What comes to mind when you think of research in education? Probably not what is found in these two unique books by Gloria Ladson-Billings and Denny Taylor, educators who aren't afraid to push the boundaries of research while exploring what makes a successful teacher of African-American children and how the written word can be hazardous to your health and welfare. Here are two brief reviews.--Ed.
Gloria Ladson-Billings is a teacher, teacher educator, and researcher. Like Herbert Kohl, her work has implications for adult basic education. Unfortunately, unlike him, she has yet to achieve such stature or fame. In her recent book, The Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers of African American Children (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1994), Ladson-Billings makes conscious choices about observing and disregarding certain norms of academic research. She crosses over the conventional lines drawn between the researcher and the researched, between academic and personal writing. Because Ladson-Billings crosses over these lines in order to connect with those of us outside of academia, she deserves an audience that is willing to cross the traditional boundary between elementary and adult education.
As with many educational studies and conclusions, the content of her book may seem deceptively simple and for many of us there will be no big surprises. Ladson-Billings sets out to provide examples of teachers who are successful with African American children. As she points out, "Children of color constitute an increasing proportion of our students...[while] the numbers of teachers of color, particularly African Americans, are dwindling.... Many teachers--white and black alike--feel ill-prepared for or incapable of meeting the educational needs of African American students." (p. x) The book looks at eight teachers in public schools in a low-income, predominantly African American school district. Although the teachers differ in their methodology, they were chosen because all were identified by both parents and district principles as effective teachers.
Over the course of the two years of the study, Ladson-Billings and the eight teachers met regularly. Together they analyzed the interviews and videotape which Ladson-Billings collected. The research group identified examples and articulated the beliefs and approaches to their students which they share. Ladson-Billings sees the teachers' underlying philosophy, motivation, and the teaching practices she observes as culturally relevant teaching. The book is then arranged to define culture and its importance, to give vignettes from classrooms which illustrate the different principles of culturally relevant teaching, and to propose how entire schools and districts could be reorganized to offer culturally relevant teaching across the grades. In an appendix, Ladson-Billings outlines her research methodology in more detail for those whose interest lies in the research rather than in the classroom.
In the core of the book, where Ladson-Billings lays out the principles and examples, readers will find commonalities with Freire, language that we use to describe effective education for adults (even what one finds in the common chapters of the Massachusetts Curriculum Frameworks). What I found so heartening about the book is the effect of the rich examples. The principles are more than empty talk. They are visible in action. As a reader I began to experience what students in these classrooms must feel. The messages are pervasive, consistent, hopeful. A few of my favorite examples follow.
In one case, teachers with culturally relevant practices help students make connections between their community, national, and global identities:
In Rossi's class, who students are and how they are connected to wider communities is very important. In the class's current-events lesson, Rossi insists that the students be able to make pertinent connections between the news items they select and themselves. As the tensions increased in the Middle East prior to the Gulf War, many students brought in articles that detailed the impending conflict.
"But what does that have to do with you?" asked Rossi. "We're sitting here in sunny California, thousands of miles away from Kuwait. Why should we care?"
After a ventured suggestion that is a dead end and some reflective silence:
In a soft measured voice, Denisha said, "Well, I think it affects us because you have to have people to fight a war, and since they don't have no draft, the people who will volunteer will be the people who don't have any jobs, and a lot of people in our community need work, so they might be the first ones to go."
Denisha's comment triggers a discusson of "overrepresented," mathematically and the case in point of soldiers of color in the Vietnam War. Discussion continues.
By the end of the lesson, students are working in cooperative groups and creating "causality charts" where they list a number of current events and their possible impacts on their community. (p 49-51)
In another case, students whose educational, economic, social, political, and cultural futures are most tenuous are helped to become intellectual leaders in the classroom. Two teachers direct a lot of their pedagogy toward African American boys. In Lewis' and Deveraux's classrooms it is "cool" or "def" to choose academic excellence. (p. 117)
One of Lewis' star students, a boy named Larry, had had a particularly troubling history. Although he was short and slightly built, he was the oldest child in the class. He had been left back several times and was thirteen in a class made up of eleven year olds. He had been traumatized by the drive-by shooting of a favorite aunt. Other teachers in the school referred to him as "an accident just waiting to happen." None wanted him in their classrooms. Lewis referred to Larry as "a piece of crystal."
He's strong and beautiful but fragile. I have to build a safe and secure place for him and let him know that we&endash;the class and I&endash;will be here for him. The school has been placing him in the kitchen junk drawer. I want him to be up there in the china cabinet where everyone can see him. (p. 111)
Throughout the book, cooperative learning and connection to community are stressed. Witness the title of chapter 4, "We are Family." Each teacher has her own way of building community in the classroom.
Hilliard and other teachers' notions about building an extended family are consistent with some of the psychological literature that refutes the notion of poor self-concept among African American students. This view suggests that African American connections to African cultural norms support a very different view of self: "Some non-Western world views, particularly the African, place a totally different emphasis on self, conceiving of the self as coming into being as a consequence of the group's being.... The African world view suggest that 'I am because we are and because we are, I am.' In so emphasizing, this view makes no real distinction between the self and others. They are in a sense one and the same.... One's self-identity is therefore always a people identity, or what could be called an...extended self." Quoting W. Nobles "Psychological Research and the Black Self-Concept: A Critical Review." Journal of Social Issues, 1973. (p. 69 )
This quote and a description of a holiday party in one teacher's class enabled me to see my own cultural baggage.
