Uncomfortable Conversations: Talking About Race In The Classroom

Good interview with Richard Milner of the Center for Urban Education at the University of Pittsburgh and author of Rac(e)ing to Class: Confronting Poverty and Race in Schools and Classrooms:

So how can teachers incorporate those outside realities into curriculum? You mention a case study in the book that involves a robbery that happened right around the corner from a middle school. When you talked to teachers at that school, what did you recommend?

I was doing a professional development session with the teachers, and I just posed a question. I said, “I’m wondering why you guys didn’t mention the robbery in the classroom,” and the educators in the room just got offended.

There was a guy who sat in the back and said, “I teach math and science, what does a robbery have to do with my teaching math and science?”

So I gave some examples: You could talk about the relationship between well-lit communities and those that aren’t. You could count the number of streetlights in a particular vicinity. You could pull up Google Maps and have the students guesstimate the amount of time it would take the police to drive from the police precinct to the robbery scene at different rates of speed. You could have the students look at the relationship between gun shop access and crime.

There are all these mathematical ways of engaging the incident and being responsive to the things that the students are concerned about. But it takes the teachers’ willingness to delve into, to be creative, and to be consistent with and align with the things that they’re supposed to be teaching. I would never tell a teacher to teach anything that they are not supposed to teach. Teachers can make lessons relevant and accessible to students and still align with and be consistent with the Common Core standards and so forth.

In the book you give examples from your classroom visits — but you don’t always offer solutions or answers. Why? Is that intentional?

So this work is contextual. With the cases, I really want teachers to read them to reflect about their own practices, to problematize them, to call me out and say “I disagree with this.”

Just because it’s complex and we don’t know for sure what’s going on doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be interrogating and trying to figure it out. And that’s where I think we really fall short.

We see that particular groups of students, like black and brown male students, are constantly being suspended and expelled from school, and we’ve got to stop it. We’ve got to recognize what’s going on, and we’ve got to address it. So with each case, it invites readers to strategize about what they would do in a particular situation.

Uncomfortable Conversations: Talking About Race In The Classroom : NPR Ed : NPR.