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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Bildung
- Sprache: Englisch
Think like an artist and design a classroom that works--well--for everyone In Brilliant Teaching, you will come to understand that equity--when we view it from an informed, multi-layered, and artistic perspective--is the essential purpose of teaching. As education thought leader Dr. Adeyemi Stembridge argues, true equity does not need to defend or justify itself against detractors. Teaching for equity means creating student-centered opportunities that match the social, political, and economic context of the learning environment. Informed by both theory and extensive collaboration with K-12 teachers, Brilliant Teaching will help you develop a deep understanding of culture, one that you can leverage in order to be responsive to students. This book draws from a range of disciplines, including but going well beyond the post-modern and critical-theory-based discourse that dominate conversations today. Brilliant Teaching also pulls from art theory, cultural psychology, cognitive science, and learning theory, as well as classic historical texts within education. With this broad foundation, Dr. Stembridge offers an empowering, engaging approach that educators can use to help learners reach their own goals, and to move society onward and upward. * Discover practices that you can use to provide vulnerable students with high quality, effective, and meaningful learning opportunities * Learn to empathize with and respond to your students in a way that will engage and empower them in rigorous learning experiences * Embrace artful thinking and an integrated understanding of culture in your approach to equity in the classroom * View the K-12 classroom with a more expansive mindset and fresh ideas from an expert educator For K-12 educators, preservice teachers, parents, school board members, and policymakers, this book is a breath of fresh air and inspiration in a world where culturally responsive teaching is increasingly recognized as a must.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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Table of Contents
COVER
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT
DEDICATION
PREFACE
DO I, OR DO I NOT, TAKE THIS PICTURE?
WHAT IS THIS BOOK ABOUT?
TO WHOM AM I SPEAKING?
PART ONE: CULTURALLY RESPONSIVE ARTMAKING TEACHING
CHAPTER 1: What Does It Mean to Think Like an Artist?
WHAT IS ARTMAKING?
SOCIAL LEARNING
NOTES ON ARTMAKING: INFLUENCE AND INSPIRATION
CHAPTER NOTES
CHAPTER 2: Defining Equity … and the Problem of Fairness
A PROBLEM OF FAIRNESS
MEASURED BY OUTPUTS
QUALITY AND EFFECTIVE
DIFFERENCE ≠ DEFICITS
WHAT SCHOOLS CAN DO
NOTES ON ARTMAKING: THE HEART OF EQUITY
CHAPTER NOTES
CHAPTER 3: Shifting Paradigms
EQUITY PROBLEMS OF PRACTICE
RACE
NONSTARTERS
NOTES ON ARTMAKING: LAYERED METHODOLOGIES
CHAPTER NOTES
CHAPTER 4: Artmaking—As an Equity Issue
WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO UNDERSTAND?
THE ROLE OF CULTURE RELATIVE TO ACHIEVEMENT
NOTES ON ARTMAKING: COMPOSITION
CHAPTER NOTES
PART TWO: THE CULTURALLY RESPONSIVE ARTMAKING TEACHER (IN) YOU
CHAPTER 5: 12 Days of Instruction
SEATING CHARTS, VOLCANOES, AND DIFFERENT GLIMPSES OF THEMSELVES
WEEK 1: PLANNING (STRUCTURE AND PROCESS)
WEEK 2: SUPERPOWERS, NOT HACKS…
WEEK 3: FROM COMPLIANCE TO AGENCY
“SOMETHING HAS TO WORK BETTER …”
NOTES ON ARTMAKING: ORDINARY RESURRECTIONS
CHAPTER 6: Improvisation
MAKE IT INTO A MELODY
UNCERTAINTY
IMPRINT THE MEMORY
NOTES ON ARTMAKING: HAVE STUDENTS TRANSLATE THE MELODY
CHAPTER NOTES
CHAPTER 7: Story
OUR JOB IS TO BE A STORYTELLER …
THE STAR OF THE SHOW
THE STORY UNFOLDS AS A QUESTION …
NOTES ON ARTMAKING: THE POWER OF STORY
CHAPTER NOTE
CHAPTER 8: Audience
A CAPTIVE AUDIENCE
A GOOD CLASSROOM IS SUPPORTIVE OF NEW IDEAS …
IN DEFENSE OF INCENTIVES
NOTES ON ARTMAKING: INCENTIVES ARE NOT THE REWARD
CHAPTER NOTES
CHAPTER 9: The Art of Culturally Responsive Assessments
A CULTURE OF RESPONSIVE ASSESSMENTS
WHY ARE PERFORMATIVE ASSESSMENTS MORE EQUITABLE THAN TRADITIONAL “STANDARDIZED” ASSESSMENTS?