Winston bought what she felt were more than enough treats for the class. But no sooner had she passed out the goodies than several students began to ask for more. When she inquired as to what they had done with the treats she had distributed, the students indicated that they had wrapped them up to take home to a family member.
Rather than seeing this behavior as piggy or selfish, as I might have, the teacher recognized it as a strength and accommodated her students, reinforcing their instincts toward caring and cooperation (p. 71)
This section also helped me look critically at some of the activities I have developed. I recently compiled a list of phrases students could use to provide transitions or to lengthen a narrative. Looking at the list, I noticed that nearly all used the pronoun "I." I wondered subsequently if I should mix in "we," ask students to adapt it or think of some other option? It was one of those moments where my cultural bias again showed up as if in silhouette.
Besides helping me think critically about cultural biases, about developing assignments, about creating a classroom environment where all can flourish, I find Ladson-Billings a reasonable voice to listen to in thinking about issues like separate schools for black kids only. Early in the book she recalls being asked by a reporter about an African American male immersion school that was under consideration. As she points out,
The concern over African American immersion schools is not really about school segregation. Indeed, schools in large urban centers today are more segregated than ever before.... African Americans already have separate schools. The African American immersion school movement is about taking control of those separate schools. (p. 3)
Ladson-Billings' book has also been a model for me in thinking about collaborative research projects. I liked the way she consulted the community to identify the teachers in her study. I appreciated her attention to their interpretations of the data.
Can anyone teach this way? Can anyone conduct research and write this way, in or out of academe? Do you have to have a special gift, like the eight teachers in the study? Do you have to be African American or be from the community like one of the white teachers? Ladson-Billings seems to believe that any of us could teach this way. She shies away from rhetoric that would place these teachers on a pedestal. "As a researcher I am cynical about the potential for change. But as an African American parent I am desperate for change. I cling to the possiblities held forth by culturally relevant teaching." (p. 91) Her words encourage all of us, no matter what our roles in the education field, to be true to our values.
--Martha Merson, ABE/Literacy Specialist at the A.L.R.I.
<Text>In Toxis Literacies: Exposing the Injustice of Bureaucratic Texts (Heinemann, 1996), Denny Taylor introduces us to Cindy, Sam, Laurie, Will, and Kathryn, whose compelling case studies vividly illustrate the ways in which people are fed into and chewed up by this country's various "systems"--the legal, prison, health, and welfare systems, as well as those intended to deal with the problems of unemployment, homelessness, and drug use--that corral the poor and process them, based less on the needs of the individuals than on the prejudices, preferences, and overall convenience of society. To the inmates in Dostoevsky's famous statement that a society can be judged by the way it cares for its prisoners can be added these other populations--those on welfare, those without homes, those without adequate medical care, those without jobs, and the stories told here show how poorly we often treat people in those groups: Cindy, who has never committed a real crime, is sent to prison for drug use. Sam is battered by a system that is supposed to help him find housing, find employment, stay sober. Laurie is given improper medical care, with ultimately tragic results.
Denny Taylor is a literacy researcher well known for her ethnographic work with individuals, families, and communities. She is the author of such books as Family Literacy and Growing Up Literate (with Catherine Dorsey-Gaines) and is the recipient of several major awards for her research and writing. Her own primary focus is on issues of literacy and, as the title of Toxic Literacies indicates, her purpose here is largely to document the roles that literacy in all its guises--paperwork, reports, forms, etc.--act to harm people in our society. And certainly these official texts play a large role in the injustice, the uncaring treatment that is meted out to the individuals portrayed here. Yet I can't help but think that the larger villains of these pieces, of these life stories, are the attitudes we as a culture take towards people like Cindy, Sam, Laurie, Will, and Kathryn, the policies we've developed to "handle" them and their problems, and the various bureaucratic systems that have been established to implement these policies. Texts and the various literacies they embody are clearly some of the tools employed by these systems, almost always to their--not the client's--advantage. And it is important for us as literacy workers to understand the ways in which texts and literacy are used and abused by these systems and to try to help our students and clients to comprehend and navigate them. But Toxic Literacies definitely does not document how literacy and texts are used in ways that corrupt or pervert otherwise enlightened, well-founded and humane policies. No, it's those attitudes and policies themselves that are ultimately most harmful, while in implementing them literacy and texts can be undeniably corrupted.
What this book portrays is just how uncaring and cruel we often are to our neighbors, to our fellow citizens, and how pervasive and powerful the obsessively individualistic "blame the victim" mentality remains within our culture. Though "toxic literacies" and their various official texts play important roles in promoting our society's attitudes and carrying out its policies, the larger indictment conveyed by Taylor's book is of our society as a whole, of our attitudes toward the poor, and of the policies and bureaucratic systems we have developed as a result. The strength of Taylor's ethnographic work is in its ability to bring to life in all their complexity the real people she works with, befriends, and cares for-- people who otherwise, as nameless, faceless numbers and categories, our society has essentially written off as expendable.
--Steve Reuys, Staff Development Coordinator at the A.L.R.I.