Read Part 3 pages 77- 123 in your text and the articles linked in module.

As you read, make notes about your reactions, assumptions, implications, arguments, questions (see prompts in instructions) The idea of personal responses are to engage in thoughtful internal dialogue about the idea of global issues and education. You should attempt, in your understanding of the readings to get “underneath” what you read in order to understand the social, political, and cultural underpinnings of the issues.  Reading critically involves more than understanding the words or liking or disliking the texts; critical reading requires reflection.

Some prompts are helpful for how you should approach these assignments. As you consider your reflections, think about these questions: (a) what are the texts’ assumptions about the phenomena being discussed? (b) What are the implications of the assumptions and/or the arguments? (c) What is at stake in the texts arguments for the authors and for you? (d) Who (or what) are the authors arguing for or against? (e) How do the authors construct and articulate their arguments? (f) How do the texts “fit” (or not fit) in relation to your own thought and practice? (g) What questions did you find yourself asking after doing the reading? Please do not simply summarize the readings.

Journal of Negro Education

Moving Beyond the Boat without a Paddle: Reality Pedagogy, Black Youth, and Urban

Science Education

Author(s): Christopher Emdin

Source: The Journal of Negro Education, Vol. 80, No. 3, Preparing Teachers to Teach Black

Students; Preparing Black Students to Become Teachers (Summer 2011), pp. 284-295

Published by: Journal of Negro Education

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41341134

Accessed: 31-10-2016 18:10 UTC

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The Journal of Negro Education, 80 (3), 284-295

Moving Beyond the Boat without a Paddle: Reality
Pedagogy , Black Youth , and Urban Science
Education

Christopher Emdin Teachers College, Columbia University

Much of the research that focuses on the academic success of Black youth in urban science
education does not consider the provision of tools that educators can use in becoming more
effective . This article discusses this issue , and introduces an approach to pedagogy – reality
pedagogy – which includes five distinct types of practices (the 5 С ‘s) which teachers can
implement in their classrooms to facilitate effective science instruction. I describe the 5 С ‘s of
reality pedagogy; discuss ways they can be implemented; and show how they can both support the
effectiveness of urban science teachers and the agency of Black youth in their classrooms.

Keywords: Urban Science Education , Reality Pedagogy , 5 С ‘s

In an age where there has been much growth in the social and political attainment of people of
color, it is customary to begin an article that focuses on the teaching and learning of youth of color
by rehashing decades of research that discusses the challenges of urban Black youth in achieving
educational parity with their counterparts from other socioeconomic, racial, and ethnic
backgrounds (Ferguson, 2007; Haycock, 2001; Jones, 1984). This is the case partly because of the
perplexing persistence of achievement gaps, particularly in science and mathematics, despite
Black achievement in other areas and much theorizing about the academic needs of Black youth
(Haycock, 2001; Oakes, 1990; Seymour & Hewitt, 1997; Wright, Standen, & Patel, 2010).

As researchers express their concerns about the achievement gaps between Black students and
their counterparts from other racial and ethnic backgrounds (Burton & Jones, 1982; Murphy,
2009; Norman, Ault, Bentz, & Meskimen, 2001), they persistently report the low achievement of
Black youth (National Assessment of Educational Progress, 2006, 2009). One resounding theme in
the academic research on Black youth in science education is that, despite the best efforts to close
achievement gaps, they still exist across the educational landscape. Furthermore, researchers
continue to spend an inordinate amount of time and effort describing and discussing the fact that
such gaps still exist. The gaps in student success in disciplines like science has become a part of
the tradition of academic research aimed toward meeting the academic needs of youth (Cohen,
Garcia, Purdie- Vaughns, Apfel & Brzustoski, 2009). Research on Black youth in education even
as it functions to provide conclusions that support the success of Black youth in academic settings,
does not get affirmed unless it rehashes, recreates, and reestablishes conclusions about the
inabilities of urban youth of color to do well in school (Emdin, 2006). While I agree that a
particular focus on Black youth in urban classrooms is necessary (Atwater, 2000; Barton, 2001;
Johnson, 2009), the tradition of re-describing achievement gaps in order to validate one’s work is
counterproductive to necessary efforts like providing tangible tools to support the effectiveness of
the teachers of Black youth. By focusing explicitly on achievement gaps, researchers place too
much emphasis on deficits within students and do not pay enough attention to deficits within
teachers, educational systems, and approaches to pedagogy – the main contributors to the
academic underperformance of Black youth (Murnane & Steele, 2007). When we focus too
closely on achievement gaps, we are inadvertently accepting and supporting the existence of an
anti-science and even an anti-school mindset in urban youth. Instead, it should be obvious –
especially to education researchers and practitioners – that everyone is scientifically minded and
that it is the environments’ (school and society) ineffectiveness in fostering this inherent interest
that disfigures urban Black youth’s passion for the sciences.

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On Effectiveness

Research in education has indicated that teachers who are qualified (certified via licensure) are not
necessarily effective educators (Darling-Hammond, 1996; Laczko-Kerr & Berliner, 2002). In
science education, effectively teaching the subject requires much more than the possession of
content knowledge (Czerniak & Chiarelott, 1990; Kind, 2009). Effective teaching in science
classrooms requires both a deep understanding of the subject matter and a profound understanding
of the cultural backgrounds of one’s students, particularly in urban settings (Fusco, 2001; Lee &
Fradd, 1998). Unfortunately, many urban science teachers are lacking in both content and cultural
expertise (Proweller & Mitchener, 2004). Even when teachers do have sufficient content
knowledge, many still lack the tools necessary to address the cultural divides that render them
ineffective in teaching science (Emdin, 2010; LaVan, 2004; Tobin, 1990).

I suggest that ineffective urban science teachers (regardless of being qualified) must be
supported in breaking from traditional practice in urban science education, and pushed toward
more practical and innovative ways to improve the academic experiences of Black youth in
classrooms (Goldston, 2009). I also argue, as Atwater (2000) does, that the effectiveness of urban
science educators depends upon their nuanced understanding of students’ culture and background
as developed and expressed outside of the classroom.

For many scholars, science teacher effectiveness is connected to the performance of their
students on science assessments and standardized exams. For others, it is related to students’
active participation in science lessons/activities, meeting federal and state mandates/standards, and
developing science learner identities in students (Davis & Smithey, 2009; Galton & Eggleston,
1979). I argue that each of these criteria for effectiveness are valuable and can be met, if teachers
adopt approaches to reality pedagogy. Reality pedagogy builds upon culturally relevant and
critical pedagogy, moving us beyond efforts to address the challenges within urban schools that
focus on the academic deficiencies of youth to instead support both teachers and their students in
improving their experiences in classrooms.

