The Dreamkeepers. Gloria Ladson-Billings
school over their neighborhood school. They may live in a district or state that promotes private school vouchers or they may opt out of brick-and-mortar schooling altogether and choose to do “homeschool” or online schooling. All of these choices means that students grow accustomed to “shopping” for their education and like consumers of other goods and services, they expect a certain degree of customer satisfaction. To maintain enrollment, some schools may acquiesce to student and parent demands that may determine course offerings and final grades.
3 New Century Students do not receive their news about the world the ways their parents did via newspapers and nightly television news broadcasts. They receive their news and information via push notices from their favorite Internet sites, blogs and programs like “The Daily Show.” Thus, teachers who may want to incorporate current events in their classrooms must be prepared to hear a variety of perspectives on an item and multiple perspectives on what was the news story of the day. It may not be the political news out of Washington. It can be entertainment news (e.g., Beyoncé dropped an album and video last night), sports news (e.g., Kevin Durant was traded to the Nets) or tech news (e.g., Apple is introducing a new iPhone). These varied perspectives on what constitutes news makes for interesting classroom conversations and the need for teachers to demonstrate some pedagogical flexibility.
4 Although heavily invested in “social justice” New Century Students are less sanguine about “social welfare” (particularly if they have to bear the costs). It is not unusual to see New Century students engage in social protests like “Black Lives Matter” in response to police brutality or “#MeToo” in response to violence, harassment, and discrimination directed toward women, LGBTQIA people, and gender non-conforming people. However, these same students may balk at the notion that they should pay Social Security taxes or be required to subscribe to a health-care plan because they see it as paying for “old people.”
5 In the world of New Century students, email is an “old technology,” and they would prefer to communicate via instant messaging and tweets. While email may be the stock and trade of schools and workplaces, it is a dinosaur among New Century students. Teachers who do not understand the way to reach their students is through text messaging or their Instagram® pages are likely to regularly miscommunicate with them.
6 For New Century students, “library” research can best be done on their desktop, which means they rarely leaf through an entire journal. Where previous generations of students trekked to the library and pulled periodicals off the shelf, New Century students find what they want by doing online searches. They rarely see an article in the context of a whole journal where they may be tempted to read beyond the assignment.
7 New Century students believe it is important to “stay connected,” thus their phones are always at hand and classes that prohibit cell phone use interrupt their connections. Teachers who want to be successful with New Century students often find ways to integrate cell phone use into their classrooms (e.g., establishing live Twitter® feeds and allowing students to search for information using their mobile phones).
8 New Century students have very different conceptions of copyright, intellectual property, and plagiarism rules. This tendency among New Century students is often difficult for 20th-century teachers. They do not realize that their students live in the world of “sampling” and “mashups” where selecting pieces of material is not only appropriate, it is expected. Hip-hop artist Ice Cube samples from the Isley Brothers to make, “It Was a Good Day,” and Lauren Hill samples from Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons on “You’re Just too Good to Be True.” Teachers at both the high school and collegiate level have to explicitly teach students rules of plagiarism and intellectual property.
Despite these tendencies among New Century students, there are some exciting opportunities for using technology in teaching and learning. For example, the use of live Twitter® feeds referenced above can be a way to get students who are shy or reserved to participate more fully in the classroom. Instead of seeing mobile devices as distractions, culturally relevant teachers encourage students to use their devices to find information and become more engaged. Several of the teachers I have observed since the initial Dreamkeepers study taught me the importance of allowing students to create a class playlist. In these classes, teachers set the criteria and encourage students to select songs for the playlist. The criteria may demand, no songs with racist, sexist, misogynistic, or homophobic lyrics. The teachers begin each class session with a song or two from the class playlist as students arrive. They indicate that students arrive on time (just in case their song is the one that plays that day) and settle more quickly. Sometimes the song selected becomes a place to begin a conversation or represent a connection to what the class is studying. Teachers working with New Century students believe that mobile devices are another tool similar to textbooks, pens, pencils, and paper. However, it is a classroom tool that students are unlikely to forget.
The approach to integrating the cell phone or mobile device into the classroom stands in stark contrast to schools and classrooms where cell phone use is prohibited. Rather than forcing students to put their phones in a box as they enter the classroom or chastising students for responding to a cell phone notification, culturally relevant teachers are often looking for ways to make the cell phone a good resource for students. In an era when schools can come under attack from deranged people who seek to shoot people in schools, the availability of a cell phone may mean the difference between life and death. The job of a culturally relevant teacher is to help students use their phones for informational and educational purposes.
COVID-19 has made most educators aware of the need to become more proficient with technology. Platforms like Zoom®, Microsoft Teams®, and Google Meet® have become necessary for maintaining teaching and learning. In a recent visit to a high school in Baltimore I spoke with students about how they felt about remote learning. I fully expected students to complain about remote learning; however, one student declared, “I really love remote learning.” When I inquired as to why he felt that way he replied, “Because when they (the teachers) get on my nerves I just turn them off!” I then asked what happens when he does that; he told me, “Oh, the teacher sometimes calls me to see what happened and I just say, ‘I had Internet connectivity problems!’” What that student was telling me was that because of remote learning, I now have command of my learning. I can choose when to engage and I can choose when to disengage without being sent to the principal for insubordination.
The technologies are allowing students to develop their own learning opportunities. A few weeks ago, a high school student reached out to me to do an interview on his podcast. At the end of the interview, he told me he was not looking forward to returning to face-to-face schooling because he was learning so much via his podcast. I checked his episode list and saw that he had interviewed some of the city’s most interesting people—policymakers, activists, businespeople, scientists, entertainers, and others.
Hip-Hop as a Hope—The Rise of Youth Culture
The second important aspect of today’s classroom is the role of youth culture. As I pointed out in the Foreword, my early work failed to acknowledge the importance of youth culture. I suggested that I ignored youth culture because I was observing elementary classrooms where the students were more likely to be consumers of youth culture but not producers of it. That was the purview of adolescents. However, youth culture has a tremendous impact on how secondary students experience schooling and like technology, it is a mistake to ignore it.
New Century students do not fit neatly into the rigid categories of race, class, gender, or national origin that their parents and teachers have relied upon to make distinctions and create hierarchy. Their sports heroes and heroines include LeBron James and J. J. Watt, Gabby Douglas and Brianna Stewart. They listen to Drake, Post Malone, Dua Lipa and Cardi B. They are more likely to endorse same-sex marriage and can separate out hip-hop traditions. Where baby boomers and their parents hear it all as “noise” (just a reminder, our parents called rock & roll and rhythm & blues “noise”), they point out that there are important differences between L’il Wayne and Immortal Technique, L’il Kim and Ana Tijoux. They know that this culture they have created is a mash-up with permeable boundaries. They are simultaneously sacred