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C H A N G E S TA R T S W I T H M E
I wasn’t proud of this strategy. It didn’t match with the kind of teacher I thought I was and with what I valued about teaching. I dreamed of creating respectful, inclusive classroom communities. I was committed to helping my students learn how to listen to one another, solve problems peacefully, and care deeply about one another and the larger community. They are the reasons I became an elementary school teacher in the first place. My college self would not have recognized myself years later, sitting in front of a group of young students, closing a book before finishing it. My college classes hadn’t prepared me for this moment; none of the books I’d read on teaching had described what I was feeling. Yet, I knew that keeping my students from talking about a subject because of my own discomfort with it was not good teaching.
How I Came to Understand My Silence I grew up in Berkeley, California, in the 1980s, in a household where we talked openly about politics and how to create a more just and better world. I attended public schools in Berkeley, one of the first cities in the United States to desegregate their schools with two-way busing. All my elementary school classrooms were diverse. I was politically active as a teenager—I canvassed for local politicians and organized a teach-in at my high school during the Gulf War of 1990. My education hero was Paulo Freire (2000), author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed, who champions transformative education and giving people the skills and tools necessary to change their lives for the better. For all these reasons, I thought I would be good at leading conversations about racism with young students. Realizing that I was, in fact, unprepared to do so shook me. I realized that speaking about racism is not a natural ability or a skill gained from one’s environment; I had not yet built the competencies needed to engage in difficult conversations about race. How might my experience have been different if my kindergarten teacher or my parents had engaged in conversations with
©️2022 by Solution Tree Press
In this introduction, I’ll tell you a bit about my upbringing and explain how I came to understand my silence. As I confronted uncomfortable truths about myself, I learned to speak up about race in my personal life. I also recognized that teaching young students about race and racism is essential for cultivating respect and care in the elementary classroom. Of course, that is challenging work for many reasons, perhaps most of all because cultural attitudes about race and systemic racism inform our experience as teachers, both individually and collectively. Finally, I’ll give you an overview of the book before we dive into part one.