On Culturally Relevant Pedagogy

Culturally relevant pedagogy is an approach to teaching that considers the unique cultural
backgrounds of youth. It awakens teachers to the possibilities that what they know about teaching
in regards to content is enhanced when the unique cultural backgrounds of the youth they are
teaching is considered (Howard, 2003; Ladson-Billings, 1995, Young, 2010). Teachers are only
effective if they know how to deliver content in a way that resonates with their students and causes
their students to take ownership of that content and explore it more deeply on their own. This view
of pedagogy considers the deleterious effect that “culture free” curriculum, instruction, and
evaluation have on youth who are embedded in a culture that is marginalized in a supposedly all
inclusive school system. This brand of pedagogy advocates for a willingness to move beyond what
is given (prescribed curriculum, “culture free” text, ideas for how to teach that are not reflective of
youth culture) and into aspects of the students’ lifeworlds that can be brought into the classroom.

Culturally relevant pedagogy is often used interchangeably with culturally responsive
pedagogy, which focuses on teachers’ acceptance of their specific cultural heritage and that of the
school and curriculum as it relates to the culture of their students (Gay, 2000; Villegas & Lucas,
2001). In this approach to instruction, which is birthed from cultural pedagogy, the
acknowledgement of the cultural differences that exist in classrooms among teacher, curriculum,
school, and student, and the reconciliation with these differences through the validation of the
culture of youth is the point from which teaching is enacted (Santamaria, 2009). In both
approaches, the focus is the validation of youth culture and its consideration in teaching youth of
diverse backgrounds.

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On Critical Pedagogy

Critical pedagogy, like culturally relevant pedagogy, pushes beyond traditional approaches to
Black youth education. It is an approach to instruction that moves beyond disseminating content
by focusing on the social, political, and historical dimensions of teaching and learning (Kincheloe,
1998; Macrine, 2009). Critical pedagogues function to not only make sense of dimensions of
teaching and learning that are not usually considered, but also to make students aware of how
these dynamics directly impact what and how they learn. This approach to instruction is rooted in
an aversion to oppression and in providing a voice for the marginalized (Apple & Carlson, 1998;
Denzin, 2009). It encourages dissention and liberation for oppressed people as a significant aspect
of teaching (Freire, 1998). It moves teachers from their normal/traditional position as innocuous
information distributors to champions for youth and disseminators of the power to affect change
within and beyond classrooms.

Hindrances to Culturally Relevant and Critical Pedagogy

Despite the potential of both culturally relevant and critical pedagogy to move beyond the tradition
in research that I call for in the opening of this article, both of these approaches do not provide
teachers with tangible tools that support them in becoming transformative pedagogues. For
teachers who have made the tremendous leap to embrace the fact that there is much to learn about
the culture of the youth they teach, there is not enough effort made to provide them with the tools
to understand the complexities of Black youth realities. In other words, a true representation of
youth experiences is not always present even among progressive educators that are fighting to
teach with a consideration for Black youth culture.

The particular vantage point of Black youth is unique, complex, and expressed differently
within different social settings (Emdin, 2011). While an appreciation and value for Black youth
culture can be developed, a full understanding of its complexities is an ever-evolving and
continual process. It can be indescribable in its most concrete forms and indiscernible in its most
abstract. For example, when one is describing the ways that urban Black youth communicate,
there is only so much that can be said or written to capture all that is simultaneously happening.
Likewise, there are certain unique practices that only those embedded in youth culture can identify
and relate to. For these reasons, when we propose cultural relevance or critical pedagogy to
teachers and do not provide them with tools to develop a true picture of the realities of Black
youth culture/experiences, it is equivalent to providing them with a boat without a paddle. They
enter the waters of theory, swim in the seas of cultural relevance, but make no progress in
providing the youth they advocate for a means to new possibilities in the classroom. This article
focuses on an approach to pedagogy that supports teachers in knowing the culture of particular
students and understanding the specific ways that these students experience teaching and learning
in the classroom. While this approach to pedagogy may be implemented in any classroom, this
focus is on science. Science, as a discipline, is historically slanted toward a Eurocentric ontology
(Aikenhead 1994; Seiler, 2001). Urban school science is taught in a way that is almost
diametrically opposed to the ways that urban youth make sense of the world (Emdin, 2010). The
historical and cultural backdrop to science positions it as an inhibitor to knowing/including Black
youth. Developing tools in this field to counter the existent tradition is not only helpful for
teachers, but necessary for creating new possibilities in science for Black youth.

Reality Pedagogy

Reality pedagogy, like culturally relevant pedagogy, is an outgrowth of my research in urban
classrooms and focuses on the cultural understandings of students within a particular social space,
like the science classroom (Emdin, 2009). At the same time, like critical pedagogy, it functions to
develop students’ consciousness about the sociopolitical factors that affect their teaching and
learning. Reality pedagogy meets its goals with a set of five tangible tools that students and

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teachers engage in together to improve science teaching and learning. It focuses explicitly on
understanding the realities of youth within a particular classroom and supports the teacher in
utilizing an understanding of these realities as an anchor for instruction delivery. From culturally
relevant pedagogy, reality pedagogy gleans a focus on students’ communities and the use of an
understanding of these communities in improving teacher effectiveness. Culturally relevant
pedagogy extends by immersing the teacher so deeply in the culture of the specific students
through actual engagement with the students, that it becomes second nature to find ways to
develop students’ interest in, and natural affinity for, science.

From critical pedagogy, reality pedagogy picks up a focus on providing students and teachers
with opportunities to discuss in school the inequities students experience both within and beyond
the classroom. It aligns to the major themes of critical pedagogy by moving teachers to engage in
dialogues with Black youth about the ways they have been denied full participation in society and
the science classroom. The teachers are given an opportunity to engage in what Oliver (2000)
refers to as bearing witness to the students, which allows teachers to identify with and make
connections to the experiences of oppressed youth despite the fact that teachers may not have
experienced the same things as their students.

The Five C’s of Reality Pedagogy: Cogeneratiye Dialogues, Coteaching,
Cosmopolitanism, Context, and

Content

In order to enact reality pedagogy, there are five steps that teachers and students must engage in
together. These steps support teaching and learning and transform the experiences of both teachers
and students. In these five steps both the theoretical and practical components of this pedagogical
approach converge to affect change in classrooms and support the effectiveness of teachers.

The author outlines these steps not to provide a recipe for teacher effectiveness or a script for
the best way to teach Black youth, but as a set of tools that, if implemented, can transform existent
teaching practices. These are not steps that must be enacted in any particular order or be used to
assess teachers for effectiveness or relevance. However, they are approaches to teaching that, if
implemented consistently, have the potential to positively transform the education of marginalized
youth.

Cogenerative Dialogues

The first of the five C’s of reality pedagogy is the cogenerative dialogue (cogens). These dialogues
are structured to emulate the ways that many urban Black youth communicate when they are
engaged in an aspect of urban (hip-hop) culture called the cypher. Cogens take structures from the
cypher and then enhance them by nesting the dialogues in what is happening in the classroom.