MEASURE IT PERFORMATIVELY …
NOTES ON ARTMAKING: “THEY WEREN'T TAKING CUES OFF OF ME.”
AFTERWORD
BRILLIANCE
BRILLIANT TEACHING IS PHILOSOPHIZING
REFERENCES
INDEX
END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT
List of Illustrations
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1 A (Normal Distribution) Bell Curve
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1 My morning cup of vanilla latte at Pablos’ on Sixth coffee shop (...
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1 Cultural Identity Bubble Map
Figure 4.2 What kind of leaf is this?
Figure 4.3 A hub network system is flexible and scalable.
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1 CRE Mental Model.
Chapter 8
Figure 8.1 Modified Cognitive Rigor Matrix with Question Stems
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Preface
Begin Reading
Afterword
References
Index
End User License Agreement
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Additional Praise for Brilliant Teaching
For many years, Adeyemi Stembridge has been working with teachers throughout the country as a mentor and a coach. This book presents a compilation of reflections on what he has learned from these experiences. The keen insights he has obtained through observation and direct experience provides a treasure trove of valuable pointers that teachers can use to enhance their practice and increase their ability to reach every learner.
—Pedro Noguera, Dean, Rossier School of Education, Distinguished Professor of Education, University of Southern California
Dr. Stembridge's new book builds and expands on concepts from his decades of work in education. The mere fact that this new book is entitled Brilliant Teaching should whet the appetite of educators who have the desire to maximize the learning options for each and every student who sits in front of them!
—Dr. Connie Sims, Retired Educator of 58 years, and President, Sims and Sims, Inc.
Dr. Stembridge's framework for culturally responsive pedagogy is transforming how educators across the state of Washington see, understand, and work to engage each student. Read this book to restore the joy in teaching and learning where it has been lost, to ignite it where it has not existed, and to maintain it where it has always lived.
—Sue Anderson, Retired Director, Educator Effectiveness Office
Brilliant Teaching
USING CULTURE AND ARTFUL THINKING TO CLOSE EQUITY GAPS
Adeyemi Stembridge
Copyright © 2023 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
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This book is a love letter to my friend, teacher, and mentor,Charles A. Tesconi (1938–2020). A quarter‐century sincewe first met, and I'm still learning from you.Thank you for everything.
PREFACE
Source: Adeyemi Stembridge (Author)
DO I, OR DO I NOT, TAKE THIS PICTURE?
In every direction, as far as I could see, nothing was left untouched by the destruction.
It was June 9, 2007. I was a freshly minted PhD embarking on the first research project of my academic career in which I was the lead investigator. Along with two exceptionally bright and committed graduate students, Thanh Ly and Ebony Duncan, our task was to spend time with a reconstituting Upward Bound program in New Orleans. We were interested in learning more about how an education program with a successful track record for preparing students for college would rebuild nearly two years after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita had effectively wiped out the Lower Ninth Ward, the district that was home to most of its student participants.
In order to understand the story of this program's rebuilding, we wanted to first know what it was that made it successful before the storms. In other words, what was the essence and ethos of this Upward Bound program that was worth reviving—even as the students, most returning to New Orleans for the first time in more than 18 months, had endured trauma beyond the comprehension of most Americans.
Upon arrival, I had thought of myself as disconnected to New Orleans. Like most, I watched closely on the national news networks as the hurricanes narrowly avoided a direct hit of the city, but leaving behind instead failed levees, a more insidious anguish. My disconnectedness served me well, I thought. I could conduct my research with the distanced objectivity of a well‐trained social scientist. I was unburdened by the personal need to redeem anything lost to me.
My colleagues and I decided to see the Lower Ninth Ward for ourselves in advance of our first visit to our research site in order to gain some perspective and context for the conditions in which this rebuild was being attempted. How do you restore something that is extraordinary when the staff and students have, in many cases, quite literally lost every physical possession that couldn't be tucked into a backpack upon evacuation?
I wouldn't have been able to comprehend the devastation in the Lower Ninth Ward until I was there to see it for myself. The water had lifted homes from their foundations, moving some of them hundreds of feet out of place. There, in the thick, stifling Louisiana heat, we soon came across a house that had been floated on top of a car, a surreal image that forces the observer into recognition of the havoc wrought by the flooding. I saw the car first, and my mind flooded with calculations for how this could have happened. Exactly how much water was flowing through these neighborhood streets? I wondered aloud… . This was someone's home. I could only imagine the stories and memories, the lived experiences that had accumulated inside of this structure.
