Reading This Book

PREFACE

In March 2020, the COVID-19 global health pandemic changed how we experience the world around us. Essential employees—first responders, health care workers, food service and grocery employees, and government and city workers, among others—were on the front lines of the pandemic. Teachers and students were thrust into online platforms and away from their classroom desks, learning new tools and implementing them in real time.

While people worldwide engaged with this crisis, certain populations had significant differences in how they experienced the pandemic. Data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC, 2021) revealed populations that were considered at higher risk for COVID-related illness and death: those who had significant pre-existing health conditions and those who experienced inequities in social determinants of health. The CDC (2021) issued guidelines such as hand washing, social distancing, and mask wearing that helped decrease the risk.

Structural inequities also contributed to level of risk. In particular, identity informed and impacted how people experienced the global pandemic in terms of care, follow-up, and even health advice. The Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion (2021) states:

Race or ethnicity, sex, sexual identity, age, disability, socioeconomic status, and geographic location all contribute to an individual’s ability to achieve good health. It is important to recognize the impact that social determinants have on health outcomes of specific populations.

The disparities exposed by COVID-19 require us, as educators, to become conscious of identity and the role it plays in our lives, our schools, and our communities.

Since 2008, I have traveled around the United States and worked with over 275 schools, organizations, corporations, associations, and leadership teams as they engage in difficult conversations about teaching and learning. While I focus on creating actionable teaching plans, lesson plans, leadership plans, and strategic plans with them, I spend a significant amount of time asking participants, “Who are you?” I encourage them to reflect on how their identities inform and impact what they do, how they act, and how they interact with the world around them.

Attentional bias, the tendency to focus on certain elements while ignoring others, accounts for the way people create preferences for what they pay attention to (Cherry, 2020). For example, as an Asian American woman, I am often thinking about how decisions at school impact Asian American students. As a child of immigrants, I am often thinking about how students and families from immigrant backgrounds experience school, curricula, and teaching practices rooted in Eurocentric ways of teaching and learning. In order to move closer to a more identity-conscious, culturally relevant, and reflective classroom or work environment, we educators must explore how our identities impact our work, what and whom we advocate for, and what we pay attention to in our decision making.

I’ll illustrate this point by sharing my identities. I am an educator, a mother, an Asian American woman, a child of immigrants, and a parent to a child with a disability. My partner and I have a middle-class lifestyle. We have three children. I am a member of a racially diverse family and community. I am Catholic. I am English speaking. I earned a terminal degree (a PhD) through formal education structures. I am heterosexual. I am able bodied. I have lived with depression.

I have spent my entire career working with and within schools. I have taught in middle and upper school classrooms, and I have served as a school administrator at both a preK–8 school and a preK–12 school. I have worked with large school systems and districts and spent much of my time navigating a large, urban research university as both a student and a faculty member. I have mentored students who identify as Black, Latinx, Indigenous, Asian, multiracial, and White. My students come from extreme privilege and from extreme challenges and trauma. Some are living with chronic illness while continuing their education. My students identify as transgender, gender nonconforming, nonbinary, and gender fluid. I have worked with first-year teachers who want to quit and master teachers who thrive on the everyday challenges of the profession.

While my identities make up the core of who I am, what I experience, and what I have achieved, I live, learn, and teach in a world where my identities interact with the identities of my students. There are identities that I feel closer to—that connect me to my students in a deep and profound way. For example, with my students of color, I share an understanding of racism from personal experience and an understanding of how the social consequences of race have impacted us. My students also hold identities that I have no experience with and that create distance in our relationships. For example, as a heterosexual and cisgender woman, I do not know what my LGBTQ and transgender students experience. I do not know their highs and their lows. I do not know how they experience the classroom or how they see me and my identities. However, through identity-conscious practice, I become aware of those identities that bring me closer and those that serve as barriers; that awareness helps me be a better teacher, advisor, mentor, and leader to and for my students.

Through building the habits and skills of an identity-conscious practice, I understand where I need to grow and learn. I know where I might make missteps or mistakes. I am aware of my language and the impact of my words. I am aware of my identity and conscious of how it shows up in the decisions I make and what I pay attention to each day. Throughout my lifetime, I’ve been on a journey of engaging, sustaining, and deepening my understanding of how identity shows up in my teaching and learning.