Cogens occur with the goal of reaching collective decisions about the rules, roles, and
responsibilities that govern students’ lives (Roth, Tobin, & Zimmerman, 2002) and lend
themselves to discussions with students about the inhibitors to their engagement in the classroom.
Beginning with four to six students and a teacher (during lunch, before or after school) and
focusing on a science class that they all are a part of, teachers and students engage in a critical
deconstruction of what happened in the classroom. Then, they decide upon at least one thing that
the group can do to improve teaching and learning when they return to the classroom. In these
dialogues, a small group of students are given the opportunity to reflect on their classroom
experiences, critique the instruction, discuss the inhibitors to their classroom learning, and, most
importantly, provide teachers with an insight into what can work well in the classroom from the
students’ perspective.

Because of the unique way that they are structured – based on the cypher that many Black
youth engage in community and private settings – these dialogues provide an opportunity for
teachers, who may not be from the same ethnic or racial backgrounds as students, to engage with
their students in ways that allow for the expression of the students’ unique standpoints. Cogens
provide an opportunity for teachers to hear an analysis of their instruction not provided in the

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traditional classroom. Teachers engage in discussions about ways to address both social (related to
the ways the teacher interacts with students) and structural (institutional and environmental)
inhibitors to effective teaching as articulated by the students they teach.

Cyphers, which are a complex form of group communication that hip-hop youth engage in,
lend themselves to the structure of cogens and are the model for how cogens are structured. In
cyphers, rappers exchange with each other, following a set of simple yet structured rules of
engagement. First, all participants are positioned in a circle with equal space among participants.
Second, there are equal opportunities for rappers/participants in the cypher to perform. Third, there
is a consistent effort to reference the collective experiences of all participants as the
dialogue/exchange continues. Like the cypher, participants in cogens are positioned in a circle,
have equal turns at talk, interact with no voices being privileged over others, and work together to
create a plan of action for improving their shared experiences in the classroom.

When cogens are in place and students are sharing their thoughts about the classroom, the
teacher hears conversations that can shift teaching practices in ways that reflect student
standpoints and insight into the inner-workings of the classroom. This helps the teacher to be more
effective. This process allows the teacher to be culturally relevant by teaching based on students’
thoughts and ideas instead of teachers’ conceptions or assumptions about their students’ culture.

Some conditions for these dialogues that will assist the teacher in properly implementing them
are as follows:

• Students are selected and invited to participate in the dialogues by their teacher based on their being
from different demographics in the classroom (e.g., high-achieving and low-achieving students or
engaged and disengaged students).

• Students are informed that participation in cogens is voluntaiy and rotational. Individual students
participate in no more than three cogen meetings per quarter, semester, or academic year depending
upon class size and duration. Students can always opt out If they choose to opt out, they are asked to
invite a peer to join the dialogues in their place or a teacher-selected substitute is chosen.

• All participants in the dialogues have equal turns at talk.
• All talk is respectful of other participants. All participants are asked to listen attentively and allow

their peers to complete their thoughts before responding. The phrase “one mie” is repeated when this
rule is violated by any member of the group, so that students can self-manage each other and maintain
a fruitful dialogue.

• A plan of action (a practical thing the teacher and students can do) for addressing an issue raised in
dialogues must be generated from the conversation.

• Topics of the next dialogue should be based on the results of the previous cogenerated action and how
successfully or unsuccessfully it was implemented in the classroom.

• All participants collectively share responsibility for enacting all agreements arising from the
dialogues.

Coteaching

The second component of reality pedagogy is coteaching. This practice usually involves a veteran
and novice teacher in a classroom. The newer teacher is learning how to teach by observing or
assisting the expert teacher, or where general education and special education students have two
teachers in an inclusive classroom (Cook & Friend, 1995; Hang & Rabren, 2009). In reality
pedagogy, coteaching as it is traditionally known is deconstructed. In this iteration of coteaching, a
role reversal of sorts occurs and the student is declared the expert at pedagogy (the person who
knows most about how to deliver information to other students) while the teacher becomes the
novice who is learning how to teach.

This process, of allowing the student to be the teacher, moves beyond a superficial rendering
of traditional teaching. Instead, the student is given all the responsibilities of the teacher and
allowed to teach in a way that he or she feels is relevant to other students in the classroom who
share the same cultural background. This process involves giving the student who will be teaching
access to the teaching materials, like lesson plans, teacher manuals of textbooks, web resources,

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and other materials used to prepare the lesson. The student-teacher is then given the opportunity to
both prepare and teach the lesson while the teacher physically and symbolically is positioned to
learn from the student. When coteaching in this form is enacted, the teacher observes the lesson,
takes notes on the ways that the student enacts pedagogy, documents the specific examples the
student uses, records the way the student interacts with peers, and learns how to teach in ways that
reflect the realities of student experiences.

For Black youth in particular, empowerment to engage in the classroom in new ways makes
their teachers more effective by providing them with opportunities to see good teaching (from the
students). It also provides a counter-narrative to the pedagogy of poverty that inscribes an anti-
school and anti-science identity on otherwise scientifically minded youth.

Research indicates that exposure to professions is a chief way to introduce youth to future
professions (McGee & Keller, 2007). Therefore, by allowing Black youth to teach science classes,
they are able to see themselves as scientists and teachers, opening up new career trajectories.

Coteaching, under reality pedagogy, also allows the student to teach peers in a one-on-one
form. In this process, students are matched up based on their strengths or weaknesses with the
content. The goal is to harness strengths (by allowing students to teach what they know well) and
address content deficiencies (by allowing students to teach their peers who need help with content
knowledge on specific topics). Unlike the in traditional classroom, This process welcomes
vulnerability in the classroom. It focuses on youth who feel responsible for each other’s learning
and the collective success of all students within the classroom. Coteaching in reality pedagogy can
be supported through the following steps:

Before Class
• Three to four students who have been engaged in cogens are invited to be initial coteachers

and use a cogen session to copian a lesson with the teacher.
• Student-teachers are given a homework assignment to enhance the lesson that was begun in

the cogen and provided with the tools to develop the lesson (textbooks, etc.)
• The teacher performs a quick review of the lesson plan to ensure that content is reflected

accurately immediately prior to the students’ teaching of the lesson.
During Class

• One or more of the students from the cogen are allowed to teach the lesson with support
from their peers.

• The teacher sits in a student’s seat in a place that is prominent in the classroom and in the
view of the student-teacher(s).

• The teacher takes notes on the student’s teaching, focusing on modes of interaction, use of
analogy/metaphor, and types of phrases used to support learners who are struggling with
content.

• The teacher pays close attention to parts of the lesson where the content delivered and
guides the instruction (by raising a hand as a traditional student would) only when there are
issues with the content.

After Class
• The teacher engages in a cogen with student-teachers where they can reflect on the lesson

taught and the teacher can ask questions about the nuances of the lesson based on his/her
notes.