I think it's important to take pictures in research. Photographs can record details and insights that language struggles to convey. As I positioned myself to capture a clear and compelling image of this home mangled by the disaster, I noticed writing across the front of the house. I was confronted by a message left for curious onlookers.
1600 People Died 4 U 2 take this picture
It felt like I was being called out. Challenged. And though there were only three of us out there on that sweltering swamp‐hot afternoon, it felt like I was spotlighted on a stage in front of millions.
Do I, or Do I Not, Take This Picture?
I decided to document the image—but not without some soul‐searching. The question at hand in that moment for me was more philosophical than technical, more existential than methodological. Why am I doing this? What are my intentions? Who am I in this moment? Why am I here?
Many years later, I continue to interrogate myself and my intentions as I deepen and extend my understanding of why some classrooms work better for our most vulnerable learners than others. I still have more questions than answers. In fact, I now understand that the brilliance that I most admire is that which values the questions … because the capacity for generating thoughtful and well‐constructed questions is unlikely to become stale, or worse, certain. It is the uncertainty of the inquiring mind that is the source of its brilliance because uncertainty is necessary for understanding.
Research, like teaching and also much like making art, is a kind of philosophizing. The philosopher seeks answers to the questions of personhood… . As in: Who am I? and How have I come to be? We were there to study an educational program's effort to rebuild its former efficacy. We were asking of the program and the people of it: Who are you? And how have you come to be? But to pose those questions, I was reminded that I must first engage in the deliberation of those questions of myself … or the entire episode would be a farce based on the false pretense of certainty—and a farce is not what I would consciously choose to be.
In the end, I took the picture because it was part of the story I was hoping to tell, and I wanted to honor the participants of my study by telling their story in the most honest and informed way possible. I interpreted the author's intent of the writing across the front of the house, whoever they were, as a personal exhortation to me in that moment to be clear about my intentions because there were consequences for ambiguity. I felt then, as I do now, that I am accountable to any who would pay attention to my words and ideas to present the full story, ugly parts included, because only the full story is truly worth telling. All else is ultimately folly.
WHAT IS THIS BOOK ABOUT?
In this book, I am making the case that Equity is the historical heir in the legacy tracing all the way back to the origin story of American public education. Hence, Equity is to be centered as the essential purpose of teaching, and teaching for Equity is a function of creating opportunities that match the social, political, and economic context in which teaching occurs. And further, the craft of creating these opportunities is what we call pedagogy, and pedagogy in the interest of Equity is a lot like making art. Most importantly, I am making the case that Equity in education that isn't responsive to or doesn't empower learners to reach their own goals is neither responsive nor empowering but more likely manipulating. Worse yet, teaching that isn't responsive underserves vulnerable student populations by compromising their preparedness for the forthcoming tasks and challenges of life. Until the artmaking sensibilities for teaching are normalized and supported by education systems, the Equity gaps we see currently will persist because our prevailing models do not empower learners, and neither the policy nor practice environments are designed to be responsive.
This book is divided into two parts. In Part 1, I define Equity as the quintessential purpose of education. The goal of Equity in education is to remove educational disparities as a hindrance to the ethos of individual freedoms, “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” Equity is not the same as equality, though they are conceptually related. A primary difference between the two is a matter of measurement. Equality is measured by sameness of inputs whereas Equity is measured by outputs. We will know that we have achieved Equity when neither race, nor class, nor income, nor gender, nor language background, nor physical (dis)ability—when no social disparity or measure of identity—is a barrier to or predictor of educational achievement. In the sense of Equity, fairness is a differentiating process through which opportunity is mediated. I am further building on the argument I make in Culturally Responsive Education in the Classroom: An Equity Framework for Pedagogy (2019) that culturally responsive teaching is useful for closing Equity gaps.
In Chapter 1, I offer guidelines for how to think about teaching as an artmaking endeavor—particularly in such a way that prioritizes student empowerment as both a process and outcome goal for instruction. In Chapter 2, I revisit the definition of Equity—which is to say that Equity in Education is broadly concerned with the extent to which students are effectively prepared through quality learning opportunities for the social and economic world beyond school. But there is a terrible flaw in our logic in terms of how districts and schools have largely attempted to solve the problems of Equity through top‐down driven approaches to reform and innovation. As a former classroom teacher, this has always struck me as agonizingly inadequate in addressing the inequities that persist in American education.
There is a troublesome disconnect among the analytical perspectives taken to understand the Equity problems that yield fragmented solutions that rarely ever solve much of anything. These disjunctured perspectives prevent the collective systems of American education to move schools, teaching, and learning forward beyond the woefully outdated factory models of the past.
