Cultural Reflections on Urban Ed
Two new books out about teaching highlight the challenges and opportunities around urban education. One, called The Battle for Room 314: My Year of Hope and Despair in a New York City High School documents how its author, Ed Boland, a former administrator at an educational access program, crashed and burned as a first year teacher. Nicole Dixon, herself a NYC public school teacher since 2009, notes in her review that the book is rather stereotypical of the urban school genre—it glorifies the many challenges that urban students face as well as their challenging behaviors. In doing so, the book misses a number of important story lines that also occur in urban schools, but are often ignored by mainstream media.
First, teaching anywhere is quite challenging. I remember my first year teacher as a science teacher. I was a scientist, and so I figured it would be easy to teach science. I had no teacher training and had not been in a classroom in over twenty years. My first lesson plan, which I prepared five minutes before students arrived, was not even a lesson—I simply wrote on the board that students were to read the first 50 pages of their text book and answer any questions they encountered.
My utter lack of experience made for a very long year for both the students and myself, and I left teaching during my second year to take a job administering a grant. However, unlike Mr. Boland, I went back into teaching and now am an award-winning teacher. Even with several awards under my belt, I am still growing as a teacher. Teaching is a challenging craft, yet urban districts often end up hiring the teachers who are least prepared to teach. Many do not last very long. They either make all their mistakes in the urban district and then take their hard-won experience to a district with more resources, or they leave teaching entirely. However, it is important to note that most urban schools have some stalwarts that hang in there year after year and who positively impact students’ lives.
And what lives these are! Another storyline that Ed Boland misses is a crucial one—students in urban schools can and do learn. They can think critically, and they can create masterfully written essays, stories, poems, and lab reports. They can impact their societies through civic engagement, perform wonders on the stage, and they can do all of this even as they have less resources and more struggles at home and in their schools. How easy it is to write the story line that thugs (Boland’s favorite word) are, well, thugs. But in a society that still struggles to value all of the members of our society, I feel like Boland does a tremendous disservice. His complete lack of preparation for what he is getting into should not be confused with his students’ capacity for beautiful work.
Another book is coming out in March, and I am much more excited about it. It is called For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood… and the Rest of Y’all Too by Christopher Emdin, an associate professor in the Department of Mathematics, Science, and Technology at Teachers College, Columbia University. His storyline is so much different from Ed Boland’s. In an NPR interview, Emdin, who has been honored by the White House for his leadership in urban education, believes that “once students are able to incorporate the arts and their culture into the science content, they take it and they run with [it].”
I am excited about this book. Over the past year, our school staff has been having a rich and deep conversation around what it means to be part of a mostly white staff in a school where the students are mostly not white. For myself, these conversations have made me step back and wonder how I could teach in a more culturally responsive manner. How can I take my teaching to the next level? Unlike Mr. Boland, I surely do not feel like my students are unteachable.
And yet, I sense there is something missing from my classroom. Mr. Emdin’s book will offers strategies to make my classroom more of a community than it already is. Grounded in theory, the ideas aims to show how culturally relevant strategies like hip-hop music and call-and-response, as well as connecting the experiences of urban youth to indigenous populations globally, can lead to a transformative experience for urban youth. Culturally sensitive teaching is my next goal as I continue to polish my craft as a teacher—in urban ed. My students deserve nothing less.