The Dreamkeepers. Gloria Ladson-Billings
the challenge of being successful with African American students.
This book is about teaching practice, not about curriculum. Much of the purported reforms and the debate about our schools focuses on curriculum: What should we teach? Whose version of history should we offer? What priority should different subject matters be given? But it is the way we teach that profoundly affects the way that students perceive the content of that curriculum.
My notions in this domain are strongly aligned with Giroux and Simon's thoughts on critical pedagogy:
Pedagogy refers to a deliberate attempt to influence how and what knowledge and identities are produced within and among particular sets of social relations. It can be understood as a practice through which people are incited to acquire a particular “moral character.” As both a political and practical activity, it attempts to influence the occurrence and qualities of experiences. When one practices pedagogy, one acts with the intent of creating experiences that will organize and disorganize a variety of understandings of our natural and social world in particular ways … . Pedagogy is a concept which draws attention to the processes through which knowledge is produced.43
Because of this pedagogical view, I went into the classrooms intending to examine both “the political and the practical.” I wanted to see not only why a certain kind of teaching helped the students to be more successful academically but also how this kind of teaching supported and encouraged students to use their prior knowledge to make sense of the world and to work toward improving it.
In the next chapter, I begin to examine the concept of culturally relevant teaching and how it can improve the educational lives of African American students. As is true of most researchers, it is my hope that this research will find broad applicability and be seen as useful for teaching students of any race or ethnicity.
Notes
1 1. Du Bois, W. B. “Does the Negro Need Separate Schools?” Journal of Negro Education, 1935, 4, 328–335.
2 2. Murrell, P. “Afrocentric Immersion: Academic and Personal Development of African American Males in Public Schools.” In T. Perry and J. Fraser, Freedom’s Plow: Teaching in Multicultural Classrooms. New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1993, 231–256.
3 3. Bray, R. “The Miseducation of Our Children.” Essence, Sept. 1987, pp. 79–80, 153–156.
4 4. Edelman, M. Families in Peril: An Agenda for Social Change. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987.
5 5. Chan, V., and Momparler, M. “George Bush’s Report Card: What’s He Got Against Kids?” Mother Jones, May/June 1991, pp. 44–45.
6 6. Kunjufu, J. Developing Discipline and Positive Self-Images in Black Children. Chicago: Afro-American Images, 1984.
7 7. The first wave of educational reform was initiated by the Commission on Excellence in Education’s A Nation at Risk and was aimed largely at school improvement. The second wave, ushered in by the Holmes Group report Teachers for Tomorrow’s Schools and the Carnegie report A Nation Prepared: Teachers for the Twenty-First Century, focused on teacher reform.
8 8. Harlan, S. “Compared to White Children, Black Children are . . .” USA Today, June 5, 1985, p. 9A.
9 9. Chan and Momparler, “George Bush’s Report Card,” p. 44.
10 10. “Saving Our Schools.” Fortune, Spring 1990 (special issue).
11 11. Murrell, P. “Our Children Deserve Better.” Rethinking Schools, Dec./ Jan. 1988, 2(2), 1, 4, 15.
12 12. Ratteray, J. D. What’s in a Norm: How African Americans Score on Achievement Tests. Washington, D.C.: Institute for Independent Education, 1989.
13 13. Ratteray, J. D. Access to Quality: Private Schools in Chicago’s Inner City. Heartland Policy Study, no. 9. Chicago: Heartland Institute, 1986.
14 14. Lowe, R. “The Struggle for Equal Education: An Historical Note.” Rethinking Schools, Dec./Jan. 1988, 2(2), 5.
15 15. Irvine, J. “Black Parents’ Perceptions of Their Children’s Desegregated School Experiences.” Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Boston, Mass., April 1990.
16 16. Du Bois, W.E.B. “Perchstein and Pecksniff.” Crisis, Sept. 1929, 36, 313–314.
17 17. Fleming, J. Blacks in College. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1984.
18 18. See, for example, Bacon, M. “High-Potential Students from Ravenswood Elementary School District (Follow-Up Study),” unpublished report to the Sequoia Union High School District, Redwood City, Calif., 1981; and Lomotey, K., and Staley, J. “The Education of African Americans in the Buffalo Public Schools: An Exploratory Study,” paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Boston, Mass., April 1990.
19 19. Lomotey, K., and Staley, J. “The Education of African Americans.”
20 20. Bell, D. And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice. New York: Basic Books, 1987.
21 21. McPartland, J. “The Relative Influence of School and of Classroom Desegregation on the Academic Achievement of Ninth-Grade Negro Students.” Journal of Social Issues, 1969, 25(3), 93–103.
22 22. Grant, C., and Secada, W. “Preparing Teachers for Diversity.” In W. R. Houston (ed.), Handbook of Research on Teacher Education. New York: Macmillan, 1990, 403–422.
23 23. Ladson-Billings, G. “Who Will Teach Our Children: Preparing Teachers to Successfully Teach African American Students.” In E. Hollins, J. King, and W. Hayman (eds.), Building the Knowledge Base for Teaching Culturally Diverse Learners. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1994.
24 24. For examples see Bloom, B., Davis, A., and Hess, R., Compensatory Education for Cultural Deprivation. Troy, Mo.: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1965; Bettelheim, B., “Teaching the Disadvantaged,” National Education Association Journal, 1965, 54, 8–12; Ornstein, A., and Vairo, P. (eds.), How to Teach Disadvantaged Youth, New York: McKay, 1968; Ornstein, A., “The Need for Research on Teaching the Disadvantaged,” Journal of Negro Education, 1971, 40(2), 133–139.