The fracture in perspectives I refer to can be summarized in terms of people groups and people. Administrators in school systems are responsible for tracking the data of students’ performance and achievement across classrooms and even school buildings, and sometimes much larger territories than school districts. From this analytical perspective, the questions asked about the data seek to find answers to the problem of uneven outcomes among the different people groups, which can be disaggregated in numerous ways. From this analytical perch, Equity problems are understood and addressed in terms of how some people groups fare better‐or‐worse in outcomes relative to others.
Teachers, on the other hand, have a different perspective by dint of their role in the education system. Teachers know kids, and when you know kids, you come to comprehend something … which is, there's a kind of irreducibility about individual kiddos. They are all, in effect, one‐of‐a‐kind … and though they belong to people groups, they can only be understood as people.
The teachers who are paying attention realize that culture and identity can be understood and leveraged in the interest of student engagement, but to truly know any one student invariably means you are able to recognize them as a unique individual and not as a cardboard cutout of any people group. In fact, even well‐intentioned efforts to use our knowledge of people groups for predictive purposes in teaching risks great harm to the very students who most need to be seen, understood, and validated for them to see, understand, and validate school as a place where they belong. And we know full well that our most vulnerable students don't often engage unless and until they are confident in their belonging.
A consequential aspect of the problems we face in American education is the poor understanding of the meaning of Equity, which has experienced substantial concept creep in the past few years. In Chapter 3, I delve more deeply into the discussion of how Equity properly understood is now and has always been the guiding purpose for the work of schools and teaching. In Chapter 4, I contend that all learning is cultural; and further, intelligence can't be understood separate from culture.
In Part 2, I take the approach of the essayist in exploring further the connections between artmaking—production and performance, that is—and culturally responsive pedagogy. Chapter 5 is entirely dedicated to telling the story of a unit‐long learning experience in a high school science class. The teacher, whom I will refer to as Mr. Andre Derain, and I plan together drawing on the Culturally Responsive Education (CRE) mental model (Stembridge, 2019). My goal is to provide a text that can be used to highlight how our CRE planning shapes and directs our pedagogy over several weeks of instruction. I'm not so much trying to describe what's happening in the classroom; I'm trying to describe the way it feels to be alive and engaged in the work of the classroom, right there and then. Chapter 5 is intended to bring the reader inside of the design process for culturally responsive learning experiences. The hope is that you, the reader, can see through Mr. Derain's eyes the ways in which he attempted to empower his students by exposing them to rigorous learning opportunities and centering their inquiry and experiences in the instruction.
I focus on several key concepts, including improvisation (Chapter 6), story (Chapter 7), audience (Chapter 8), and assessment (Chapter 9) as essential ingredients of the culturally responsive teacher's philosophizing toolkit. In Chapter 7, I consider how we teachers can best design learning experiences that center students’ identities. In Chapter 8, I make a defense of incentives by drawing on, among others, the fields of cognitive science, anthropology, and cultural psychology. The topic of Chapter 9 is assessments; more specifically, I put forth the argument that culturally responsive assessments are those that allow students to effectively draw on their assets and cultural fluencies in order to perform their learning and developing competencies.
My desire in writing this book is not so much to refute existing premises regarding Equity or Culturally Responsive Education but rather to build out an argument based in multiple disciplines that seeks to explain what teachers can do in their classrooms to close the stubbornly persistent gaps in educational outcomes that frustrate educators and stifle our societal collective capacity to maximize the talent of the youth. As Albert Bandura, Peter Richerson, Robert Boyd, Richard Wrangham, Joseph Henrich, Robert Sapolsky, and many others have argued, the secret of the human species’ success lies not in our raw intellect or reasoning powers, but in our capacity to learn from those around us and then diffuse what we've learned outward, through our social networks, and down to future generations.
My teachers are the many teachers who've thought‐partnered with me in professional development and classroom spaces where we share our collective brain power and experience to solve for problems of Equity not at some far‐off level of abstract theory, but at the granular level of the classroom. Teaching is perhaps the most human profession of all because we can learn from others (most especially our students) and integrate insights from diverse populations. Each of us teachers is invited to tap into a rich, dynamic, ever‐growing, and improving repertoire of tools, skills, techniques, goals, motivations, beliefs, rules, and norms. As teachers, we are either growing in our practice or we risk a kind of inertia that is harmful to the learners who most depend on our own engagement to serve as a model and inspiration for theirs. In this way, innovation is less the invention of something altogether “new,” but more commonly a recombination of inspired insights that have the potential to show up in our practice in the most profoundly specific, relevant, and personal ways.
TO WHOM AM I SPEAKING?
