Different Approaches to Anti-racist Teaching
Part 3: Learning from Equity in Action
Edited by Ryan Ingram
This is the third in a series of four articles that address how the Goalbook team is making a concerted effort to learn about anti-racist teaching practices from the educators who are and have been engaging in anti-racist teaching. By learning from others, we hope to contribute to a more racially equitable US public school system through our own products and services.
View the other articles in the series here
As I was learning more about anti-racist teaching, I noticed not just shared universal features, but also contrasting perspectives and approaches. A more in-depth look at each revealed that they weren’t in conflict with one another but that the complexity of the problem of racial inequality in education is way too nuanced for any single approach to be the exclusive “right way”.
I encountered many different ideas, concepts, and practices when reading pedagogical literature and theory as well as when interviewing education leaders who were leading anti-racist teaching efforts in their own school districts. I have found four important and distinct perspectives helpful to me in understanding and analyzing the various anti-racist teaching practices and I hope they will be useful for you as well.
Four Different Approaches to Anti-racist Teaching
Below are the four different approaches I found and I’ll share what I’ve learned about these from both theorists and researchers as well as practitioners.
- Quality of Service
- Culturally Informed Practice
- Student Agency
- Social Justice
1. Quality of Service
This approach asserts that the teaching practices that reliably produce student excellence are already known and “out there” in the world. Therefore, the cause of the racial disparities in student achievement come down to the fact that these effective practices are inequitably distributed throughout our education system with Black students and other students of color receiving lower quality instruction than white students as a group.
The late professor, Ada Hilliard III, states that “reform” to create a more equitable school system is to increase the prevalence of quality of teaching that Black students and other students of color encounter in the classrooms they are in.
There is no mystery … popular public policy proposals are pitiful as means to change things in substantial and positive ways for the masses of our children, and for African children in general. In general, educators have pursued what I call “decoy issues,” such as the testing issue, the preoccupation with the child capacity issue, and the “reform issue.” None of them captures the essence of what I have attempted to discuss above, and that is to adopt an approach that encourages high-quality teaching.
— No Mystery: Closing the Achievement Gap between Africans and Excellence by Asa Hilliard III
A special education administrator I spoke with in a majority Black and LatinX student district echoed this approach. That many students, including students with disabilities, were being excluded from high school instruction, not because of something inherent in the students’ abilities but due to high school instruction primarily being lecture-based.
I don’t care what the disability is, I need you to prove to me why you are moving this kid out of the classroom. So traditional high school might be a lecture. We’re not teaching our teachers to do that. We are teaching our teachers about the multi-tiered systems of support and we’re teaching our teachers to do whole group and then small group based on data.
– Inclusive Practices Specialist, New Jersey
This leader strongly felt that creating more inclusive and equitable high school classrooms for more groups of students was to universally utilize more targeted small group instruction based on data. That is to increase the quality of service of high school instruction.
2. Culturally Informed Practice
This anti-racist teaching approach asserts that content, instructional methods, and the teacher themselves must learn, validate, and integrate the cultural assets and distinctiveness of our Black students and other cultures that might be represented in their classroom. This is because there are different assets, skills, and experiences students bring with them to the classroom which often will differ from their teacher as well as the traditional curriculum and practices of a US school system centered on white middle-class culture and norms.
Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings is credited with coining and developing a specific framework called Culturally Responsive Teaching. A key component of the approach is that teachers study the cultures of their students and recognize how it compares/contrasts with their own:
Learning these nuances of culture takes deliberate study. No teacher education course can ever cover every potential cultural conflict. Thus, culturally relevant teachers take the initiative to learn about the communities where they work. They may read larger cultural histories, but they also attend cultural events and institutions.
– Gloria Ladson-Billings, “The (R)Evolution Will Not Be Standardized” in Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies (2017).
Dr. Rudine Sims Bishop takes a curricular perspective through her concept of Windows and Mirrors. Dr. Bishop observes that students of color are dramatically underrepresented in the texts that children and youth consume and when they are represented, it is often a stereotyped or disempowering representation.
When children cannot find themselves reflected in the books they read, or when the images they see are distorted, negative, or laughable, they learn a powerful lesson about how they are devalued in the society of which they are a part. Our classrooms need to be places where all the children from all the cultures that make up the salad bowl of American society can find their mirrors.
Children from dominant social groups have always found their mirrors in books, but they, too, have suffered from the lack of availability of books about others. They need the books as windows onto reality, not just on imaginary worlds.
