The Dreamkeepers. Gloria Ladson-Billings
youth culture trends also change how we all think about things like art and fashion. It is virtually impossible to find anything other than “skinny jeans” and if you do, rest assured, youth will deem them “mom jeans.” Even President Obama, whom most youth regard as the “coolest” (or perhaps I should say, “dopest”) president they have known, committed the faux pas of showing up to throw out the first pitch at an opening baseball game wearing “mom jeans.”
One of the places that youth culture lives and thrives is in the spoken-word community. Urban Word NYC and Sacramento Area Youth Speaks (SAYS) are two examples of the robust poetry spoken-word communities that exist in cities such as Los Angeles, Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Chicago. Competitions such as “Louder than a Bomb” in Chicago and “Brave New Voices” that rotates throughout the country are examples of the public exhibitions in which students participate. Most of these events are external to schools and formal education. Yet, their network identify city, statewide, and regional youth poets who go on to compete in the National Youth Poet Laureate competition—the same competition that 2021 Presidential Inauguration poet Amanda Gorman won in 2017. There are youth spoken-word and poetry workshops in almost every state from Alabama to Wisconsin. These programs provide youth with constructive and creative opportunities to express themselves while they hone their literacy skills and amplify their poetry with knowledge from various disciplines.
For teachers to ignore this work is to effectively tell students their lives and their thoughts do not matter. Lee4 explains that most of the things that English teachers want students to do with text—identify plot, setting, theme, and character analysis—they already know how to do in genre-specific ways. So, while students struggle with making sense of The Crucible or The Scarlet Letter, they are able to go through a music video or hip-hop lyrics and explain all of the literary elements. They can draw inferences, understand double entendre, metaphors, similes and alliteration in songs by Drake, Cardi B or Lizzo.
Technology and youth culture are two aspects of the r(e)volution of culturally relevant pedagogy. In order to remain relevant and viable the theory must pay attention to changing contexts and a changing culture. Culturally relevant teachers are regularly assessing their work as they search for ways to ensure that all of their students are learning, developing cultural competence, and growing in their critical consciousness. As you read through the work of the outstanding eight teachers I researched in the early 1990s think about how their work might change if they were still working in classrooms with New Century students. What elements of technology and youth culture might they include in their pedagogy? How might they remix their teaching to ensure they are serving all students well? What might they do to remain the Dreamkeepers we knew them to be a generation ago?
Notes
1 1. Srna, S., Schrift, R. Y., and Zauberman, G. “The illusion of multitasking and its positive effect on performance,” Psychological Science, 2018, 29(12), 1942–1955. doi:10.1177/0956797618801013
2 2. Ladson-Billings, G. “Culturally relevant pedagogy 2.0, aka the re-mix,” Harvard Educational Review, 2014, 84(1), 74–84.
3 3. Rawls, J., and Robinson, J. Youth Culture Power: A #HipHopEd guide to building teacher-student relationships and increasing student engagement. New York: Peter Lang, 2019.
4 4. Lee, C. D. “A culturally based cognitive apprenticeship: Teaching African American high school students skills in literary interpretation,” Reading Research Quarterly, 1995, 30(4), 608–631.
1 A Dream Deferred
What happens to a dream deferred?
—LANGSTON HUGHES
In 1935, W.E.B. Du Bois posed the question, “Does the Negro need separate schools?”1 The question came as a result of Du Bois's assessment that the quality of education that African Americans were receiving in the nation's public schools was poor, an assessment that is still true today. Across the nation, a call in our urban centers for alternative schooling suggests that attempts to desegregate the public schools have ultimately not been beneficial to African American students. School systems in such cities as Milwaukee, Baltimore, Miami, Detroit, and New York are looking at experimental programs designed to meet the specific needs of African American boys.2 The idea of special schools for African Americans (specifically African American boys) has sparked heated debate about both the ability and the responsibility of the public schools to educate adequately African American students. Why, in the 1990s, after decades of fighting for civil and equal rights, are African Americans even contemplating the possibility of separate schools?
The Current Climate
One look at the statistics provides some insight. African American students continue to lag significantly behind their white counterparts on all standard measures of achievement.3 African American children are three times as likely to drop out of school as white children are and twice as likely to be suspended from school.4 The high school dropout rate in New York and California is about 35 percent; in inner cities, where large numbers of African Americans live, the rate nears 50 percent.5 African American students make up only about 17 percent of the public school population but 41 percent of the special-education population.6 These dismal statistics hold despite the two waves of educational reform initiated in the 1980s.7
These poor education statistics for African American students correlate with some harsh social and economic realities. Nearly one out of two African American children is poor. The rate of infant mortality among African Americans is twice that of whites. African American children are five times as likely as white children to be dependent on welfare and to become pregnant as teens; they are four times as likely to live with neither parent, three times as likely to live in a female-headed household, and twice as likely to live in substandard housing.8 More young African American men are under the control of the criminal justice system than in college.9 Indeed, an African American boy who was born in California in 1988 is three times more likely to be murdered than to be admitted to the University of California.10
These poor economic and social conditions have traditionally prompted African Americans to look to education, in the form of the integrated public school, as the most likely escape route to the American dream. In the landmark 1954 case Brown vs. Board of Education, Thurgood Marshall argued not only that the separate schools of the South were physically substandard but also that their very existence was psychologically damaging to African American children. Yet now, more than sixty years later, some African American educators and parents are asking themselves whether separate schools that put special emphases on the needs of their children might be the most expedient way to ensure that they receive a quality education.
While I was teaching in California, in the late 1980s, a reporter from another state called