Human beings are a tribal species. We create tribes on all sorts of levels. That's why culture—the formal and informal rules that govern human interactions—is such a dynamic and critical feature of humanity. As humans, we understand each other through the identities and cultural inheritances we share within our social groups. Our tribes are those with whom we have common goals, fashion, and ways of being. Here, I welcome all readers, but I know my tribe—and I write for you. You are the teachers who see teaching as your craft. To you, teaching is a kind of cause, and you aspire to be brilliant for all your students. You seek ideas to add to the quality of your craft. You like ideas, but because you're a teacher, you especially like ideas that you can use in your practice.
The publication of this book comes on the heels of what may be the hardest few years to be a teacher in the history of the world. The moment is pressing. I'd rather not waste time grandstanding. My message is twofold. First, schools today are more important than ever, and Equity‐focused teaching is the essential task of schools. In my view, the most important work of schools is to provide meaningful opportunities to learn—opportunities that are rigorous and engaging—for all students. All means we must give specific attention to the groups of students that have historically been underserved because they're the ones most likely to be overlooked. We cannot be satisfied with schools that predictably serve some groups better than others. That violates our most fundamental ethic. Our goal is to teach in ways that every student will have a fair opportunity to learn and the support to take advantage of the opportunity. That's Equity, and I believe that culturally responsive teaching is an effective pedagogical pathway for closing Equity gaps. In the American multiracial, multiethnic, multilingual, multicultural, pluralistic democracy, free and public schools serve a purpose, and that purpose is Equity. That's what schools are for.
My second message is that culturally responsive teaching that creates equitable opportunities does not follow some narrow, prescriptive form. It isn't an algorithmic, paint‐by‐numbers type of endeavor. Yes, there are important themes and ideas with which teachers should be familiar, but culturally responsive teaching is a function of mindset. My goal in writing this book is to provide source material for your pedagogical philosophizing that will help you to make good ideas functional in your practice.
It is true that artists are creative—but what they do is make art. Making art with our pedagogy is Equity work. I embrace the pragmatic value of CRE, but culturally responsive teaching is at least as much a function of mindset as it is of any technical skill. The great challenge in making art is that it invariably reveals that our flaws and weaknesses are at once both obstacles to our getting work done and inspiration as well. Teaching is inherently frustrating not because the process is halting and often disjointed, but because we imagine it to be fluid, seamless, and immediate. Similarly, “most artists don't daydream about making great art—they daydream about having made great art” (Bayles & Orland, 1993). Only the teacher with artmaking sensibilities can discern how important small maneuvers and micro‐choices are in engaging students. These details of artmaking are mostly uninteresting to lay audiences (and frequently to disengaged teachers) perhaps because they're almost never visible—or even knowable—by merely examining the finished work.
I hope that the readers of this book will feel both challenged and inspired to evolve their practice. Though my primary intended audience is teachers, I know that others, policymakers and educators in administrator roles, may also be interested in what I have to say. I want administrators who read the book to also feel challenged, but I want them to feel it differently. I want administrators to know that Equity work requires that they thoughtfully revise the very systems and structures in which teaching and learning occur. I want administrators to read this book and know that they must make an effort to create the circumstances in which this artmaking teaching is possible … which means that administrators and policymakers have to do something beyond the issuing of proclamations. Too many are seeking answers to “chequity” questions—the questions you ask when you want to mark items off an Equity checklist. I am asking you to engage more deeply than that. The circumstances necessary for culturally responsive, artmaking teaching that closes Equity gaps require a re‐centering of students and a re‐imagination of the prevailing organizational models for schooling. In fact, until administrators and policymakers take on the challenge of re‐imagining the systems and structures for school, brilliant teaching will be a subversive act carried out in spite of the policy environment and not because of it. For those who work in executive and policymaking roles, the question I hope you will consider is: What systems and structures will directly support the types of artmaking and culturally responsive teaching discussed in this book?
This book may offer the reader an opportunity for some existential, philosophizing reflection, as in: Why am I doing this? What are my intentions? Who am I in this moment? And why am I here?
To teach without clear insight into these questions is an exercise that is, at best, ripe with frustration and the attendant feelings of inadequacy, and at worst, a pedagogical catastrophe in waiting. To teach with clarity, however, renders a great deal possible to ourselves and our students. In fact, it is the only way for us to truly achieve Equity in the work that we do.
PART ONECULTURALLY RESPONSIVE ARTMAKING TEACHING
“Education is the acquisition of the art of the utilisation of knowledge. This is an art very difficult to impart.”
—A. N. Whitehead (1929)
CHAPTER 1What Does It Mean to Think Like an Artist?
“The precise role of the artist, then, is to illuminate that darkness, blaze roads through that vast forest, so that we will not, in all our doing, lose sight of its purpose, which is, after all, to make the world a more human dwelling place.”
