Have you ever wondered why you can recall the lyrics from jingles you sang along to as a child? For instance, most 80s babies will remember, “My buddy, my buddy. Wherever I go he goes.” This is not happenstance, in fact, it’s intentional. According to the Forbes Ad Council, on any given day we are bombarded with between 6,000-10,000 advertisements. We are exposed to more advertisements than there are minutes in a day! This inundation undoubtedly influences our thoughts, decisions, and preferences. Likewise, students spend roughly six and a half hours per day in school for most of the year. The nursery rhymes, stories, histories and narratives that are shared in learning environments throughout a learner’s K-12 experience, shape their preferences and beliefs about themselves and others.
Both the media and education industries contribute to how we show up in the world and in our classrooms. Think back on your own educational experience. How many Black or Indigenous scientists did you learn about? Had you learned about the Tulsa Massacre before HBO taught you over this past year? Was the “High on the Hog” Netflix series the first time you learned about Thomas Downing’s oyster cellars and how African American cuisine played a large role in transforming America? This too, like media messages, is an intentional legacy of White-centered education in America that leaves both students and teachers robbed from learning about the wealth of contributions by Black and Brown people to this country. Instead of learning this rich and diverse history, we often were presented with false or incomplete histories and deficit beliefs about students of color.
So how do we create the robust, multifaceted learning environments our students deserve? We do this by introducing counter-narratives. According to Dr. Arnetha Ball of Stanford University, counter-narratives are strategies for bringing the stories and life experiences of those who are often on the outskirts of society into our classrooms with the purpose of critiquing traditionally accepted narratives. Why is this critique so important? Counter-narratives are an important tool in disrupting the programming around historically marginalized students, and a strategy to counter the dominant narrative in the classroom by learning from and with our students. I suggest you check out Chimamanda Adichie’s TED Talk to hear her experience firsthand.
Counter-narratives can be a powerful solution to the pervasive concern of low student engagement. Here are a few questions to ponder:
- How might students show up in school if they were encouraged to share their stories?
- What if classroom learning shifted from being unilateral to omni-directional?
- What if we assumed that our students were collaborators in creating rich, engaging learning experiences where everyone, including the teacher, could grow?
Truthfully, some students have low or no participation in our classrooms because they sense that their lived experience is excluded from the curriculum, resources, and pedagogy.
As you begin to explore the concept of counter-narratives and the role it plays in educational equity, here are some simple ways to begin shifting your practice:
- Accept that you are biased. We all have biases– bias simply means a lack of neutrality, leaning towards one side or another. Take time to reflect on those biases and ask where those ideas originated and challenge them with the truth.
- Expose yourself to stories and narratives that are written by Black and Brown authors that center historically marginalized students. As the African proverb goes, “Until the Lion tells his side of the story, the tale of the hunt will always glorify the Hunter.”
- Create space for students to share their lived experiences. Our students bring a wealth of untapped knowledge into the classroom. How can their lived experiences be leveraged to teach the content?
I’d love to hear your thoughts on ways you’ve begun to shift your practice, or even strategies you’ve brought into your classroom. You can email me at rohiatousiby@linclearning.com or find me on Twitter @Siby_Rohiatou. Be sure to check back here for some great upcoming blogs and resources from more of our LINC coaches.
We’re at a pivotal moment of change in education where we can recalibrate and reimagine what education can mean for Black, Brown, and White students. Now more than ever, we are aware that the way we were doing education was missing the mark for many students, especially for students on the margins. (I would argue it was missing the mark for White students as well.) Education B.C. (Before Covid) suggested to Black and Brown students that their stories did not matter and that they were not an integral part of the making of America. It suggested to white students that almost everything (if not everything) was imagined and created only by people that resembled their pigmentation and that there was nothing to be gained from learning anything different. Fortunately, we are now in a position to use our imagination to shape who we want to be(come) as practitioners, examine what learning means to our students (not to us), and how we can create real equity in education. This shift will allow Black and Brown students to feel included and expose white students to learning experiences that are reflective of the culturally and linguistically diverse world that we live in.
So what becomes possible if we don’t focus on students taking a test, but instead expect students to be co-producers of knowledge in the classroom? Dr. Ladson-Billings asserts that “students learn a lot more than we can test.” Imagine students becoming excited to know that their ability to think is intentionally being nurtured by asking them thought-provoking questions that consider the students’ context (e.g. community, experiences, family, etc.), igniting a wondering and curiosity within students to want to explore more. We are in a perfect position to cultivate educational environments where students can fall in love with learning in and outside of the classroom. These environments must provide evidence to Black and Brown students that they belong and will be cared for. What might that evidence look like? What evidence would you want to see if you were a student of color?
Finally, what is the “why” for our students? If last year taught us nothing else, it taught us that we are all looking for a purpose. Our students are no different. They are now questioning “why” they have to go back to school when they can learn from home and “why” they need to do their homework. Learning must be purposeful, meaningful, and relevant if we want students to be thoughtfully involved. We must know how the learning connects to and is reflective of the world that our students live in, including their communities, their families, and their future. Students want to produce work that reveals the fabric of their community and solve problems that are important to them right now.
As a mom of three kids and a professional working in the education innovation field, this has been an intensely challenging year. While we engage in many conversations about what we lost during this pandemic, and we cannot understate the loss in terms of life, I’d like to focus on what our students learned during the pandemic.