Three insights on antiracist teaching from Samm

1. Educators must avoid propagating ideas about anti-racist and culturally relevant pedagogy that unwittingly further stereotypes about the needs and interests of students of color

2. Anti-racist and culturally relevant pedagogy that centers around leveraging and building upon students’ own knowledge, interests, and lived experiences promote better engagement and more effective learning.

3. Administrative signals to the teacher body are critical to establishing a foundation for anti-racist culture in a school.

Samm Leska never intended on becoming a teacher. Her path into education began with her experience in and surprising affinity for the Americorps program Jumpstart teaching at underresourced preschools. From there, she joined Teach for America, decided she needed more of an “education in education” and went back to school, and afterwards returned to Connecticut, only to be shuffled between several schools amidst various budget cuts.

Leska currently teaches literature at a high school in Westport. The variety of administrative and demographic settings to which she has had to adapt, rather than stifling her anti-racist drive, has reinforced and further advanced her teaching framework. When asked how she views anti-racist education, she points to the importance of the teacher’s philosophy.

“I had a very big white savior complex,” she reflects. “I think a lot of people, particularly people in urban education or low-income education that are teaching students of color have a mindset that we need to help that’s both very well-intentioned and incredibly problematic. I definitely had that”. She describes leaving that mindset as a critical inflection point in the process of becoming an anti-racist educator: “You’re not here to help save anybody...You’re here to teach children and understand that children are complex and different”. In its place, Leska emphasizes “trying to make things as applicable to kids’ lives as possible” as the core of anti-racist education and culturally relevant pedagogy.

That said, Leska warns a lot of nuance can be lost even after teachers adopt a more appropriate perspective. Educators’ attempts to confront stereotypes regarding students of color can result in the unconscious construction of new stereotypes regarding the needs and interests of these students. “The way I had been taught about culturally relevant pedagogy I felt like was, use Tupac to teach intercity youth,” she says wryly. “Every time people talk about culturally relevant pedagogy they try to like ‘make it cool and add some hip hop into it.’” She is clear: “That’s not what it is.” 

This awareness manifests in her classroom through lessons that not only acknowledges the diversity of students’ interests, but leverages their inherent knowledge. During her time at New Haven Academy, Leska taught an elective on Feminism and Literature that, in addition to employing voices of color such as Roxane Gaye, Bell Hooks, and Chimamanda Adichie, emhpasized placing texts in conversation, and in doing so encouraged students to examine their own knowledge and beliefs. One lesson compared Jane Eyre, a book by Charlotte Brönte about the eponymous English governess and her relationship with her employer Mr. Rochester, and Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys’s anti-colonialist critique and response to Jane Eyre written from the point of view Mr. Rochester’s wife.

“Kids could see these books kind of talking to each other and playing off of each other,” Leska says, highlighting how comparing the two books allows students to analyze how society views women across race and time. Such discussion allowed students to begin examining their own funds of knowledge. “[They said] things like ‘People have never talked to me about women before as, like, a thing,’ or ‘I didn’t realize this about myself or I didn’t think about myself as a women before,’ and… the young men in the class were also ‘I didn’t think about being a women and understanding the experience of a women is something that is uniquely important to think about’”. From there, students began asking questions of society such as “Why didn’t we learn about this in history and why don’t we know about this stuff”.

The class culminated in a discussion about whether Disney’s Mulan was a feminist film. “The are ways you can look at Mulan and go ‘Absolutely she’s like a warrior’,” Leska states. She goes on to say that, on the other hand, Mulan having to dress up as a man, for example, can make reaching a decision more complex. Leska once again emphasized that the effectiveness of the lesson rested upon drawing from students’ own interests and allowing students’ own experiences to guide their learning. “This is a movie kids have seen, they have grown up with. They’re used to Disney, and to think about this from a completely different perspective now that they know all these things [about feminism]: they were engaged in that discussion because they cared about it”.