—James Baldwin
WHAT IS ARTMAKING?
Technically, I am a consultant for Equity in education—but I'm not fond of the term consultant. I much prefer to think of myself as a freelance teacher. As such, I provide site‐based, professional development with particular attention to pedagogy in schools and classrooms where there are Equity gaps. But I'm not fond of the term professional development either. It's compromised with the fiction that some outside expert can provide answers to teachers’ problems of practice. In supporting teachers, I try very hard to thought‐partner with them in developing a deeper understanding of our students and the contexts in which they are learning. It's a heuristic approach. Also, I enjoy thinking; and I find that the best answers to teachers’ questions about Equity are usually those that empower them to be thoughtful as well.
So, in that vein, you should think of this book as one long thought experiment. Here's the scenario:
Imagine that you are a teacher. You are a teacher in any grade you like, but you are teaching in the current year of your reading of this book. If you're a secondary school teacher, choose any subject area or discipline you want. You can be a teacher in any type of school you like. It might be an urban school, but it could also be suburban, or even rural. Doesn't matter. It can be a large school with several thousand students or a tiny school where you literally know every kiddo's name in the building. Any school, anywhere.
Mind you, you are not just any teacher. You are a teacher who cares deeply and wants to teach brilliantly. Let’s say that brilliant teaching closes Equity gaps in which case, it's really important to you that you are both brilliant and equitable in your teaching….
Having established this as our premise, the central thought‐experiment question is: What does Equity mean in your teaching? Or put another way, how do you do Equity?
Let's Begin at IKEA … Yes, You Read That Correctly—IKEA
My unrecognized and underappreciated talent is that I can always find a reason for a trip to IKEA. One should have a system for these types of things. Because I know what I'm doing, my IKEA routine obviously begins at the cafeteria, and my order is always the same—the Swedish meatballs. They're delicious … and it puts me in just the right mood to buy the three things I intended to purchase and the additional dozen or so items that mysteriously find their way into my shopping cart before I make it to the cashier.
Did you know you can buy those very same delicious IKEA Swedish meatballs to prepare at home? In fact, you don't even have to take a trip to IKEA. The recipe for making Swedish meatballs is freely provided on the internet by IKEA itself. Here's the thing though: you must follow the directions closely, or your meatballs are going to taste weird, which is the opposite of the goal of your project. You want your meatballs to taste just as if you were savoring them in an IKEA cafeteria. Your goal is to replicate. The good news is that if you acquire the exact ingredients and follow the instructions precisely, the Swedish meatballs you make at home will be basically just as tasty as they are at IKEA—better actually, if you factor in that you don't have to second guess all those impulse purchases from the kitchen section.
Let's consider that teaching is like making Swedish meatballs, and we want to make the most scrumptious meatballs possible. If every teacher was tasked with preparing the perfect dish of meatballs—that is, if every teacher were to teach brilliantly—it would also be true that every teacher would be responsible for something more than following the cooking directions precisely. An excellent kitchen cook pays careful attention to accurately repeating the steps for preparing a dish. To follow directions is an algorithmic approach to cooking and teaching; but in this analogy, the teacher would require a skillset much more like that of a chef because the dining audience of every classroom is uniquely different than any other.
Chefs also know how and when to follow directions, but chefs think artfully. They exercise a kind of innovative autonomy and carry forward decisions with myriad variables, all of which—when arranged well—contribute to the serving‐up of memorable and satisfying experiences for patrons in the culinary context (Haykir & Çalışkan, 2021).
If the teacher's task is to (metaphorically) make delicious meatballs—but each classroom is a distinct mosaic of students’ backgrounds, interests, personalities, and ambitions—the teacher can't merely be expected to follow even the most detailed of instructions because each classroom is a qualitatively singular commixture of humanity. Rather, these teachers with the responsibility for managing many variables would have to be able to think like chefs, which is different than how kitchen cooks think. The teacher with a chef mindset is required to be innovative, to analyze and synthesize, to combine the available parts in the interest of a unique creation that is responsive to the dining audience. The goal is to create an experience of meatballs—but the steps taken in doing so are informed and influenced by the context in which the dish is being served.