I intend for this book to support you in practicing identity awareness. Wherever you are on that path, I am grateful for your journey to become a more identity-conscious educator. The events of 2020, particularly connected to racial injustice and COVID-19, deepened our collective awareness that identity matters. For teachers and school leaders, identity matters in the school community. We must build the skills for talking about identity and for recognizing how to shape a more inclusive school environment for our students, colleagues, and families to thrive.

INTRODUCTION

Identity matters; it has always mattered. But the global pandemic brought that truth into the spotlight in a multitude of ways. Class differences (as evidenced by access to technology, internet, and food security) affected how quickly and successfully students transitioned to online learning environments. Americans witnessed the rise of racial injustice and the resulting public outcry in communities, towns, and schools across their nation. Many teachers were unsure how to talk to their students about inequity, race, racism, injustice, protest, and identity. Some teachers chose to lean into dialogues about these topics, while others chose to leave these issues out of the classroom.

CNN reports that, in response to the focus on systemic and institutionalized racism, Black students and alumni began sharing “Black at” Instagram posts highlighting micro- and macroaggressions they had experienced in majority-White schools, at times naming teachers and administrators who had negatively impacted them (Holcombe, 2020). From both an accountability lens and a communications lens, school leaders were forced to respond. In return, stakeholders (students, families, boards, alumni, faculty, and staff) demanded that schools address a culture and a climate that weren’t acknowledging race, racism, and identity. Teachers and school leaders began to confront how school curricula, policies, practices, programs, and procedures contributed to a school culture that failed to be diverse or inclusive of identity.

Within a few months, school communities made some progress by hosting book clubs, professional development, and online workshops to raise awareness of identity in schools. Scholars, such as Kimberlé Crenshaw, hosted webinars to address policies impacting Black communities (www.aapf.org/media-gallery). Learning for Justice (formerly Teaching Tolerance) also posted content to address issues of race in K–12 schools (www.learningforjustice.org/professional-development/webinars) to support teachers and school leaders in this work. White teachers, parents, and school leaders engaged in the dialogue, such as in the New York Times podcast Nice White Parents (Joffe-Walt, 2020). Even Sesame Street and CNN hosted a town hall to talk about race and racism with a young audience (Chaet, 2020).

In this introduction, I’ll make the case for why teachers should be talking about identity in school and I’ll discuss how they can get started exploring identity. For educators who are just beginning that journey, the first step is understanding how their identities

shape their lives. By developing their identity-conscious practice, they open the door for their students, their peers, and their schools to talk about identity and work toward more inclusive environments. Educators can build this connection to their peers and communities by bringing people together to discuss issues of identity and inclusion. Finally, I’ll discuss setting shared intentions and guidelines to create positive group environments.

Talking About Identity in School

While there was a social push to talk about race, racism, and identity in schools, many educators, White educators in particular, found themselves unprepared to do so. Research indicates that White educators and school leaders tend to avoid discussing race and racism in the classroom (Gere, Buehler, Dallavis, & Haviland, 2009; Haviland, 2008). Some teachers avoid such conversations for fear of saying the wrong thing (Keengwe, 2010). They might lack the skills to engage in challenging conversations or perhaps learned to avoid conflict. However, others take the view that racial distinctions don’t matter, an ideology called color blindness. Researchers Terri Peters, Marcia Margolin, Kristi Fragnoli, and Diane Bloom (2016) find that “color-blind racial attitudes have negative effects on teaching and learning, negating the history of racism and discrimination in the United States and its continued influence on people of color” (p. 13). While 2020’s racial climate pushed teachers to engage in identity-conscious practices, many were underprepared and too overwhelmed to talk about what they were experiencing.

In addition to hosting conversations about identity, schools have begun adjusting their curriculum to better reflect an inclusive history, providing counternarratives to largely Eurocentric, male-dominated perspectives of history. Through my work, I’ve seen teachers providing more diverse mathematics, science, technology, and engineering examples for students to create more inclusive structures and approaches. Students are hearing more voices and stories of people of color, of LGBTQ families, and of people with disabilities. In some cases, these efforts have been met with resistance—mostly in response to a changing demographic, a changing society, and a changing community (Zwicky & Walls, 2020).

The events of 2020 set education on a path toward increased identity consciousness and greater inclusion. However, as students return to in-person learning and schools try to resume business as usual, educators must guard against reverting to practices where identity-conscious learning is an afterthought. The COVID-19 global pandemic and ongoing racial injustice gave us a collective awareness that identity matters. If we as educators are to continue the important work of building skills for identity-conscious practice, we need to create meaningful pathways for learning and growing. I wrote this book to help teachers and school leaders commit to greater inclusion in their schools and communities, develop an identity-conscious practice, and cultivate skills for engaging in difficult conversations. When we understand ourselves and the impact of belonging, we

can provide more responsive classroom experiences that benefit not only our students but also our schools and communities.

