Robert Taylor - Week 4

The CCCC’s statement sent me down a rabbit hole. I have always been interested in incorporating different perspectives in my high school English classroom, yet the statement left me wondering if there is more I could be doing to improve my teaching practices. I began researching each of the co-authors of the piece; Lamar Johnson was one who stood out to me. Johnson co-authored a piece that caught my attention right away: “‘Loving Blackness to Death’: (Re)Imagining ELA Classrooms in a Time of Racial Chaos.” In this piece, Johnson and others detail the complicity that can exist in the ELA classroom which can violate the Black spirit by knowingly or unknowingly asserting Eurocentric and white supremacist ideologies. His words caused me to examine my own practices and assumptions about the way I incorporate different texts in my classroom. The piece lists examples of texts that can be used in a secondary classroom, and I know many of my future curriculum focuses will be on incorporating more of these writings.

I’m left wondering what my role can be in this conversation beyond incorporating Black voices in my classroom. I firmly believe that it is not my place as an educator to posit my own beliefs to my students. Is choosing texts such as these simply one step removed from positing my own beliefs? Am I able to have an “unbiased” conversation with students about the authenticity of Black Life and Black voices? Should this be an ideal I strive toward? Is it even my place to have these conversations in my classroom (or with tutoring students)? Should my students know where I stand in these conversations? I don’t pose these questions to sound as if I am unwilling to be an advocate; I pose them because I do not have answers to them, and I feel it is my responsibility to answer them with integrity for myself and my students.


Comments

  1. ConorSeptember 21, 2020 at 2:19 PM

    The question of transparency about your positions/beliefs/etc as an educator is a fascinating one that I often think about. I talk about bias with my rhetoric students and those conversations often circle around the ways that I have or haven't revealed my own biases (positions/beliefs/etc.) to the class.

    In some senses, it seems irresponsible to NOT be open about my position. Like, I should be explicit about things, at least as far as doing so makes me a 'safe' instructor for marginalized students to approach. Yet, it seems irresponsible to use the classroom as an opportunity to make a couple dozen 'mini-me's'. So, there should be some middle-ground, I think. And, I feel like I am inevitably shaping the classroom around my own interests and beliefs, so perhaps the only responsible thing to do is to be open about it (yet, how to do so without alienating students or making the class about itself, like, if I am open about supporting Black Lives Matter, will that fundamentally alter the nature of the course? Is that alteration good and necessary? Are there other, more productive ways to make my position known?).

    Just some scattered thoughts and additional questions to add to yours.

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