There are, however, limits to this analogy. The work of teaching is not the same as preparing meatballs. Teaching is the work of developing students to have the capacities for intelligence; and to be clear, intelligence should be understood as something different than intellect.1 I will return in greater depth to the discussion of intelligence in Chapter 4, but for now intelligence should be thought of as competencies that cultivate understandings. Intelligence is that which integrates reason and affect, that which speaks to the relationship of the parts to the whole, and that which expands students’ awareness for accurate self‐assessment and self‐regulation. Intellect, on the other hand, is something related to intelligence but qualitatively different. Intellect, as I'm referring to it, references the accumulation of topic‐ and context‐specific knowledge (facts, dates, phraseologies, and algorithms) that demonstrates a specialistic recognition of patterns and phenomena in particular fields. Intelligence and intellect are, of course, not mutually exclusive and can be complementary. Further, an intelligent person may lack knowledge that an intellectual person cites readily, but it can also be said that an intellectual person is not necessarily intelligent.
In this book, I want to make the argument that teaching that closes Equity gaps is much more artful than algorithmic. Teaching is the art of empowering students with understandings. And further, the art of teaching is performed through learning experiences that position students in proximity to concepts such that their cultural fluencies are useful to them in integrating understandings into a schema of meaningful knowing.
There is an artistic sensibility in the work of teaching that is indispensable for Equity broadly and Culturally Responsive Education specifically. Artists—all artists—struggle with their art.2 That's part of what it means to be an artist. The stories of struggle are epic and taken as evidence of the artist's commitment to their craft. The problems of Equity in education are complex and cannot be answered by an out‐of‐context algorithm or global program. Complex problems require adaptive and not technical solutions. It's important that we are willing to think deeply about teaching. The search for simple fixes to complex problems is more dangerous than the problems we seek to address; therefore, the approaches to solve must be more artful than algorithmic.
Making art is purposeful and integral to one's identity. In fact, those who make art can be said to be driven by a kind of philosophical directive more than a simple task‐oriented impulse to produce something. And though artmaking is channeled through tools including the familiarity with certain algorithmic methods—artmaking draws from one's very sense of being in a way that following directions does not.
Artmaking and Philosophizing …
Teachers, like artists (and most people for that matter), are drawn to philosophy, by which I don't necessarily mean the philosophy of the Socrates, Diogenes, or Plato variety. The word philosophy is derived from the Greek word philos (“loving”) and sophia (“wisdom”) and etymologically means “the love of wisdom.”3 The balance of one's fundamental convictions about truth, right, wrong, good, bad, beauty, ugliness, work, family, concepts of god and spirituality, and the like can be said to constitute a personal philosophy. Teachers and any persons who are moved to find meaning in life, those who question where they are going, why, whether it's all worthwhile, and so forth, can be said to be doing philosophy. And if we are thinking and feeling people, that kind of activity recurs throughout our lives. To be a thinking and feeling person is not without consequence. To think and feel condemns us to question, to take ruminative strides toward understandings, to unsnarl the complex forces which play upon us—in short, to philosophize (Tesconi, 1975).
To philosophize forms the basis of what human beings are inclined to do—to make sense out of our life situations, to find or create meaning in or out of them. To philosophize for teachers means to bring to one's own awareness the beliefs and assumptions that underscore how we approach our craft. It's not an anchor but rather a rudder that steers our thinking toward understandings that are useful and consistent with the highest goals of teaching. To philosophize is to engage cognitively, to compose a view of one's philosophy of life, and by extension for us teachers, a philosophy for our craft.
This implies that the responsibility of teaching bears with it the commitment to investigate our own relationship with the ideas and techniques of our craft. To carry this responsibility there must be the love of understanding and not mere learning for the acquisition of knowledge. In this way, philosophizing is an exercise in self‐knowledge, and self‐knowledge is more than superficial adjustment; rather, it is the capacity to understand one's own patterns of thought, including one's biases and blind spots, and it is the perception of how intelligence can be applied to the influence of one's existence. Of what value is knowledge to the individual if one continues in their confusion? The craft of teaching is too complex to take on uncritically. It demands careful and reflective thinking—an inclination for the philosophical as a companion to practice.
As I will discuss in Chapter 2, our understanding of Equity and what it requires of teaching is the result of a multigenerational, societal inquiry through which the central and essential purpose of schools has been clarified relative to the principles of American democracy. Put another way, Equity in education is a product of public philosophizing. The goal of Culturally Responsive Education is to operationalize Equity in the classroom. Culturally responsive pedagogy that is effective in creating equitable opportunities for kiddos is more than knowledge. There is a difference between being knowledgeable (which strikes me as something more like a technical attribute) and artful (which though may rely in some way on technical knowledge is critically adaptive in nature).
Art, in general, is about the sharing of aesthetics, communicating meaning, and promoting the aspirations of a society. Teaching, especially in a culturally diverse context, is an artful endeavor intended to draw out a reaction (i.e., engagement) from the audience (i.e., students) while developing products for posterity (i.e., intelligence and understandings). Artful teaching entails the skillful presentation of concepts and the intentional design of conditions in which students can learn most effectively—and this art demands much of us.
