Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza is the target of scorn right now for encouraging the city’s educators to confront their implicit bias. I appreciate what he’s doing, because it’s helped me become a better teacher.
Let me explain, through the story of a young man named Thabo.
In his freshman year at our school, Thabo was difficult to engage in class. He seemed to like our school, his teachers and his classmates, but he was not showing up every day to learn. He did enough to pass his classes, but just barely.
I wondered what I could do to hook Thabo into school.
Fortunately, my school has a new focus on authentic learning and culturally relevant curricula. We have been working together to develop content and strategies that are attentive to the cultures of our students.
In an algebra course, to represent linear functions, I teach a yearly project about people in a bicycle race. Usually, the racers are named after teachers at our school, but this year, we named the racers after activists in a few different fields.
It was a game-changer. One of the aspects of the project is to conduct research on the riders in the race. Thabo was researching James Baldwin. He asked excellent questions about Baldwin’s relationship to Martin Luther King Jr., and Malcolm X, revealing a level of prior knowledge I wouldn’t have otherwise known about.
We bonded over our adoration of Malcolm X, both despite and because of the aspects of his character that were challenging to the civil rights discourse of the time. After remaining closed off to me and to the content I was teaching, Thabo opened up and began engaging with algebra more fully.
A few months later, I was supporting Thabo’s social studies class. By this point in the year, he had solidified a reputation as a class clown.
He knew that I knew otherwise. This day in social studies class, the students were presenting a lesson about groups who resisted Italian colonization in Ethiopia in the early 1900s. The teacher read out options for students to present about: women, the Orthodox Church, guerillas.
Thabo’s face lit up. “Guerillas!” he yelled out loud. Other students laughed, thinking more about the animals than the fighters. But Thabo knew. He prepared what he was going to say. He included his outside knowledge about Che Guevara and the Cuban Revolution.
When he presented, the whole class was spellbound. His passion was clearly evident. The social studies teacher and I locked eyes across the classroom silently communicating to each other, this is why we need culturally relevant curriculum.
Before this lesson, we hadn’t known much about colonization in Africa, let alone resistance to it. The course had previously been all about the colonizers, not the colonized, and certainly not about resistance movements.
Our recognition of this error and our efforts to repair it had paid off. Not only was Thabo provided a chance to shine, now his peers knew about his intellect and capabilities, they understood the content, and were more excited to learn with him on their team.
My co-teachers and I were able to improve our teaching to engage Thabo largely because of the implicit bias trainings we have participated in with our school. As a white teacher in a public school with majority-white staff, I could get by without improving my teaching in these ways. My cultural values and morals are generally reflected in the content that is taught, the way students are assessed, the way they are graded, the discipline style and the qualities we look for in new hires.
But this is not always true for my students, who are nearly 80% black and Latino. Nor is it true for the people of color on our staff. I have to stretch outside of my comfort zone to reflect on how my biases impact my teaching, see the shortcomings, and do things differently. There’s nothing wrong, and a lot right, about that.
Madsen teaches at Manhattan’s Essex Street Academy public school.
