DEFAULT NARRATIVES (explored)

The presumption that our default social norms are “just the way things are” is what makes them so insidious. Critically reflecting on the language and narratives we understand as “benign” and “common sense” is important to disrupt the unjust, anti-Black status quo (Boler & Zembylas, 2003; Leonardo, 2009). Due to space and time limitations, I have chosen a few examples to demonstrate how the participants discursively framed their understanding of our ourselves, our classrooms, and our students. As you read through these findings it is important to keep in mind the paradox of agency: “The more we are aware of the conditions that control our behavior, the more we are able to overcome those conditions” (Rymes, 2016, p.100).

Our ignorance is reasonable

One of my first attempts to design a study included an “educational” component for the white faculty. I imagined I would first interview participants individually, analyze the data, present the findings with the participants as a group, and then invite the participants and the rest of the white faculty to a panel discussion. I imagined the panel consisting of three or four white anti-racist educators from outside our community who would serve as a model for my white colleagues in attendance. I remember explaining to Dr. Rymes, the chair of my dissertation committee, I thought a panel of “outsiders” would work best because I wanted to avoid appearing to position myself as “the expert” on whiteness in predominantly white independent schools. It’s not that I didn’t think I would be an expert by the time this study concluded. In fact, while I did not view myself in prophetic terms, I had read a lot about whiteness already and I knew a lot more about how to talk about race and racism than I used to -- which I figured was more than the average white person. I believed it was reasonable to assume the average white person was ignorant about race and racism because we have been socialized in a way that we view our whiteness as neutral -- that is, race is something people of Color have and, therefore, racism is something that is external to white people.

Our classrooms are safe

**Figure 2. Visual representation of a discursive classroom boundary**

Over my tenure as an educator, I have reflexively understood my classroom as a #safespace for all students. Part of my confidence in declaring my classroom as safe stems from my own experience as a student, which I wrote about for an assignment in Dr. Gerald Campano’s course back in December 2016 (Appendix J). I often regularly invoked this experience of struggle in school to explain to students and families how I understood my role as a teacher: I want to be the person I wish I had in high school. Someone who does not deny that much of the day-to-day annoyances of schooling are “baked in” to a system that prioritizes (and rewards) obedience over disruption. In fact, I often introduce my high school students to the work of Noam Chomsky by sharing and discussing some of the ideas in a 7-minute Youtube video entitled, Noam Chomsky on the Role of the Educational System. Although Chomsky (n.d.) suggests many elite liberal adults see the educational system as a way to indoctrinate the young, he also concedes that not all teachers subscribe to this mission: “I mean, there’s-- you know, there are teachers who do stimulate thought. And sometimes they get away with it” (Chomsky, c.1989). All this to say, one of the ways I believed I could “get away” with encouraging students to “safely” critique the status quo was by drawing a boundary around my classroom so that I could protect students from a system that interprets their critique as a challenge to the authority of the institution (Figure 2).

We are doing our best

From my perspective as a Learning Specialist and one of three Diversity Coordinators in the High School, sometimes it appears a strategy we use to keep our classrooms safe is by keeping other adults -- e.g., the administration and Diversity Coordinators -- out of our classrooms. This is where I believe some of the tension occurs. Often when faculty say they are “doing their best” and close their classroom doors -- both literally and figuratively -- those left on the outside seem to jump to the conclusion the teacher has prioritized their own allegiance to the Western Canon/Academia over the well-being of students.

(White) students are innocent

Before I joined Heritage Academy, I taught middle school science at a predominantly white independent school whose mission was to educate students diagnosed with language-based and/or social-emotional disabilities. Many of the students who attended this school struggled to consistently adhere to societal norms -- particularly those norms associated with the majority of educational institutions in the United States. During my tenure as a middle school science teacher, one of my students -- let’s call him Christopher -- unintentionally pushed me to the limits of (what I now understand to be) my racial literacy.

Black students are struggling

From my perspective as a Learning Specialist, I can attest that when students perform poorly on two or more assessments in one course, teachers tend to focus on student behavior as a proxy for the student’s intention and/or commitment to learning the curriculum: This student feels entitled to not work and/or lacks the academic discipline to be successful here. Although certain behaviors are often associated with struggle, e.g., not meeting one-on-one with a teacher after being explicitly asked to do so, we often cannot confidently point to the origin of the struggle. As we hypothesize and inquire further into the reasons for the struggle, we begin to tether whatever “it is” to the student. It becomes their struggle.

When students fail to change their behaviors, many teachers turn to the class dean to report what often is understood as the student’s unwillingness to engage with the material and/or the teacher. Although well-intentioned, this triggers a predictable and problematic series of inquiries, which includes the class dean surveying the student’s other content-area teachers to assess the scope of what is now seen as the student’s struggle. Those content-area teachers who “haven’t yet noticed” the student struggling in their course, assures the class dean they will 1) keep an eye out for any evidence of struggle and 2) report back to the class dean at the first sign of struggle. From my perspective, as adult involvement/awareness increases, so does the scope of the individual student’s struggle.

A way forward

Practitioners who lead and facilitate “diversity-related” initiatives for predominantly white institutions are often understood by others in the community as the experts about “diversity-related” topics/issues (Ahmed, 2012). From my perspective as a Diversity Coordinator, it often seems we -- diversity practitioners who work for/at/with predominantly white independent schools -- understand our role as supporting faculty to “do this work” because the students of Color need our help: Many of these kids of Color are really struggling in these schools. Critical reflection and reframing of the default narratives used to frame our understanding of ourselves, our classrooms, and our students offers an alternative for those of us who seem to reflexively define and justify “our work” on the backs of the students of Color.

While some may see this as overly academic and theoretical, I disagree. This practitioner inquiry -- which was necessarily built upon a theoretical foundation -- helped me see that the current status quo is more than “white people” creating a situation in which “students of Color” struggle. Our “diversity and community” work can be more than taking down what we perceive as hurdles and barricades for students of Color. From my perspective, the decontextualized and ahistorical ways we make sense of our experiences as (white) faculty help to hold in place our current inequitable, anti-Black status quo. Theoretically grounding and explicitly contextualizing our curricular and pedagogical choices as educators creates a “space to place new steps of change” on our quest to create a more equitable and inclusive school community (Angelou, 1993). The restoration of nuance to our oversimplified default narratives was my (and can be our) willful effort to revive “unyielding language content to admire its own paralysis” (Morrison, 2011).

Work w/ Dan