Teaching Care-fully
A dynamic and effective equity and inclusion trainer/instructor MUST begin their work with the learner in mind. While positive change is the goal, the instructor must take care in how they design their lessons. For example, a great trainer has to figure out what the learner already knows, or thinks they know. Please believe, they are not the same. Real learning and real change begins in the space where we connect what we knew with what we now know. It’s about memory.
As cognitive scientists agree that working memory is the path to long-term memory, diversity practitioners, like myself, have to carefully use the concepts of what and how kids remember as we introduce topics of identity. The great (or not so great) thing is that students are consistently receiving messages into their subconscious about themselves and others. When teachers are abreast of these messages, they can use the same messages, though negative, to influence the learning of the student. That is, I use what is already in my students’ memories, their beliefs about themselves and others, and how they are able to manipulate that information, to guide them towards that growing edge. Lee Shulman’s book, The Wisdom of Practice, encourages teachers to mine for what’s already in the student. That “stuff” within can be used as an anchor. An anchor in and of itself is value-neutral. It simply serves as a way to know where you are.
Students are NEVER tabula rasa, though some argue this. They enter our learning spaces with everything their homes explicitly and implicitly teach. They enter with victories and challenges from other learning spaces. These prior experiences influence how they will receive what you plan to provide. We can’t ignore this, because our jobs as equity and inclusion teachers and trainers is vital to righting this wrong world. What they believe about themselves, their fellow learners, and about us directly correlates to what they choose to learn and how they choose to learn it.
When teaching and coaching (students and teachers) about structures of race and ethnicity, socio-economics, ability, gender, sexuality, culture, language, and religion, I desire to use what they can already retrieve to introduce new retrievable and accurate information. Every video clip, every picture, every article, every quote must link BOTH to something they recognize and the new behaviors and understandings I’d like them to build. Language matters here. Not just the terminology itself, but the nominal vocabulary students have to possess before we can delve deep. I can’t be confused about what they do and don’t know. Each lesson scaffolds on the previous lessons. Teaching in a social justice construct is science, art, and magic for the practitioner that reads the student.
I am so honored to walk into spaces that basically have mini-worlds within them. All learners, young and old, have created understandings of how their world works. They allow me into their orbit, and risk my teaching taking them off their comfortable axis. The least I can do is pay attention to where they are.
