power that  underpin character motivations and shape the larger story. Streets presents a creative entry point to teach this through the perspective of  the music of the resistance ranging from traditional gospel hymns to modern day songs. Additionally, Streets won a teaching Support Grant from Harvard University for her unit titled Girl Power! Female Heroines in Novel Study. Through this grant, Streets will use novels from her curated classroom library centering reading on how socio-political and economic systems favor or work against the status of women, and how women orient themselves to those forces. The gaze is primarily through the lense of the African American experience in the Women’s Suffrage Movement to investigate how minority women work within these systems to mobilize for social change. Learning centers on how these systems underpin character behaviors, conflicts, and plot lines and helps students to make real world-to-text connections building their historical application to fictionalized complex story structures. Streets regrets how the current pandemic cut short the school year and  is currently considering how to streamline and redesign her units for hybrid learning in accordance with the “new normal” of the pandemic.  

 Streets notes that collaborative efforts are key in helping students build agency within their own learning as all of her curricular units are designed as interdisciplinary resources for teachers of all levels. Streets credits extra educational opportunities as being personally and professionally transformative. Having support networks is crucial to the ongoing process of anti-racist teaching. Streets encourages gathering with like-minded teachers, whether it’s branching out to the teachers in your building or sharing resources with online communities such as teacher-focused social networks. She recommends teachers utilize every opportunity for professional development by applying for travel grants, seminars, and institutes with organizations such as the National Endowment for the Arts. She believes that across every discipline, it is crucial for teachers to not merely teach content, but to produce new approaches to the text, especially when approaching content centered on historically aggrieved populations. Lastly, Streets encourages teachers to approach the work of anti-racist teaching by being the voice  of pushback, a voice that “Insists that we address this in a way that is not going to marginalize students as I was when I was a student.”