Recognizing Privilege & Acknowledging My Own Culture

EDU 6918 Final Reflection
My experience teaching at an all-black high school in DC was diving into the deep end of a pool of indeterminate depth when it came to exploring my own Dynamics of Difference. I was an outsider and learned a lot about my own privilege and cultural competency during my eight years there. I am indebted to my students, colleagues and the parents who welcomed me into their community. They wanted me to succeed and to be my best. Their belief in me allowed me to be my best for them. Many of my 9th graders from southeast DC had not met many white people. If they had grown up in the neighborhood, they had maybe only one or two white teachers before me.

One dynamic of difference emerged during the Socratic seminar I led in my first few years teaching. A room of only black students were being prompted to talk about racial injustice and challenging, polarizing issues like the death penalty, abortion, and gun control by a young white man, whose privilege allowed him [me] to obfuscate my position or opinion altogether. This caused a rift and led to me negating my own culture and point of view. By deferring to my students' cultural truth and ignoring my own, I thought that was being culturally proficient when in fact, it was just my own version of “colorblindness.” Initially, I believed this pedagogical choice was valuable for cultivating a seminar space for my students to work out their opinions in a dialogically friendly space free from my opinions.

However, one of my students DeShawn, wrote in her course evaluation of our journalism seminar course: “I understand that you didn’t want to preach, but I wish you had shared your opinion more – as a young white man. We don’t get the chance, before college, to talk to many people like you, in this open kind of way and I think that would have helped us to go deeper.” This is my first piece of evidence for inclusion here. It reminds me of my commitment to my students’ beliefs and insights and demonstrates the importance of including my own for both their sake and mine.

What DeShawn taught me was that I wasn’t serving her or any of my students by pretending I didn’t have a culturally informed lens that shaped my opinions. With her encouragement and insistence, I was able to better incorporate my own opinion into conversations of social justice in my remaining years at TMA.

I have also included a screen shot of the cultural proficiency continuum infographic as a reminder of the specific language that I am committed to as I work to be a culturally proficient and engaged social studies teacher.

Additionally, my cultural competency grew through mentorship and collaboration with colleagues. Seeking out mentors, collaborators and most especially feedback has been the bedrock of my professional growth. I can see this strength of mine showing in my collaborative work already with teachers, instructional aids and other tutors working at Cleveland. My interest to dive right into TMA served dual purposes. First, it was my formal training. Secondly, this openness connected and committed me to the community and the work we were doing together.

Without any formal training or credentials, it was requisite that I surround myself with competent and willing mentors. Two teachers, in particular, continue to be key mentors and collaborators in my life. Kena, the science department chair and teaching coach who most formally trained me through the planning and critical feedback process and also Karen, the social studies department chair and the mentor both helped cultivate in me the spark and skills to encourage dialogic seminar with my 11th and 12th grade students and promote critical thinking and discussion about issues of social justice and equality. My collaborative work with Karen also led to our work leading three different professional development workshops and also one teaching fellowship.

Both of these two women were and continue to be sounding boards for growing my cultural competency. They’ve helped me to see that I am never done growing in this regard. They have helped me to be mindful of my privilege and how to better incorporate more perspectives when discussing challenging topics with students and colleagues. I am so fortunate to find that this perspective and focus is such an important component of our SPU MAT program and educational philosophy.