– Rudine Sims Bishop, “Mirrors, Windows, and Sliding Glass Doors”
I recently spoke with a district leader from a school district in the Pacific Northwest. He shared how he and district leadership recognized that their curriculum does not equally represent and uplift all the cultures in their increasingly racially diverse school district and the changes they have been making.
The big thing, curriculum-wise, for us is that everyone sees themselves in the resources we provide them. If I was going to give feedback to any of my partners it would be that the resources you are producing, make sure everybody sees themselves in it, because that is important. You know, 25% of our enrollment speaks Spanish as their first language, when we are pumping everything out in English that isn’t exactly embracing their culture.
– District Leader, Washington State
The Culturally Informed Practice approach doesn’t deny the fact that there are universally effective teaching practices but recognizes that cultural differences exist and their existence should impact what and how we teach.
3. Student Agency
The student agency approach to anti-racist teaching is a response to the often held deficit view that we in the school system use to interpret student challenges or struggles. That is, assuming that when a student is not achieving means that something is wrong with the student rather than that something is wrong with the classroom, school, or society the student is in.
The student agency approach centers on building the power and control that students have within themselves to direct their own lives despite racial injustice. It aims not to “fix” students nor does it attempt to directly address underlying racial inequities. Instead, it focuses on equipping and empowering students with skills and capacities to productively meet and overcome the negative impact of racial injustices.
Dr. Bettina L. Love states that Black students as a group are not lacking grit (a deficit) rather they should be empowered with mental health and stress reduction strategies (agency) if they have been subject to toxic stress (environment).
Dark children, especially those who are experiencing or have experienced toxic stress, do not need their grit measured or their character examined by researchers or school officials. They need culturally relevant therapy that teaches age-appropriate stress-reduction practices and they need mentors who understand … In order to make mental health as important as education, the two must and should work in tandem.
– Bettina L. Love, We Want to Do More Than Survive (p 74)
I got to hear a compelling real-life example of this from a specialized services leader from a school district in Southern California. She recounted a recent example of a student that was going to be expelled because the interventions for his presumed “anger-management issues” were not effective.
So here I come and I said, “No, we are not going to expel him because you did not offer the appropriate support.” He did not need to go to another school. He did not need anger management. What he needs is support from a licensed clinician to help him process his grief and loss … It’s things like that, we’ve seen a lot of cases like that.
– Special Services Administrator, Rialto Unified School District (CA)
It turned out that the underlying issue wasn’t a student deficit of being unable to manage anger, but rather a lack of support in processing the intense grief and stress of the sudden death of a sibling. What the student needed is greater agency over this personal tragedy. This district leader was able to help her team understand this, provide the appropriate mental health support, not only did the student end up thriving, but he was on track to graduate.
4. Social Justice
The social justice approach believes it is necessary to explicitly educate teachers and students about race and racism in order to create a more equitable school system and society. Both teachers and students should be actively learning how to understand and discuss race and racism both in the past and in the present. Educators should be actively identifying and addressing school policies and practices that contribute to racial disparities and students should be equipped to be impactful advocates for social justice as adults.
Dr. Tracey Benson, co-author of the book Unconscious Bias in Schools, describes the causal relationship between a lack of explicit instruction of race with students to the general inability to have productive dialogue on race in society as adults.
“But because [teachers] are so uncomfortable, we don’t allow kids to develop the capacity to talk about race. So what happens when kids work their way from kindergarten all the way to 12th grade, because it’s a taboo subject in schools — they become racially illiterate as adults, and then we continue to have problems with talking about racism.”
– Tracey Benson, A UNCC Professor on Using Classrooms to Sow Seeds of Anti-Racism (2020)
In a conversation I had with a district leader who leads equity initiatives for a school district in Northern California. She described rolling out a series of summer teacher training programs that were specifically designed to help teachers recognize, understand, and address their own racial biases that may show up unintentionally through their classroom instruction and interactions with students.
For me it is very intentional even when we talk about instruction, getting teachers to understand how implicit bias, how explicit bias, how microaggressions, impact what we do … We are going to do these modules as a team.
– Director of Equity, Northern California School District
I am sure that these four approaches are not fully comprehensive of all possible aspects of anti-racist teaching. However, I hope they are useful for identifying and understanding different ways teachers, leaders, and partners to the school system can have a positive impact on creating a more just and equitable school system. In the fourth and final installment of this series, I will describe Goalbook’s approach to supporting anti-racist teaching for our partner schools and districts.
Read part four of this series on Learning from Equity in Action.
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