The Dreamkeepers. Gloria Ladson-Billings
knee on his neck. Despite pleading with the officer that he could not breathe, Mr. Floyd was subjected to 8 minutes and 46 seconds of that officer’s knee on his neck where he expired. In addition to the officer whose knee was on Mr. Floyd’s neck there were three other officers on the scene who did nothing to aid him despite audible cries from an astonished public to help him. Mr. Floyd’s murder sparked unrest and uprisings throughout the nation and around the world. People began to protest racism not only in cities and towns in the US but also in the UK, France, and Canada. Confronting anti-Black racism became a worldwide cause. It represented a second pandemic.
The third pandemic is the coming economic collapse. It is trailing COVID-19 because job loss and skyrocketing medical costs were directly related to the coronavirus pandemic. Families across the nation are trembling in anticipation of evictions and foreclosures. Parents are standing in food lines to supplement what they are able to put on the table. Families are unable to pay utility bills and car notes. About 800,000 women have left the workforce compared to 78,000 men. Many of these women were in the prime working ages of 35 to 44.
The fourth pandemic is climate catastrophe. Although there are those who deny climate change, those who experienced the horrendous West Coast wildfires or the spate of hurricanes that entered the Gulf Coast region (so many that the National Weather Service went through the traditional alphabet and started in on the Greek alphabet), know that the climate is definitely changing. There are more days with temperatures above 90 degrees, more days with stagnant air, longer mosquito seasons, more coastline erosion, and lower mountain snow packs across the country. Climate change is very real for most people.
This litany of pandemics may sound a lot like gloom and doom, but I actually have a bit of hope supplied by Indian novelist, Arundhati Roy, who wrote an essay entitled, “The Pandemic Is a Portal” (see https://www.ft.com/content/10d8f5e8-74eb-11ea-95fe-fcd274e920ca). According to Roy, the pandemic gives us an opportunity to step into a new world leaving all of our old “carcasses, prejudices, avarice, old ideas” and other things behind. She argues we can carry “little luggage” and walk “lightly” into a new world ready to “fight for it.” What a refreshing way to approach this full stop we have been asked to make as a result of the pandemic and reset our educational agenda.
What might a full stop and reset look like? I have argued that what our schools need as a result of the pandemic pause is a “hard reset.” I draw the notion of a hard reset from mobile technologies. While cell phones are ubiquitous—we all have them—they are also prone to fail from time to time. We may turn them off and start them again to see if that fixes our problem. We may remove and then replace the SIM card. We may remove and replace the battery. Sometimes we go online and search for tech support groups. If none of those things work, we may reluctantly head to the mobile device store where a technician alerts us that we need to do a “hard reset.” Those dreaded words mean that if we have not already backed up all of our information, we are going to get a mobile device returned to us minus our pictures and minus our contacts. It will look a lot like it looked when we first received it from the factory. We will need to start over. That is what I believe education through the portal, on the other side of the pandemic, should look like. We will need to reset so we can restart.
Unfortunately, far too many people clammer for school to “get back to normal.” The problem I have with “normal” is that “normal” was where the problems resided. Normal was having Black and Latinx students in the lowest reading groups and lowest tracks in mathematics, English, science, etc. Normal was having Black and Latinx students over-identified for special needs. Normal was having Black and Latinx students disproportionately suspended, expelled, and sanctioned. Normal was Black and Latinx students excluded from Gifted and Talented Education, honors courses, and Advanced Placement classes. Getting back to “normal” is not the place we need to be.
As the chief proponent of “culturally relevant pedagogy” I have had the opportunity to look carefully at what shortcomings of culturally relevant pedagogy have been made evident over these past 30 years.1 The primary shortcoming is that the pedagogy I observed failed to incorporate the notion of youth culture. While the teachers I observed did an excellent job leveraging students’ home cultures—their first languages, customs, traditions, etc.—they did not factor in the impact of youth culture and its influence on US popular culture. I believe the primary reason for not including youth culture was an artifact of the teachers being teachers of elementary-aged students. Although elementary students consume youth culture through their use of language, adoption of fashion and style, and affection for popular music, they are not producers of youth culture. Had the study been done in secondary classrooms I am certain I would have seen more deliberate deployment of youth culture.
It is possible to see the effective use of urban youth culture in work by Emdin2 and Rawls and Robinson3 as well as in projects like “Science Genius” and #HipHopEd, which is a weekly Twitter® chat for teachers, students, scholars, artists, and community activists that discusses how youth culture impacts education. An excellent example of the merger of youth culture and student learning is Urban Word NYC, where Michael Cirelli serves hundreds of students from New York City Public Schools as well as incarcerated and homeless youth. Students who participate in Urban Word NYC programs write and perform spoken-word pieces. The US Youth National Poet Laureate program is run out of Urban Word NYC and in 2017 I had the opportunity to serve as a judge for the US Youth National Poet Laureate Program. Our judges panel selected a young woman from Los Angeles, CA, whose biography indicated she had battled a speech impediment and some cognitive processing issues. That woman’s name is Amanda Gorman—yes, the very same Amanda Gorman who became the youngest poet to deliver a poem at a Presidential Inauguration in 2021 and perhaps the only poet to deliver a poem at the SuperBowl!
So, in this edition of Dreamkeepers, I attempt to help teachers consider ways youth culture may be infused in classrooms to increase engagement, support student learning, develop cultural competence, and encourage critical consciousness. Thirty years may have passed, but I am convinced that our students still need Dreamkeepers to ensure their individual, family, community, and cultural dreams come true.
Notes
1 1. Emdin, C. For White folks who Teach in the Hood… and the Rest of Y’all Too: Reality Pedagogy and Urban Education. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2016.
2 2. Paris, D., and Alim, H. S. (Eds). Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies. New York: Teachers College Press, 2017.
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.
PREFACE
No challenge has been more daunting than that of improving the academic achievement of African American students. Burdened with a history that includes the denial of education, separate and unequal education, and relegation to unsafe, substandard inner-city schools, the quest for quality education remains an elusive dream for the African American community. However, it does remain a dream—perhaps the most powerful for the people of African descent in this nation.
The power and persistence of the metaphor of the dream has defined the sojourn of African Americans in the United States. From the words of the Bible to the poetry of Langston Hughes to the oratory of Martin Luther King, Jr., African Americans’ struggle against all odds has been spurred on by the pursuit of a dream.
Perceived as the most direct avenue to the realization