Cracks in the Foundation: Trouble at Parent Night (Part 5)
By David Rose
(with contributions and review by Jenna W. Gravel, and Nicole Tucker-Smith)
[Note: This is the fifth installment of a six-part blog series by CAST Co-Founder David Rose, part of CAST’s UDL Rising to Equity initiative, a multiyear, community-driven effort to revise the UDL Guidelines to identify, name, and redress systemic barriers to equitable learning and outcomes. We encourage you to join the conversation in the comment boxes, by using the hashtag #UDLrising on your favorite social media platform, or by emailing your feedback to udlguidelines@cast.org.
Access parts one, two, three, four, and six on the UDL Center blog. You may also download an accessible version of the complete paper on the CAST website.]
Near the end of the school year, the entire annex staff hosted a parent night. I was eager to meet the parents and also nervous. I had had almost no contact with them over the year, and I had no idea what kinds of concerns or questions they might have about my not-very-traditional teaching. And I looked (and was) very young and inexperienced. So, I showed up early, wearing my best (only) suit and tie.
On the way into the school, I met the vice principal. He greeted me and said: “I see this is your first parent’s night.” I looked puzzled so he patted me on the shoulder patronizingly and told me it would be a disappointing evening, and hardly worth wearing the nice suit.
He was right. Out of my 120 students, only 3 parents showed up, all mothers. In several of my 5 classes, no parent showed up at all.
At the time, I felt many emotions. Relief was one of them, but anger was also among them. One hundred no-shows seemed to reflect a depressing lack of parental investment. Looking back, now embarrassingly, I recognize the fundamental social and cultural divide between the school I taught in and the home and community in which my students lived. Certainly, that divide was evident in my English curriculum. Most of the required reading could best be described as neo-colonial. While I loved teaching Shakespeare, the surrounding curriculum was dominated by novels like Ivanhoe and Great Expectations and poetry by Wordsworth and Kipling. Something should have seemed amiss to me — too narrow, too homogeneous, too English. And my reading list was just the start of the problem. Basically, the school was suffused and dominated by literature, music, art, language, customs, expectations, biases, and a “hidden curriculum” that were foreign, unfamiliar, or at least obscure to many of my student’s families, and oppressive to many. It is not surprising that few of my parents felt they belonged.
As was the case with the MFA, closing that kind of gap — a gap in who belongs — will require more than sensitivity training workshops or community outreach, it will require re-examining and often relearning how the school belongs in its community. Given the historical legacies and barriers of racism, sexism, ethnocentrism, classism, ableism, etc., that re-learning will be difficult in many communities. And given that communities are at least as diverse as students, that learning will require careful universal design.
The UDL Guidelines were developed to address internal barriers — those inside classrooms — not the barriers between school and community. But it is clear that reducing the external barriers will require attention to many of the same principles and guidelines as the internal barriers (e.g., barriers are inevitable when the school communicates in only one language, assumes one culturally specific body of background knowledge, values, etc.). Rather than reviewing the applicability of each of the Guidelines, let me highlight how the UDL descriptions of “expert learners” may apply to schools.
Expert learners are resourceful and knowledgeable. A UDL school is more likely to belong in the community when it is resourceful and knowledgeable. But that would require some adjustment. While many schools see their role as disseminating culturally privileged knowledge to needy constituents, a UDL school would emphasizes a different role: Embodying and modelling what it means to be an expert learner (not just an expert teacher). For example, it is resourceful in that it leverages the existing knowledge networks in the surrounding community and incorporates local expert learners — of all kinds — into its pedagogy and mentoring. It is knowledgeable in that it recognizes the limits and biases of its own knowledge and continually seeks, very publicly and collaboratively, to expand the things it knows, and the ways it knows. A UDL school belongs in the community because it knows how to learn in that community.
Expert learners are planful and strategic. A UDL school belongs in the community by being planful and strategic rather than reactive. Expert learners are aware that many of their reactions to the world are unconscious, instinctive, automatic, biased, evolutionarily ancient. The advantage of those reactions is speed — humans jump to avoid a snake before the time it takes to become consciously aware of it. But many of those automatic responses are maladaptive and they are very hard to unlearn. Expert learners engage the evolutionarily (and ontogenetically) newer parts of their brain — primarily prefrontal cortex — to predict and anticipate what lies ahead so that they can take advantage of experience, context, logic, probability, etc., to make more careful, more deliberate, less biased, decisions. Schools, as human organizations, also exhibit biases and prejudices that are “implicit” and unconscious — often creating barriers with the larger community. Expert schools, UDL schools, anticipate their own biases and prejudices rather than ignore them, and actively design plans and strategies to reduce the barriers to their belonging.
Expert learners are purposeful and motivated. A UDL school belongs in the community by sharing its values. Neuroscientists have learned that there is a large and specialized area in the prefrontal cortex whose function is to calculate the value, the relative reward, of any future goal. Without being able to estimate and anticipate that value, the brain loses its ability to set priorities or sustain them — it becomes purposeless and unmotivated. Not surprisingly, even more than its knowledge or strategies, a school’s success is determined by its values. A UDL school recognizes that its values — including antiracism, anti-ableism, etc., — must also be universally designed. That is, its values must be constructed in concert with the full community, including those who have been traditionally under-represented and marginalized, in which it hopes to belong,
As I look back, I am shocked by how little I knew about the community from which my students emerged. I knew almost nothing about the knowledge, the plans and strategies, or the values that motivated and animated them. It is hard to imagine any theory of pedagogy that would think that was a good idea. With some revision, and some explicit prompts and supports that direct attention to the interface with the community, the UDL Guidelines could help future teachers like me, and their schools, be better learners in a community in which they belong.
[Go to part six of this six-part series. Or download an accessible version of the complete paper on the CAST website.]
