A Departure From the Status Quo

including a Black author in our readings or finding short excerpts by people of color that aligned with our unit expectations. I collaborated with my neighboring teacher, who is Puerto Rican, Brazilian, and Black, to incorporate more interactions with and discussions about texts written by Latinx authors. I began researching and reading African, Asian, and South American authors to add to my literary canon and to use in my classroom. I started giving shout-outs and blurbs about books I was reading and asking if students wanted a copy. When they expressed interest, I bought more copies or loaned my copy. I started a book club that met before school. Sometimes students met during lunch to discuss books they wanted to read next.

I still have more work to do—researching, interviewing, surveying, and adapting curricula—to ensure that I provide students with diversity in reading. I am still striving to provide more inclusive literary choices for students and to expand my personal and professional reading to incorporate greater diversity. I continue to alter spaces in education to more accurately reflect our global sphere. I am on a mission to ensure that students not only feel included but also see that their perspectives can transform society in positive ways. This book was born from that desire.

Equitable Instruction, Empowered Students is about transformative education—learning that allows students to recognize and analyze injustices and barriers while creating, implementing, and evaluating collective and cooperative plans for dismantling biases and injustices. Transformative education is a response to the ways in which the status quo fails to support teachers and empower students. Let’s examine some of the key ways transformative education seeks to transcend the status quo.

Perpetuating the status quo in education has continued to widen inequities. Based on high-stakes standardized testing, the status quo dictates what type of curriculum students are allowed to learn, pay based on student performance on test scores, and resegregation of schools. Additionally, the drive toward achieving the status quo has led to data manipulation, teacher exhaustion, and staff departure. The status quo—achievement based on standardized test scores—dictates district funds, teacher placement, and what educational pedagogies, ideas, and concepts can be implemented in classrooms. The status quo is constraining and destroying education; and it is time to change that.

What do inclusion and cultural competence mean in the sphere of education, and what do they have to do with creating equitable learning environments? Inclusion and cultural competence are the first steps educators must take toward creating an equitable environment. Inclusion allows all people to share their ideas. Becoming culturally competent means appreciating diverse cultures, attitudes, traditions, values, and beliefs. Creating an equitable learning environment first requires inclusion and cultural competence because

equitable learning for all prioritizes accessibility, opportunity, justice, and collaboration across curriculum, instruction, and assessment.

Creating an inclusive and culturally competent classroom is a departure from the status quo in five key ways. 1. Equitable teaching recognizes and rejects assimilationist educational practices. Assimilationist educational practices do not allow for diverse cultures to thrive, as they seek to ensure equality by forcing all students to blend in with the dominant culture (Calderon-Berumen, 2019). This pedagogical practice provides little to no differentiation, limits opportunities to select students, and disregards the potential positive impacts of culturally competent pedagogies. It’s an approach that stifles students. 2. Equitable teaching subverts the preoccupation with the achievement gap and focuses instead on closing the opportunity gap. The achievement gap creates a narrative from data measuring how one group (based on race, ethnicity, and gender) outperforms other groups (Flores, 2018). It’s a narrative rooted in competition and pits students against students and teachers against teachers. Ultimately, focusing on the achievement gap creates a cycle of inequitable practices to gain the highest statistical scores on high-stakes standardized assessments. By shifting their focus to the opportunity gap, teachers are able to design equitable practices rooted in cooperation rather than competition. 3. Equitable teaching acknowledges the education debt. The education debt is the accumulation of injustices that include lack of access, denied opportunity, and racial discrimination (Howard, 2019; Ladson-Billings, 2006; Zygmunt, Clark, Tancock, Mucherah, & Clausen, 2015). Pedagogical theorist and teacher educator Gloria Ladson-Billings (2006) coined the term to encompass the link between historical, political, and economic inequalities of minoritized individuals. The education debt illustrates how discrimination creates barriers to progressive and transformative change for historically marginalized people. Tyrone C. Howard (2019), professor of education at the University of California, Los Angeles, summarizes it this way:

The economic debt, or the funding disparities that have existed historically and contemporarily between non-White and White schools; the historical debt, which includes social and educational inequities formed around race, class, and gender; the sociopolitical debt, which describes the exclusion of people of color from the civic process; and the moral debt, or the disparity between what we know is right and what we actually do when it comes to the just and fair treatment of all U.S. citizens. (p. 31)

Faced with the opportunity gap and the education debt, educators in the United

States and abroad must ask themselves, “How am I providing an equitable and justice-driven educational environment? How do my teaching practices include a focus on students threatened with erasure, students who are not taken seriously when they engage in discourse?” Practical ways to ensure an equitable and justice-driven classroom include ensuring language is positive and inclusive, understanding student needs and providing scaffolds to ensure those needs are met, teaching students skills and strategies to meet their own needs, and incorporating and integrating quality multicultural content that includes all perspectives and voices of diverse people. 4. A significant facet of the status quo in education is deficit thinking. Deficit thinking shows up in the way teachers focus on what student do not have, what they cannot do, and how far behind they are rather than drawing on what students do have that can drive success. Equitable teaching disrupts a deficit model and embraces an asset model. Researchers Shannon Renkly and Katherine

Bertolini (2018) explain why deficit thinking is problematic in the classroom:

While other businesses may thrive with the deficit model, education is not one of them. When schools focus solely on at-risk behaviors exhibited by students, they tend to work reactively rather than proactivity [sic]. Within a school, where the ultimate goal must be student learning and growth, this method is wildly unsuccessful. Rather, schools must focus on identifying and building up students’ assets to create positive development. . . . According to Rose (2006), a deficit model is one that focuses on what students cannot do. If a student is underachieving, those that work from a deficit model believe the failure is because that student is not trying hard enough (Lombardi, 2016). . . . On the other hand, an asset model, or abundance model, focuses on what a student can do: their strengths, skills, talents, interests, and competencies (Alber, 2013; Rose, 2006). As Weiner (2006) suggests, it is extremely important that schools encourage all educators to examine and challenge tacit assumptions. “We can make powerful changes when we break through the pervasive influence of the deficit paradigm and recognize the untapped strengths of students and teachers” (Weiner, 2006, p. 70). (p. 24)

5. Equitable teaching transcends diversity and inclusion. Speaking of diversity and inclusion is a good start, but it doesn’t go far enough. It promotes surface-level interactions that allow the educational system to disenfranchise students. These surface-level interactions are the impositions of quotas rather than open-ended strategies for eliminating barriers (Barnard & Turnbull, 2019).

Figure I.1 (page 6) represents professor Dafina-Lazarus Stewart’s (2017) assertion that teachers can extend the work of diversity and inclusion by striving for equity

and justice through cyclical listening, engagement, and evaluation to ensure active and purposeful iterations to justice.

Justice

Equity

Inclusion

Diversity

• Entails deep interactions • Asks who is not taken seriously • Actively engages to shift oppressive interactions

• Entails deep interactions • Asks who cannot get in • Asks who is at threat of erasure

• Focuses on surface-level solutions • Asks if everyone has shared his, her, or their ideas

• Focuses on surface-level solutions • Examines who is in the room

Source: Adapted from Stewart, 2017.

FIGURE I.1: Extending from diversity and inclusion toward equity and justice.

Creating an equitable classroom not only provides students with diverse and inclusive interactions but also calls educational stakeholders to listen empathetically to the voices in the classroom and to provide the best educational environment that promotes whole-learner development.

How can teachers make this shift to creating a classroom that is equitable and justice driven? They can begin by listening, paying attention, and allowing empathy to lead them. Teachers must ask whose voices are in the room and unheard and whose voices are not even in the room to be heard. Teachers must then include those voices in the classroom literature, discussions, and tasks. Teachers must ask who is not being taken seriously and ensure their classroom environment values all voices and perspectives.

This work isn’t an add-on; it’s not a strategy best suited to any particular grade level or subject area. Inclusive and culturally competent teaching through transformative education is a lens that every teacher of every subject at every grade level can and should adopt in order to provide equitable instruction for all students. Let’s look more closely at what this book is about and who it’s for.