• The teacher delivers the same lesson students to another class using techniques from the
student’s lesson.

• The teacher and student-teachers discuss the content delivered in front of the class and

students disclose their understanding of the subject.
• Students are matched to each other based on their disclosures of content expertise and

partnered to teach each other.

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• The teacher facilitates one-on-one teaching sessions, takes notes on student teaching, and
utilizes the feedback received as part of a pedagogical toolkit for future instruction.

Cosmopolitanism

The third step of reality pedagogy, and another approach to support the effectiveness of teachers of
Black youth, is cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism is a philosophical construct that, when
described in reality pedagogy, becomes a tangible approach to transforming human roles in social
settings. This construct has been used in the field of education as a way to teach diverse
populations but has not been presented in a way that is tangible for classroom use.
Cosmopolitanism is often presented as a way of knowing and being that embraces a belief in
human responsibility for each other and of the value of the individual differences (Appiah, 2006).
In essence, all human beings are responsible for each other in some way and an appreciation for
the unique roles that we each play for the maintenance of each other’s livelihoods and happiness
gives our lives meaning. The owning and sharing of a cosmopolitan ethos is important for the
teacher to develop and even more necessary for students to feel when within a classroom (Todd,
2008).

In the urban classroom, cosmopolitanism begins with the teacher identifying the
nontraditional roles and responsibilities of the student role of learner but that support the smooth
operation of the classroom. In the science classroom in particular, these roles and responsibilities
should align with those that are carried out by professionals in science. For example, in the
traditional science lab, there are principal investigators, research scientists, laboratory assistants,
and field researchers who each have distinct roles to play in the proper functioning of the lab. All
are held responsible and are appreciated for the roles they play. Likewise, in the ideal classroom
for students who have been marginalized from school and science, it is necessary for these youth
to feel like they are a part of a unit that cannot function properly unless the student is present in
class. In the cosmopolitan classroom, there is a familial structure that allows students to become
invested in the daily operation of the classroom, which, in turn, allows the teacher to be more
effective in the delivery of content.

Within the classroom, there are roles that students can hold that can ensure that students
develop a connection to the classroom and a desire to learn within it. Simple roles include: the
greeter of visitors, who welcomes the school administration or other guests to the classroom; the
equipment distributor, who hands out lab materials to students; technology manager, who ensures
that computers and smart-boards are appropriately running; and even comedian, who is a
designated person to provide comic relief in a class. The following steps can be taken to ensure a
cosmopolitan classroom:

• The teacher identifies the roles and responsibilities for tasks that make the class run smoothly.
• Students are invited to select roles that they want to take on and teachers compare these roles to roles

in the science lab.

• The first weeks of school are dedicated to explicitly discussing the roles of students, their relationship
to the smooth functioning of the class, and the effect of these responsibilities on how the rest of the
class learns.

Roles may be alternated at significant points in the school year (e.g., holidays, semester breaks),
and students who opt out of cogens have priority in choosing roles.

Context

The fourth C, Context, describes a set of practices that revolves around bringing artifacts into the
classroom. These artifacts have some significance in the physical spaces (contexts) that students
inhabit outside of the classroom and traditionally may have little to no value within the classroom.

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These artifacts serve as anchors for classroom instruction and the connector between student
lifeworlds outside of the classroom and the world within the classroom. Artifacts can be rocks or

plants from a local park brought into the biology classroom, which have more significance than
pictures from a book or Internet. Pictures of street signs, store fronts, building facades, graffiti art,
and other parts of the students’ communities can be used to explain concepts in geography or
chemistry, like weathering. When students can physically see and examine artifacts both in the
classrooms and in their home communities, the divides between the school world and their real
lives are broken down. The use of artifacts from students’ lifeworlds, that reflect their
communities and honors their Blackness instead of animations and text from places far removed
from students’ lives enhances classroom lessons and makes teachers more relevant and effective.

For teachers, finding artifacts from the contexts where youth are embedded will require their
physical movement. This facilitates immersion in, or at least awareness of (via physical presence
in), the complexities of student backgrounds. It almost forces the teacher to look at the lesson and
the way it is prepared through the lens of its significance to the student.

Using this approach to instruction, the complex connection between the teacher and the
learner are revealed when students start making connections to artifacts on their own and begin
looking at other pieces of their lifeworlds through a science lens. Furthermore, it allows the
teacher to display an effort to make science relevant for students that students can both appreciate
and admire.

Focusing on context in the classroom can be expanded to include homework
assignments/projects which students search for and collect artifacts from their lifeworlds that can
used for their co-teaching sessions. Context allows students to see the significance of their out-of-
school life worlds to the content being delivered in the classroom, extending the connections
between school and community. Furthermore, it encourages student creativity in making
connections in and out of school worlds.

Content

The final step in reality pedagogy that will be discussed is Content. Content refers to the academic
work/science topics that the teacher is responsible for covering within the curriculum. In reality
pedagogy, it involves teachers’ willingness to both expose and embrace the limitations in their
content knowledge within the classroom. This process involves the creation of spaces within the
classroom for the revision of the topics where the teacher is not expert and where the student and
teacher can explore that content together. This process is enacted with the embracing of the
finiteness of the teacher’s knowledge and a validation of questions from students around these
topics as points for further research. In the classroom, this process can be identified by statements
from the teacher, such as “I don’t know,” “That’s a good question,” and “Let’s research it later.”
This process expands students’ perceptions about the nature of science – that science is a
completed body of knowledge – and teachers – as someone who has all the answers.

For Black youth, once the understanding that science or any other discipline being taught is
but an infinite body of knowledge ripe for interrogation, the willingness to exchange within the
classroom and support the teacher in the codiscovery of new knowledge begins. This refraining of
who is a content expert also highlights science-informed professions not traditionally viewed as
scientific, such as music engineers or graffiti artists, to discuss how science concepts relate to their
work.

Recommendations for Research

Contemporary authors in urban science education, particularly those that address issues related to
youth of color, argue that urban science education research is limited in scope and far removed
from the cultural experiences of youth in classrooms (Johnson & Fargo, 2010; Roth, 2009; Seiler
& Elmesky, 2007). I suggest that research in this academic vein focus on tangible teaching tools

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for classroom teachers and are practiced in spaces beyond the traditional classroom. I suggest that
research begins with the identification of teaching practices within urban communities that may be
physically and culturally removed from classrooms but have the potential to transform formal
teaching and learning.