Leska maintained this focus on capitalizing on students’ knowledge in her other classes. In one of her middle school classrooms, eighth grade students created a survival guide for middle school for incoming fifth graders. “That’s an experience they know a ton about. They can think about writing in a very intentional way. Honestly, [it was] the first time as a teacher that I had success getting kids to think about the audience of who they were writing to,” Leska recalls. “It was because it meant something to them and they understood who the audience was. It was real.” 

The importance of the practice goes beyond student engagement. “I think about where am I giving kids a chance to use knowledge that they have, because now they’re not fighting anything,” Leska says. “A lot of time kids can struggle in their writing because they’re not writing about things that they know about, they’re like writing about concepts or new contexts that they are not familiar with” (15:00). On the other hand, with projects such as these, students expand upon existing knowledge and can say to themselves “I know about middle school. I read a little about adolescent development and that informs me but like I know how to open a locker, and I know what to tell you about friends, and I know about young kid culture and meme culture, and I know how to make it engaging for them”.

Much of this can be accomplished by paying attention to the questions that students are asked. “If you stop and ask kids questions that are being answer or explored in a novel but also something that they can reflect on in their own life, they’re going to be more engaged” (18:05). Leska uses a class on The Glass Castle, an memoir by Jeannette Walls detailing her impoverished upbringing under dysfunctional parents, as an example. Students were asked to evaluate whether they thought Jeannette’s family was a good family, and prior to this, asked to reflect on their ideas of a good family—“What did their family look like, what were their experiences with their families?” (18:53). “It's going to be easier to write about whether you think that they’re a good family or not if you have a deep sense of what you think that means to you because you’re going to write a better argument if you have been reflective and done some metacognitive work within yourself to be able to see it within characters and things like that within the book” (19:23).

Educators employing this style of culturally relevant pedagogy can run into problems when students’ reliance on their knowledge is not balanced by critical reflection. Leska recalls a point of tension between two of her students, a white boy and a black girl, during a discussion about the play Fences, which examines the struggles of working class African-American Troy to provide for his family. While discussing Troy, the male student mentioned that the character “should just work harder,” a statement that provoked a response from his peer. Leska utilized the situation as simultaneously a teaching moment for the boy and a show of support for the girl.

“I said, ‘This is what you need to understand’,” Leska tells us, and recounts how she addressed the boy’s antiquated idea of race, a trait Leska says is common in schools where the students are overwhelmingly white. “You have to unpack things, or require kids to unpack things,” (28:11).  Leska continues: “A lot of it was looking back in the text and being like “No no no, you’re missing parts of the experience that have been put in this play to understand and you’re relying on your own knowledge, but you need also know that there’s things in the book that are being said that you’re not understanding”

Such situations are difficult to navigate, Leska admits, but are critical to ensuring students learn and that marginalized students feel safe. “I’m sure I did not do it perfectly, but sometimes you have to sit and challenge kids to think about things a little bit differently, or think outside of their own perspective” 28:46. As for the girl, Leska spoke with her afterwards and was told “she felt like someone had heard her in that moment.”

Leska finished with a discussion of school administration, and how the amount of time an administration spends addressing anti-racist and culturally relevant pedagogy is directly related to the level of comfort educators have with respect to undertaking such projects. “The more, as a district as a school, as an administrative team, the more you are training teachers or sitting teachers down to have conversations about this, the more that you build up teachers to feel confident to talk about it, to feel confident that, ‘if you’re taking time out of our PDE to talk about race or antiracist education and these issues for kids then it probably means that when i go into the classroom to do this, and to wave my flag, you’re going to have my back’”.

The opposite is also true: “And if you’re not getting trained on those things then [the administration] is sending a silent message. When people aren’t talking about it or an administration or a district is not talking about then you’re sending a silent message that ‘mm, I don’t want to touch it’”. Leska, who is also a member of her school’s equity team tells us that the main reason more of her peers do not practice anti-racist or culturally relevant pedagogy is the perceived lack of administrative support in case a lesson goes awry. 

“I honestly wish that I had space to talk about race and gender and inequities, in school. I wish that someone was like ‘okay now her is your time, in this group, and this is the action plan’” Leska concludes. “In order to be an effective anti-racist educator you have to be in conversation with people and I just don't think that people provide lots of time for teachers to do that”.