In 2019, Sesame Workshop and NORC at the University of Chicago conducted a study examining how parents and educators in the United States view the importance of social identity in children’s future success. Researchers Jennifer Kotler, Tanya Haider, and Michael H. Levine (2019) note that “children fare better when they feel valued and respected by the people who surround them and by the institutions that serve them” (p. 6). Their research also indicates that “healthy social development—including a strong appreciation of individual and group identity factors—can be influenced (both positively and negatively) by home and peer interactions, as well as in community and school experiences” (Kotler et al., 2019, p. 9). By extension, having a positive identity is crucial to children’s development, and classrooms and school communities play a major part in this development.

The research team also found that 60 percent of teachers discuss race and ethnicity in their classroom at least sometimes, while 37 percent of parents do so at home (Kotler et al., 2019). And “at least half of teachers discuss their students’ family make-ups, genders, and countries of origin in their classroom” (Kotler et al., 2019, p. 23). The topic of social class appears to be largely off-limits; just one in five teachers says they regularly discuss this in their classroom, “despite teachers’ belief that social class is the most impactful identity on later success in life” (Kotler et al., 2019, p. 23).

When the research team asked teachers whether a student, a student’s family, or a teacher had complained of differential treatment due to race or ethnicity, gender, social class, family makeup, country of origin, religion, or immigration or documentation status during the 2018–2019 school year, about 25 percent of teachers reported having experienced an incident of differential treatment. This percentage suggests that tens of thousands of differential treatment incidents occurred in schools and early learning settings across the United States in that school year (Kotler et al., 2019). A study drawing data from the Toronto District School Board (TDSB), the nation’s largest public board of education, suggests teachers and students in Canada share similar experiences (Parekh, Brown, & Zheng, 2021).

Getting Started Exploring Identity

Schools are spaces of learning, critical thinking, and discourse where people wrestle with new ideas, concepts, and experiences. All of this happens through the lens of identity. Who people are informs what they do, how they act and interact with others, and how they see the world around them. So, how can teachers talk with their peers and school leaders about working toward greater equity and inclusion? How can they have more conversations about identity with their students? What do educators need to know, learn, and experience to do this work with students?

While some professional development focuses on how to expand content and curricula related to issues of identity, a key missing component toward building identity-conscious educators is a focus on the educators themselves. Educators’ lives are not identity neutral. Supporting teachers to make content and curriculum changes is important, but it doesn’t go far enough. Educators also need tools to explore how their identities inform their work—how they interact with students, what they pay attention to, and how proximate they are to particular identities.

The activities, reflection questions, vignettes, and discussion guides throughout this book will support you, the reader, along your identity-conscious journey. By deepening your understanding of identity and the role it plays in your classroom and in your school, you will strengthen your engagement with your students, your curriculum, your peers, and your community. By building your capacity for difficult conversations about identity, you will begin to seek more opportunities to engage in those conversations. You will become more curious. You will become more aware of who you are and how you see the world around you. By being more conscious of identity, you can begin to shape more inclusive classrooms, schools, and communities through more meaningful connections, conversations, and collaborations.

I encourage you to complete each chapter on your own, diving deep into your reflections and thoughts about how your identity informs and impacts your personal life and professional life. While space is provided in the book for you to complete the activities, extend your practice by using a journal or digital notepad if you need extra space to write. Then, find a community in which you can talk about what you’re learning. Your community can be a group of peers, your class, family, friends, a book club, an affinity group, or an online meetup of folks who are committed to this work. Share your thoughts and experiences as you go through this work together.

Bringing People Together

If you are interested in extending your learning to a discussion group, I recommend that you co-create intentions, discussion guidelines, or conversation protocols so that members can contribute to a positive discussion environment. The following are some helpful intentions to draw from as you move forward with your group. I encourage you to read through these with your group, adjusting the language to suit your group and adding or removing items as needed.

• Approach these group sessions as a learning time: “We must come to our sessions with a commitment to learn and to support others in their learning.” • Believe in the first draft: “Knowing that we are coming together in community to try on new ideas, to practice speaking up, and to better