I also suggest that future research in urban science education focus on the interrogation of
systematic approaches to disseminating, implementing, and studying the effectiveness of these
out-of-classroom and in-community tools. For example, traditional research on professional
development of teachers or forms of assessment in classrooms can be rooted in a study of the
applicability of youth culture based approaches to pedagogy and teaching techniques. This
process, unlike traditional educational research, places the value on the utility of the research
being produced with teachers within classrooms. Once this process occurs, theorizing of issues
surrounding urban youth of color that we find in traditional research can begin. This work should
be more connected to the realities of the urban youth experience than the usual academic rendering
of the issues that plague urban education. With this approach, the theory developed or employed
by researchers becomes much more than extraneous musings of academics who are far removed
from youth realities. The theory becomes a spotlight that illuminates the practical and tangible
aspects of the tool for instruction under scrutiny. In this type of research, the act of researching
becomes a quest for more effective teaching strategies and educational theory becomes an
outgrowth of (and support for) work “in the trenches” of urban communities and classrooms.

Recommendations for Practice

Some suggestions for practitioners that go beyond the five C’s for reality pedagogy involve
developing the appropriate mind-set for effective teaching. These recommendations, because of
the practical nature of this article, are aligned the cultural tools teachers need to ensure that they
are properly enacting reality pedagogy. For example, with the implementation of cogens and co-
teaching, teachers must come to the classroom with a willingness to listen to students, and an
acceptance that the teacher is the content expert while students are the content delivery experts.
With the implementation of cosmopolitanism, content, and context, teachers must be willing to
loosen existent classroom structures to allow students to enact behaviors that may not be usually
accepted in classrooms. Educators must accept that when youth question existent structures, as this
article suggests they do, they will be vocal and, in some instances, critique the teacher’s
instruction. This must be permitted and welcomed in the classroom. Concurrently, teachers must
be vulnerable enough to accept when there are gaps in their content expertise, be willing to
confront their fears of youth and their communities, and accept the inherent value of urban youth
to their own teaching and learning.

Conclusions

While the tools mentioned above have the potential to impact the teaching and learning of Black
youth and provide theoretical and practical approaches to supporting the effectiveness of teachers,
they must first be accepted into both teacher preparation programs and professional development
offerings in schools, even as they are used to break from traditional practice in those spaces.

Because existent research in Black youth education is often hyper-theoretical despite its
transformative qualities, it can be challenging for teachers to implement in classrooms. Therefore,
discussions about societal inequities and achievement gaps often come at the expense of providing
the tools for teaching effectively.

The work produced provides a set of practices that teachers can readily implement in their
classrooms. These practices are conducive to both the needs of potential teachers who are
clamoring for what to do once they are in classrooms and those in the classroom struggling for
tools to become more effective. As teachers and researchers we must accept that there is much
work to be done in transforming education for Black youth. Hopefully, through the practices

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provided here, we move towards giving teachers the tools – the paddle – to move the boat that can
connect urban youth to academic success in science and other disciplines.

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Author

CHRISTOPHER EMDIN is Assistant Professor of Science Education in the Department of Math,
Science and Technology at Teachers College, Columbia University.

All comments and queries regarding this article should be addressed to ce2165@columbia.edu

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• Contents

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• Issue Table of Contents

The Journal of Negro Education, Vol. 80, No. 3 (Summer 2011) pp. 183-438
Front Matter
Editor’s Comments: Diversifying the United States’ Teaching Force: Where are We Now? Where Do We Need to Go? How Do We Get There? [pp. 183-186]
Guest Editorial: Transforming the Field of Education to Serve the Needs of the Black Community: Implications for Critical Stakeholders [pp. 187-190]
Commentary: Swords, Shields, and the Fight for Our Children: Lessons from Urban Prep [pp. 191-192]
Foreword: Disparities, Economics, and Evidence: Beyond Politics in Teacher Education [pp. 193-196]
Part I: Preparing Teachers to Teach Black Students
Teachers and Teaching for the New Millennium: The Role of HBCUs [pp. 197-208]
From Maybe I Can to Yes I Can: Developing Preservice and Inservice Teachers’ Self-Efficacy to Teach African American Students [pp. 209-222]
(Re)Framing Diverse Pre-service Classrooms as Spaces for Culturally Relevant Teaching [pp. 223-238]
Key Theories and Frameworks for Improving the Recruitment and Retention of African American Students in Gifted Education [pp. 239-253]
Experience-Centered Instruction as a Catalyst for Teaching Mathematics Effectively to African American Students [pp. 254-265]
Pre-service Teachers’ Knowledge for Teaching Algebra for Equity in the Middle Grades: A Preliminary Report [pp. 266-283]
Moving Beyond the Boat without a Paddle: Reality Pedagogy, Black Youth, and Urban Science Education [pp. 284-295]
A Case for Culturally Relevant Teaching in Science Education and Lessons Learned for Teacher Education [pp. 296-309]
The Use of Educational Documentary in Urban Teacher Education: A Case Study of Beyond the Bricks [pp. 310-324]
Towards A Pedagogy of Hip Hop in Urban Teacher Education [pp. 325-338]
New Visions of Collective Achievement: The Cross-Generational Schooling Experiences of African American Males [pp. 339-357]
Minding the Gap: Cultivating Black Male Teachers in a Time of Crisis in Urban Schools [pp. 358-367]
Part II: Preparing Black Students to Become Teachers
Pathways to Teaching: African American Male Teens Explore Teaching as a Career [pp. 368-383]
Identifying New Sources of African American Male Pre-service Teachers: Creating a Path from Student-Athlete to Student-Teacher [pp. 384-397]
“I Don’t Think Black Men Teach Because How They Get Treated as Students”: High-Achieving African American Boys’ Perceptions of Teaching as a Career Option [pp. 398-416]
The Black Teacher Shortage: A Literature Review of Historical and Contemporary Trends [pp. 417-427]
Epilogue: Passing the Torch: The Future of Education in the Black Community is in Our Hands [pp. 428-428]
Book/Media Reviews
Review: untitled [pp. 429-430]
Review: untitled [pp. 430-432]
Review: untitled [pp. 432-434]
List of Contributors [pp. 435-438]
Back Matter

34 E D U C A T I O N A L L E A D E R S H I P / M A R C H 2 0 1 5

Paul C. Gorski
and Katy Swalwell

I
feel like a visitor in my own
school—that hasn’t changed,”
Samantha said, confusion and
despair in her voice. We were
at the tail end of a focus group

discussion with African American
students at Green Hills High, a pre-
dominantly white, economically
diverse school. We had been invited to
conduct an equity assessment, exam-
ining the extent to which Green Hills
was an equitable learning environment
for all. We had asked Samantha and
a small group of her classmates how
they would characterize their school’s
two-year-old Multicultural Curriculum
Initiative, touted by school adminis-
trators as a comprehensive effort to
infuse a multicultural perspective into
all aspects of school life.

“I’m invisible,” Sean added, “but
also hypervisible. Maybe twice a year
there’s a program about somebody’s

food or music, but that’s about it. I
don’t see the purpose.”

Then Cynthia, who had remained
quiet through most of the hourlong
discussion, slammed her fist on the
table, exclaiming, “That multicultural
initiative means nothing. There’s
racism at this school, and nobody’s
doing anything about it!”

