The school is equipped to respond to the students’ unique position as refugees. Teachers are careful to identify potentially triggering material, and a counselor is on staff to address the traumas that the students likely sustained when fleeing from conflict. The school also provides students with free lunches and snacks to address poverty affecting many refugee students which can create barriers to learning such as lack of nutritious food. Because the school is a specialty middle school, it is able to place students in “forms” based on literacy level and not age.  In an article for Gather Good, two former GVP students credited their success in college to attending the GVP. One student acknowledged the power of learning alongside other students “who are in the same boat with you.”

The school aims to help students process their trauma by integrating visual art and music into all areas of the curriculum, drawing on research which suggests that arts-based interventions help refugee students to process and express their emotions. The GVP has an arts coordinator, an artist in resident who writes songs especially for the GVP chorus, and the school partners with organizations such as The High Museum and the Synchronicity Theatre for field trips. I noticed one student in particular who struggled to engage in most of the class activities, and who often did not turn in work, light up whenever the students were asked to produce artwork in class. She often put the most time and effort into the drawings out of all the students in the class.

Despite the efforts of the school to create an affirming and healing space for students, there remain many challenges to this type of work. The teachers must be aware of the values which students’ families bring with them across the border. Parents might be nervous about the reproductive health curriculum taught in the health class, however the school also has an obligation to prepare students to enter high school as teenage girls. Another challenge is finding culturally responsive literature for the classrooms. Children’s’ literature is a predominantly white field, and most of the books in the GVP library feature white children from the west. In recent years there has been a greater push for diverse children’s literature. Activist efforts such as #1000blackgirlbooks  and We Need Diverse Books are pushing for greater diversity in publishing and access to books which reflect students identities and experiences. The GVP has not yet caught up to this wave by having a rich collection of books written by and for the communities they are serving. Finally, the very structure of the school raises problems. With an almost entirely white board of directors and staff, the school maintains the power over resources and curriculum building. In this way, the school mimics and upholds the very structures that it professes to resist. It raises important questions about most non-profits serving non-western communities of color: in what ways do they generate power with, and perhaps power over the communities they are serving?

Even with these unsolved dilemmas, it is impossible to deny the joy, learning, and friendships which are fostered every day at the GVP. While the students have different nationalities, dress, diets, and religious practices, they are able to find commonalities with one another. They love to play games, and they know which girl is best at picking words for hangman, or playing the guard in “the statue garden.” They share music with one another, and half of the students have binders sporting the pictures and logo of the popular K-Pop group “BTS.” Many of the students share a deep connection with their families, and agree that their mothers are their heroes. Even the category of “girl” seems to be meaningful across national borders, and the students find solidarity together in that identity.

The “Author’s Teas,” or showcases which the GVP puts on for donors and parents twice per semester, highlight the very best of the work being done by the GVP to preserve cultural identities while creating cross-cultural community. Students are all assigned short lines in English, and many voices shake as they struggle not only with the nerves associated with public speaking, but doing so in a foreign language. At the last Author’s Tea that I attended, students in small groups also sang verses in their native tongues. A mother’s face in the audience shone with pride. At another Author’s Tea, the students sang “This Land is Your Land,” which made my eyes tear up. Underneath the benign cuteness of the children’s choir was a radical assertion that no matter what the political discourse says on the matter, this land belongs to them, too.

Image taken from the Public Domain

The reality of the current US teaching force is that the majority of teachers only reflect a narrow demographic of students. According to a study by the Center for American Progress, 82 percent of all public school teachers are white, and the majority of teachers are middle class white women, especially at the elementary level (Williams, 2015). This means that the education of the majority of black and latino students, who are “more than twice as likely to attend underfunded, under-resourced…schools” (Williams 2016) lies in the hands of teachers who do not look like them. Deplit (1988) demonstrates that minority teachers are not only outnumbered, but they are not being given the chance to lead discussions on the learning of minority children (p. 282). Many efforts by white outsiders to “close the achievement gap” are riddled with problems. Programs such as Teach for America (TFA) recruit young teachers from respected (expensive) higher learning institutions but do little to prepare them to teach in conditions many of them have never experienced. The two years of training that KIPP offers is luxurious compared to the five weeks that TFA recruits receive. Many of the teachers who join these programs enter with a “white savior complex” at best, and with an “educational tourist” mindset, in which they are only looking to boost their resumes for their “real careers,” at worst (Greene, 2016). Clearly, when the positionality of teachers in a community is not considered, students often do not have access to the “thoughtful…fully-qualified” teachers that Ayers argues they deserve.

One persuasive conclusion to this debate is that students should be exclusively taught by members of their own communities because students receive incomparable benefits and because teachers are most equipped to teach their own communities. There are many compelling arguments that support this view. When students see “themselves” represented as educators, they are more likely to picture themselves pursuing their own education (Boisrond 2017). Students are less likely to be stigmatized or expected to fail when their teachers share their backgrounds (Danielle 2014). Students are also more likely to “feel cared for… and [feel] confident in their teachers’ abilities to communicate with them” (Boisrond 2017). This may be because of the differences in communication styles that exist between communities. Deplit (1988) notes that minority students are often labeled “troublesome” because they are unresponsive to the white authoritative style of schooling that is very different than the authoritative style that is used at home by their relatives (p. 288). Even efforts made by white teachers to address language differences, such as “dialect readers”, can miss the mark by denying students access to the “culture of power” they need to succeed in standardized testing and higher education (Deplit, 1988, p. 285). Teachers from students’ own communities can introduce them to the “culture of power” while being explicit about how this culture fits in with the students’ own (Deplit, 1988, p.285). This is well demonstrated by a teacher who articulates how she would take a state-mandated activity (planting seeds and monitoring their growth) and contextualize it in her community of mostly indigenous agriculturalists (Braybrook & Maughan, 2009, p. 9).

