The Need for Learning Communities Part 2

 A lot of the work I did this summer, the first semester of my doctoral program at Georgia State University, was centered on professional development. Much of what we read seemed to exist in a vacuum. It was reading research about what makes for a good structure of professional development, but not content. Or rather, it goes deeper than that. Content could be excused because the articles were about creating PD that was universal to all content areas. What I'm feeling was missing was more of a framework - a framework that has an ultimate goal of helping teachers to see, learn, and work with their students as they are. For PD to be high quality, it must also address a teacher's ability to connect with students. I also believe that this supersedes content. This is not something that should be separate content but rather a new layer to PD. 

I teach in a county that is the most diverse in the state and home to 950,000 people. It is not classified as urban, but it has most of the markers that would declare it to be. Our teacher population, like most of the country, is largely middle-class white women. After the muder of George Floyd and the start of the uprising in the Summer of 2020, our county decided that it would focus on embedding Social Emotional Learning (SEL) into all curriculum areas. Not Culturally Responsive Pedagogy (CRP, Ladson-Billings) or Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy (CSP, Paris) - both of which demand that teachers see value in the cultures and experiences of their students and their families and seek to build a curriculum that represents these cultures and exists to nurture and love students of color through their education, but instead we focused on Social Emotional Learning (SEL). 

This is important for two reasons. First, it demonstrates that you can add layers into PD that deliberately and intentionally help teachers learn new ways of working with students. I watched it happen with SEL. It was brilliantly done, and I believe that it has fundamentally altered how many teachers teach in our county. Second, this is important because of the dangers of SEL. Dr. Betinna Love, in her book We Want to Do More than Survive (2019), writes deeply on the Educational Survival Complex. She describes this as an industry, much like the Prison Industrial Complex, that benefits from the suffering of people of color and creating systems that only maintain that suffering for BIPOC students to exist but not thrive. SEL is a tool and a framework and thus can be part of this Educational Survival Complex because SEL asks first that students take responsibility for their emotions and actions and learn to regulate them more effectively. An organization known as the Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) has created a whole industry out of SEL. To the credit of CASEL, they do specify that part of the value of their work is to build equity and that they specifically "do not ask students to conform to the values and preferences of the dominant culture." However, this is a form of character education. This does not address the root of BIPOC students suffering in schools. It merely asks students to find a better way to survive the oppression and devaluation they suffer.

If teachers do not value BIPOC culture - or as often is the case where I live, they see these cultures as less than their white normative, hetero-normative culture - then how will SEL improve the cause of behaviors SEL is seeking to address? It puts the onus on the child when it is teachers who need to do the work first. SEL is a high-quality product. It is valuable. Paying attention to a child's emotional needs is important. However, kindness is not it. Kindness does not sustain culture, nor does it help students see themselves in the classroom. If we can embed SEL training into our curriculum and PD, then we can embed CRP and CSP. This is work that our learning communities can and should take up. Part 3 of this discussion will focus on some very early thinking about embedding CRP and CSP into LC work that can be done as part of course teams and curriculum grade-level groups.

Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). Toward a Theory of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy. American Educational Research Journal, 32(3), 465-491. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,shib&db=eric&AN=EJ512942&site=eds-live&scope=site&custid=gsu1 

Love, B. L. (2019). We want to do more than survive: abolitionist teaching and the pursuit of educational freedom. Beacon Press. 

Paris, D. (2012). Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy: A Needed Change in Stance, Terminology, and Practice. Educational Researcher, 41(3), 93-97. https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&AuthType=ip,shib&db=eric&AN=EJ960396&site=eds-live&scope=site&custid=gsu1 http://dx.doi.org/10.3102/0013189X12441244