We found ourselves only a few
moments later in our next scheduled
focus group, surrounded by the
school’s power brokers: the prin-
cipal, assistant principals, deans, and
department chairs. Still taken—maybe
even a little shaken—by what we had
heard from the young women and
men who felt fairly powerless at Green
Hills, we asked the administrators
about the purpose of the Multicultural
Curriculum Initiative.

After a brief silence, Jonathan, the
principal, leaned back in his chair.
We had observed him over the past
few days interacting with students,
and it was clear he cared deeply about

them. The Multicultural Curriculum
Initiative was his brainchild, his baby.
Jonathan decorated his office door
with quotes about diversity and his
office walls with artwork depicting
diverse groups of youth. “We see
diversity as our greatest asset. That’s
what this initiative is all about. What
we aim to do here,” he explained with
measured intensity, “is to celebrate
the joys of diversity.” When we shared
with Jonathan the concerns raised
by the African American students,
he appeared confused and genuinely
concerned. “They said that?” he asked,
before interrupting a member of his
leadership team who had begun to
defend the initiative. “Maybe it’s time
to rethink this.”

Beyond Artwork
and Celebrations
If we’ve learned anything working
with schools across the United States,
it’s this: When it comes to education
equity, the trouble is not a lack of

Equity
Lıteracy

FOR ALL

Schools can commit
to a more robust
multiculturalism by
putting equity, rather
than culture, at the
center of the diversity
conversation.

Gorski.indd 34 1/29/15 7:48 PM

A S C D / W W W . A S C D . O R G 35

multi cultural programs or diversity
initiatives in schools. Nor is it nec-
essarily a lack of educators who,
like Jonathan, appreciate and even
champion diversity. In virtually every
school we visit, we see attempts at
multi culturalism: corridors lined
with flags, student-designed posters
r epresenting the national or ethnic
origins of families in the community,
anti-bullying programs, or faculty

positions like “Diversity Director.”
The trouble lies in how so many

diversity initiatives avoid or whitewash
serious equity issues. It lies in the
space between what marginalized stu-
dents like Cynthia say their schools
need to do to help them feel less mar-
ginalized and what many of the adults
in those schools are comfortable doing
in the name of multiculturalism.

To better grasp this, put yourself in

Cynthia’s shoes. Imagine a world in
which, as a result of something over
which you have no control—say, your
racial identity, sexual orientation,
or home language—you’re made to
feel alienated or invisible at school.
Imagine that when you occasionally
see little shimmers of yourself reflected
in the curriculum, your identity or
culture is reduced to a stereotype—to
a sari, taco, or polka. Imagine the

© RAFAEL LOPEZ/THEiSPOT

Gorski_REV.indd 35 2/3/15 6:52 PM

36 E D U C A T I O N A L L E A D E R S H I P / M A R C H 2 0 1 5

glimmer of excitement you might feel
about the possibility that, when the
teacher mentions Martin Luther King
Jr., a real conversation about racism or
poverty might ensue, only to find that
even he has been sanitized down to I
have a dream. Imagine experiencing
racism, sexism, or class inequality in
the present while hearing about it in
school only in the past tense.

What would it feel like, given those
circumstances, to be pressed into par-

ticipating in celebrations of diversity
while nobody tends to your alienation?
That’s what many schools’ diversity
efforts feel like for students of color,
low-income students, English language
learners, and other students whose
voices historically have been omitted
from school curriculums. Meanwhile,
this brand of multiculturalism does
little to help students whose voices
historically have been honored at
school become aware of and question
their privilege. In both cases, we’re
doing a disservice to our students.

To be clear, we’re not suggesting
that something is inherently wrong
with celebrating diversity. We’re not
necessarily suggesting that schools
abandon the diversity parade or the
multicultural art festival. Our concern
is that, all too often, these sorts of
initiatives mask, rather than address,
serious equity concerns. They become
distinctly unmulticultural when we
don’t offer them alongside more
serious curricular (and institutional)
attention to issues like racism and
homophobia because they present the

illusion of multicultural learning even
as they guarantee a lack of sophisti-
cated multicultural learning.

What we are suggesting is that
at the heart of a curriculum that is
meaningfully multicultural lie prin-
ciples of equity and social justice—
purposeful attention to issues like
racism, homophobia, sexism, and
economic inequality. Without this
core, what we do in the name of multi-
culturalism can border on exploitative:

asking students and families who
experience these inequalities to allow
students and families who don’t expe-
rience them to grow their knowledge,
while the inequalities themselves go
un addressed. There’s racism at this
school, and nobody’s doing anything
about it!

Overcoming the “Culture” Fetish
In her article, “It’s Not the Culture of
Poverty, It’s the Poverty of Culture,”
Gloria Ladson-Billings (2006) explains
how culture fetishism undermines
education equity. “Culture,” she
explains, “is randomly and regularly
used to explain everything” (p. 104).
It’s used, in effect, as a stand-in for
race, class, language, and other issues
that aren’t as comfortably discussed as
broad, vague “cultures.”

Many of the most popular frame-
works for creating more inclusive
classrooms and curriculums con-
tinue this culture fetish. In addition
to multi culturalism, we have
inter cultural and cross-cultural edu-
cation, cultural competence and

cultural proficiency, culturally relevant
pedagogy, and culturally responsive
teaching. And despite the fact that
social scientists debunked the concept
in the early 1970s, the “culture of
poverty” remains the dominant
framework in U.S. education circles for
understanding the lives of low-income
students.

Of course, some focus on culture
is warranted. Culture is an important
aspect of student experience to con-
sider in efforts to create a meaningfully
multicultural curriculum and a more
equitable school. Moreover, some of
these frameworks, including cultural
relevance and cultural responsiveness,
are rooted in principles of equity
(Ladson-Billings, 1995). The chal-
lenge is to retain principles of equity as
central aspects of a multi cultural cur-
riculum that is truly meaningful, even
if—especially if—it feels easier or safer
to home in on more simplistic notions
of culture.

Embracing Equity Literacy
In our own teaching, as well as in our
work with schools and school districts,
we embrace a framework for both
multi cultural curriculum development
and bigger efforts to create equitable
classrooms and schools. We call this
framework equity literacy. Its central
tenet is that any meaningful approach
to diversity or multiculturalism relies
more on teachers’ understandings of
equity and inequity and of justice and
injustice than on their understanding
of this or that culture (Gorski, 2013).
It relies, as well, on teachers’ abilities
to cultivate in students a robust under-
standing about how people are treated
by one another and by institutions,
in addition to a general appreciation
of diversity (Swalwell, 2011). The
idea is to place equity, rather than
culture, at the center of the diversity
conversation.

Key to developing equity literacy for
educators and students is cultivating

At the heart of a curriculum that is
meaningfully multicultural lie principles

of equity and social justice.