While this model seems ideal after considering the factors above, it does not reflect the current makeup of the teaching force. Stereotypes, pay, and opportunity all influence who becomes teachers. While I believe that there should be ample examples of teachers from every community, we must have a model in place for when these teachers are not yet present. The other shortcoming of this solution is that its focus on race and ethnicity, while extremely important, does not factor in the myriad of other ways that teachers and students can exist in community. The intersectional identities of students and teachers, such as sexuality or faith, must complicate our understanding of community. Students and teachers of different backgrounds may share community in vital ways, and students and teachers of the same background might be at odds in other ways.

With these limitations in mind, many may argue, such as the promoter from KIPP did, that teachers can and must learn to approach educating outside of their community with enough thoughtfulness become valuable educators for all students. Throughout our course we came across several examples of educators modeling what this can look like.  Katch (2010) quickly realizes that she is out of her element when one of her students displays gender variant behavior. Instead of forcing her student to change his behavior, or wait for another adult to educate her, she takes it upon herself to seek out information about the experiences of gender variant individuals. She decides to give this student agency in making decisions regarding his education, such as whether to sign his “feminine” drawing  of a maiden for his school’s open house, which could potentially make him a target for gender enforcement by other students and adults (p. 384). Saylor (1992) turns a critical eye on her position as a hearing administrator working in a school for Deaf children. While she concludes that she is presently the best fit for the position, she ensures that her students still have access to Deaf teachers and volunteers (Saylor 9). In this way, Saylor takes her allyship to a deeper level than does Katch, because she builds a space for her students “in consultation with adults who share their culture”(Deplit, 1988, p. 296).  By including Deaf adults, Saylor ensures that hearing people are not making all the decisions in Deaf education. In addition, although Saylor can never be part of the Deaf community, she involves herself in the larger community of Deaf people and their allies. In this way she is an insider/outsider to a community which is not entirely separate from her.

These models of teachers embracing their role in teaching students from other communities is also not without limitations. It requires a significant amount of education and training for teachers which is rarely offered. There is little incentive or systems of accountability in place to encourage teachers to undergo this oftentimes uncomfortable process of critical self evaluation. Even when teachers do their best to follow the models above, there is little guidance they can look to when they are stuck. The guidance they do receive is often free intellectual and emotional labor provided by marginalized communities. Finally, too much focus on this solution should not shift priority away from cultivating a diverse teaching force.

It is clear to me that like many of the issues we addressed in this class, the solutions I have discussed require systemic changes and infrastructure which is not yet put in place. I have concluded that I believe we as a democracy should pursue both solutions. We should strive for an educational system where all students have access to teachers from their own cultures. Teachers from minority cultures and outsiders should collaborate to educate their students. I believe that when all teachers are held to this high standard, they will be prepared for the day when they inevitably comes across a student whose culture, values, or ways of being are unfamiliar to them. I have decided not to pursue KIPP or any position which will place me so far out of my own experiences. I do not however, want to limit myself to involvement in communities of people who are “like me” in every way. I will seek out diverse communities where I can settle as an insider/outsider. I will “pay attention to the things students of color say they appreciate about having teachers who look like them” so that I can relate to others in a way which is attentive to their identities, regardless of the career path I end up in (Deplit, 1988, p. 296)

References

Ayers, W. (2009). Teaching for Democracy. DePaul Journal for Social Justice, 3(1), 1-8.

Boisrond, C. (2017). If Your Teacher Looks Like You, You May Do Better In School. NPR. Retrieved from https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2017/09/29/552929074/if-your-teacher-looks-likes-you-you-may-do-better-in-school

Brayboy, B. M. J., & Maughan, E. Indigenous Knowledges and the Story of the Bean. (2009). Harvard Educational Review, 79 (1), 1-21.

Danielle, B. (2014). America’s Teachers Still Don’t Think Black and Latino Kids Are Smart. Participant Media. Retrieved from http://www.takepart.com/article/2014/10/10/americas-teachers-still-dont-think-black-latino-kids-are-smart

Deplit, L.D. (1988). The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People’s Children. Harvard Educational Review, 58 (3), 280-298.

Greene, P. (2016). What Went Wrong With Teach For America. The Progressive. Retrieved from http://progressive.org/public-school-shakedown/went-wrong-teach-america/

Katch H, & Katch J. When Boys Won’t Be Boys: Discussing Gender with Young Children. Harvard Educational Review, 80 (3), 379-436.

Saylor, p. (1992). A Hearing Teachers Changing Role in Deaf Education. Harvard Educational Review, 62 (4), 519-534.

Williams, J. 2015. America’s Kids Are Getting More Diverse, but Its Teachers Aren’t. Participant Media. Retrieved from http://www.takepart.com/article/2015/03/03/americas-kids-getting-more-diverse-but-not-its-teachers/

Williams, J. (2016). Why Kids of Color Don’t Need ‘White Hero’ Teachers. Participant Media. Retrieved from http://www.takepart.com/article/2016/04/03/kids-color-dont-need-white-hero-teachers

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