Craft
Brilliant teaching, while encouraging the learning of knowledge and technique, should accomplish something of far greater importance; it should impart upon students the means of how to think rather than what to think. How to think is also a kind of artistic endeavor. If we accept that intelligence is the capacity for how to think, then we can also say that the intelligence we hope to develop through artful teaching yields students’ understandings of their own relationships with and responsibilities within their intersecting and overlapping communities—not in isolated terms but as a total process. Taken together, these communities comprise society, and society is the relationship between each one of us and every other.
The craft of teaching should empower students to solve the many problems of existence at their respective levels. The interactional tools necessary for the solving of personal, community, and societal problems necessitate an intelligence that integrates specialistic knowledge (separated as it is into various categories) into a cohesive whole (Zimmerman, 1995). To approach problem solving otherwise indicates an utter lack of comprehension. By extension, brilliant teaching should empower students with the intrapersonal capacities to understand themselves as whole beings constituted by the intellectual, emotional, psychological, and cultural parts in order to summon the agency to influence the circumstances of their existence. If school is to be perceived as relevant, then it should at the very least provide students with the tools to understand themselves as a total process of the various parts. This integrated understanding is required if there is to be any possibility for inward transformation through learning, and this manner of learning (i.e., intelligence) is essential because without it, life and all that can be studied become a series of themeless, threadless chaotic events—and meaning is difficult if not impossible to ascertain.
I think of culturally responsive teaching as a type of artistic expression that exists in concert with a kind of philosophical outlook. More specifically, culturally responsive teaching creates opportunities that close Equity gaps by engaging learners in rigorous thinking through the leveraging of culture in the interest of amassing understandings. I describe in greater detail what I mean by culturally responsive teaching in Culturally Responsive Education in the Classroom: An Equity Framework for Pedagogy (2019). Of course, there are technical and scientific principles, but be assured, this type of teaching doesn't make lessons, it makes art; and teachers who make art approach the craft from a fundamentally different philosophical outlook than teachers who make lessons.
Where brilliant art is created with paint or cameras or through storytelling or performance, brilliant teaching is created on the canvas of experience. Whether it be physical, emotional, or cerebral, it is through the compelling medium of experience that understandings are forged. In my vocabulary of effective teaching, I prefer the term brilliance over mastery because brilliance, in my view, is indicative of a more artful, dynamic, and ongoing process to build one's capacity to engage learners in rigorous and meaningful thinking.4 There is no single expression of brilliance, and brilliance evolves. This could be said to be the critical difference between the proverbial one‐hit wonder and an artist of generational significance. The generational artist is more likely to have evolved their craft and expression of their artmaking self so that they continue to create when the one‐hit wonder has exhausted their capacity to be brilliant in one, or very few, productions.
When I talk about brilliance, I don't mean to suggest that artmaking teachers bring some supernatural, inaccessible, genius‐level insight to the craft. Brilliance, as I am describing it, is earned, not granted by the heavens. When the artist learns to incorporate their technical skill inside of a larger vision, their work takes on expanded dimensions. Similarly, when the teacher finds their voice and purpose, they can create from a higher level of perspective and with an intention tailored to match the specific context in which their pedagogy is performed. And once artists understand themselves as creatives, they must never stop evolving—or the most dangerous of fates awaits them … inertia … which is to no longer produce from a heartfelt purpose but rather to copy one's previous successes.
Artmaking involves skills and habits that can be learned, but scripts and simple directives just won't suffice. Our philosophizing habits can take us in a more (or less) fruitful direction, so it's important to pay attention to what those philosophical conventions are—to inquire if they're serving our purpose well or not. This is, of course, not such a mystery or a provocative thing to say. It mostly requires a certain discipline, an awareness, a reverence if you will, of the gravity inherent in what teachers do.
Like many who may be reading this, I am a person who seeks to understand myself in relation to the world in which I live. I see this as a kind of philosophizing; or said another way, I consciously try to live such that my view of the world—my beliefs and core values—is something more than abstractions but rather an operationalized expression of my being. I am not an ant driven only by instinct and group membership. I can and do think for myself, though often in error, but (nearly) always in pursuit of that which I can reliably claim to be justified beliefs based on some measure of epistemic demand. This requires that I have tools for vetting the quality and usefulness of ideas. I am too engaged to consume concepts without philosophical critique. That would betray the very awareness and sense of purpose I bring to my craft.
The central question of this book—How do you do Equity?—is only partially about the classroom methods and activities we choose; it's a philosophical question we ask of ourselves relative to teaching. What are my convictions about the craft? And how are these convictions operationalized in my pedagogy?