Gorski.indd 36 1/29/15 7:48 PM

A S C D / W W W . A S C D . O R G 37

four abilities (Gorski, 2013). These
include the ability to

n Recognize even subtle forms of
bias, discrimination, and inequity.

n Respond to bias, discrimination,
and inequity in a thoughtful and equi-
table manner.

n Redress bias, discrimination, and
inequity, not only by responding
to interpersonal bias, but also by
studying the ways in which bigger
social change happens.

n Cultivate and sustain bias-free and
discrimination-free communities,
which requires an understanding that
doing so is a basic responsibility for
everyone in a civil society.

Part of the difficulty
with implementing a
curriculum that grows
these abilities in
young people
is that we
educators must
first grow them in
ourselves. We might
start by ensuring that
professional development
related to multiculturalism
focuses not only on cultural
competence or diversity awareness,
but also on recognizing sexism
and ableism, for example; not on a
mythical “culture of poverty,” but on
responding to economic inequality;
and not on how to help marginalized
students fit into school cultures they
experience as alienating, but on how
to redress the alienation by making
changes in our own practices and
policies.

We recognize this is a daunting
task, and we understand the pressure
of feeling here’s one more thing I need
to squeeze into an already packed
workday. But then we remember Cyn-
thia’s exhortation: “There’s racism at
this school, and nobody’s doing any-
thing about it!” We don’t have control
over everything, but to the extent that
we do influence the curriculum, we

feel an urgency to avoid the kind of
well-intended complacency we found
at Green Hills High.

The good news is that there are
many powerful models for what a
curriculum oriented around equity lit-
eracy looks like in practice (see “Great

Equity Literacy Resources,” p. 39).
Teacher-led organizations around the
United States have developed rich
databases of curriculums that can (and
should) be modified for local contexts.
Nobody needs to start from scratch.

Five Guiding Principles
It can be difficult to paint a precise
picture of what an equity literacy
curriculum looks like because, like
all curriculums, it will look different

depending on contextual factors.
What we can say is that, rather than
a list of facts or historical figures that
everyone should know (as in E. D.
Hirsch’s “cultural literacy” lists), an
equity literacy curriculum focuses on
essential questions like these: What
makes something equitable or inequi-
table? What (local, regional, global)
in equities exist? How have they
changed over time, and why? What
individual and collective responsi-
bilities do we have to address them?
These questions require both evidence
and ethics to debate. They fit well with

the inquiry approach to education
promoted by recent curriculum

frameworks, such as the
College, Career, and Civic

Life (C3) framework.
As we plan cur-

riculum for our
students and
work to develop

our own skills and
knowledge related to

equity literacy, it’s useful
to keep the following five

principles in mind.

Principle 1. Equity literacy is
important in every subject area.
When we teach with and for equity
literacy, we’re not abandoning content.
Rather, we’re teaching content (when
feasible) through an equity lens. One
of our favorite resources for teaching
through an equity literacy lens is Eric
Gutstein and Bob Peterson’s Rethinking
Mathematics (Rethinking Schools,
2013). In it, these educators provide
multiple examples of teaching math
in a way that develops students’ math-
ematical abilities while also helping
them see math as a powerful analytical
tool for addressing social problems.

For instance, students can develop
formulas for how best to calculate a
living wage, examine historical trends
in wealth and poverty, or map income
data in their own communities. Their

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38 E D U C A T I O N A L L E A D E R S H I P / M A R C H 2 0 1 5

findings can become fertile ground for
rich discussions, deliberations, and
debates about the nature of economic
inequality.

Principle 2. The most effective equity
literacy approach is integrative and
interdisciplinary.
It’s easy to see how equity literacy
naturally favors interdisciplinary
inquiry. As we see in the math
example above, students would
also engage with reading, writing,
speaking, history, and civics.

Science, technology, engineering,
and the arts similarly could be tapped
as students grapple with real-world
equity issues in their communities.
Sánchez (2014) describes an inter-
disciplinary project in which teams
of students at a high-poverty school
examined challenges in their racially
segregated and economically strained
community. One group, the Park
Fixers, was frustrated “with having
insufficient and unsafe equipment
for students to play on during recess”
(p. 185). Group members were also
concerned that the children who lived
in an adjacent low-income housing
project had no place to play.

With guidance from teachers, the
Park Fixers applied a wide variety
of skills and an impressive depth of
knowledge to address this community
challenge they had identified. The
students used video and still photog-
raphy to document the conditions
of the park. They used language arts
and math skills to craft community
surveys, distribute them, and analyze
the results. They practiced com-
munication skills by composing and
sending letters to several key com-
munity members. They even worked
with an urban design specialist who
helped them capture their vision for a
new park in blueprints. Finally, they
delivered both oral and written reports
to their teachers that incorporated all
the material they had gathered.

Teachers considering similar
approaches shouldn’t feel discouraged
if students don’t see the fruits of
their efforts within the school year.
As Schultz (2008) notes, “spec-
tacular things happen along the way”
when students are engaged in this
kind of work; the process is just as
important—if not more important—
than the actual outcome of their
efforts.

By engaging students in this way,
the teachers modeled equity literacy.
They acknowledged what the stu-
dents knew all along—that they were
targets of bias and inequity. What
was happening to their park wasn’t
happening to the parks in wealthier
neighborhoods. The teachers also
helped strengthen students’ equity
literacy by integrating lessons about
math, writing, and other subjects with
an opportunity to apply academic
skills to redress this inequity. Culti-
vating equity literacy is most effective
when it’s integrated into the broader
curriculum rather than segregated
into disconnected activities and when
it’s a schoolwide commitment rather
than isolated in one or two teachers’
classrooms.

Principle 3. Students of all ages are
primed for equity literacy.
Did we mention that the Park Fixers
were 3rd graders? The most common
rebuke we hear when we talk about
equity literacy goes something like
this: My students are too young to talk
about that stuff. If you’re thinking
the same thing, consider this: Even
preschool-age children have been
exposed to socializing messages about
themselves and one another—often
even at school. Many students already
knowingly experience bias and dis-
crimination, and those who don’t often
learn that it’s impolite to mention any
distinctions. For example, researchers
have found that children as young
as three or four already differentiate
racial categories—they’re not, as we
may want to believe, “color-blind”
(Olson, 2013; Winkler, 2009).

So when we say or think that stu-
dents are “too young” to talk about
issues like racism, it’s important that
we stop and reflect on whom, exactly,
we’re trying to protect. Are we pro-
tecting the students who are expe-
riencing racial bias by sidestepping
conversations about race, even as we
ask them to celebrate diversity?

In our experience, the younger we
start, the better. By integrating issues
of equity into the content at young
ages, we help all students develop
the skills and language they need to
explore complex and controversial
issues in a community of people who
may disagree about what’s going on or
what should be done about it. Equally
important, we demonstrate to stu-
dents who are the targets of bias and
inequity that their experiences matter,
and we offer them an opportunity to
challenge their peers’ mis perceptions.
As a result, they may experience
the more celebratory, surface-level
multicultural initiatives as safer and
more legitimate. Meanwhile, students
who enjoy more privileged identities
become better able to interpret the

Many initiatives
present the illusion

of multicultural
learning even as
they guarantee a

lack of sophisticated
multicultural learning.

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A S C D / W W W . A S C D . O R G 39

stereotypes and biases that feed any
misperceptions they might have about
the more marginalized people in their
communities.

Principle 4. Students from all
backgrounds need equity literacy.
Many of the common examples of
equity literacy in action come from
high-poverty schools serving large
percentages of students of color
and nonnative speakers of English.
Un fortunately, this can lead some
people to believe that white and
wealthy students wouldn’t benefit
from a curriculum informed by equity
literacy. In fact, these students may
have the steepest learning curves
when it comes to learning about bias,
discrimination, and inequity. Tradi-
tional forms of multicultural education
that focus on celebrating diversity
rather than equity can reinforce their
misunderstandings by feeding the
assumption that celebrating diversity
is enough—that everybody is starting
on a level playing field.

A growing body of research pro-
vides helpful examples of how to
engage more privileged students in an
equity literacy curriculum (Swalwell,
2013). In one elite K–8 private school,
teachers meet regularly in professional
development study groups focused on
race, gender, and social class to design
curriculum and share their work.
While the 8th grade teachers have
asked their students to examine real-
world historical and contemporary
wealth gap data, the 4th grade teachers
are inviting their students to share, in
journal entries, what they know about
being rich and poor, and the kinder-
garten teacher is designing a simple
simulation of unequal distribution of
resources.

The teachers are also compiling
a list of formal and informal ways
that class advantage goes unchecked
at their school—for example, how
morning meeting questions can

sometimes invite students to brag
about their material possessions. The
teachers’ ultimate goal is to help stu-
dents do more than simply “be nice”
to people with less privilege; they want
their students to understand the issues
involved and commit to working
toward a society with less economic
inequality.

Principle 5. Teaching for equity
literacy is a political act—but not more
so than not teaching for equity literacy.
Another common rebuke we hear is
that teaching for equity literacy intro-
duces views about social justice into
the curriculum that don’t belong in
school. But is teaching about poverty
or sexism more political than pre-
tending that poverty and sexism don’t
exist by omitting them from the cur-
riculum? How might we explain the
politics of not teaching about these
issues when many of our students
are experiencing them, even within
school? How can we prepare youth to
be active participants in a democracy
without teaching them about the most
formidable barriers to an authentic
democracy?

According to Hess and McAvoy
(2014), there’s no silver bullet for
engaging students in discussions about
important and often controversial
issues, but rather a series of factors
that teachers must weigh to introduce
these issues ethically and responsibly.
It’s important for teachers to consider
when to withhold or disclose their
personal views and how to frame
issues in relation to their students, the
subject matter they’re teaching, and
the community.

Ultimately, Hess and McAvoy con-
clude, classrooms should directly
engage students in answering the
question, How should we live together?
It’s a nonpartisan question like its
empirical cousin, How do we live
together? but a deeply political one
that’s essential in a diverse society
based on democratic principles and
committed to equity.

A More Meaningful Investment
As Cynthia taught us (“There’s racism
at this school, and no one’s doing
anything about it!”), students who
feel marginalized in our schools may
experience what we thought to be
meaningful multicultural curriculums

Great Equity Literacy
Resources

Here are some of our favorite—and
free—resources for an equity literacy
curriculum:

EdChange (www.edchange.org/
multi cultural/teachers.html)

Education for Liberation Lab
(www.ed liberation.org/resources/
lab)

GLSEN (http://glsen.org/educate/
resources/curriculum)

New York Collective of Radical
Educators (www.nycore.org/
curricula)

SoJust (www.sojust.net)

Teachers for Social Justice (www
.teachersforjustice.org/search/
label/all%20curriculum)

Teaching Economics As If People
Mattered (www.teachingeconomics
.org)

Teaching for Change (www
.teaching for change.org)

Teaching Tolerance (www
.tolerance.org/classroom-resources)

Zinn Education Project (http://
zinned project.org)

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40 E D U C A T I O N A L L E A D E R S H I P / M A R C H 2 0 1 5

as a purposeful avoidance of a more
serious reality. When we invest our
multi cultural energies in surface-level
cultural exchanges, fantasies of color-
blindness, or celebrations of white-
washed heroes while ignoring the
actual inequities many of our students
face, we demonstrate an implicit com-
plicity with those inequities.

We can avoid these pitfalls by
building our multicultural curriculum
efforts, not around cultural awareness
or cultural diversity, but around the
cultivation of equity literacy in both
ourselves and our students.�EL

References
Gorski, P. (2013). Reaching and teaching

students in poverty: Strategies for erasing
the opportunity gap. New York: Teachers
College Press.

Hess, D., & McAvoy, P. (2014). The
political classroom: Evidence and ethics

in democratic education. New York:
Routledge. 

Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). Toward a
theory of culturally relevant pedagogy.
American Educational Research Journal,
32(3), 465–491.

Ladson-Billings, G. (2006). It’s not the
culture of poverty, it’s the poverty of
culture: The problem with teacher
education. Anthropology and Education
Quarterly, 37(2), 104–109.

Olson, K. R. (2013). Are kids racist? Psy-
chology Today. Retrieved from www
.psychologytoday.com/blog/developing-
minds/201304/are-kids-racist

Sánchez, L. (2014). Fostering wide-
awakeness: Third-grade community
activists. In P. Gorski and J. Landsman
(Eds.), The poverty and education reader
(pp. 183–194). Sterling, VA: Stylus.

Schultz, B. (2008). Spectacular things
happen along the way: Lessons from an
urban classroom. New York: Teachers
College Press.

Swalwell, K. (2011, December 21). Why
our students need “equity literacy” [blog
post]. Retrieved from Teaching Tolerance

at www.tolerance .org/blog/why-our-
students-need-equity-literacy

Swalwell, K. (2013). Educating activist
allies: Social justice pedagogy with the
suburban and urban elite. New York:
Routledge.

Winkler, E. N. (2009). Children are not
colorblind: How young children learn
race. PACE, 3(3), 1–8.

Paul C. Gorski (gorski@edchange
.org) is associate professor of Inte-
grative Studies at George Mason Uni-
versity, Fairfax, Virginia, and founder of
EdChange (www.edchange.org). His
most recent book, coauthored with
Seema Pothini, is Case Studies on
Diversity and Social Justice Education
(Routledge, 2014). Katy Swalwell
(swalwell@iastate.edu) is an assistant
professor in the School of Education
at Iowa State University. She is the
author of Educating Activist Allies: Social
Justice Pedagogy with the Suburban and
Urban Elite (Routledge, 2013).

Thomas Edison State College is one of the 11 senior public colleges and universities in New Jersey, and is accredited by
the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, 3624 Market Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104 (267) 284-5000.

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