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Social Justice Symposium 1:  Response to Carol Lee

A Call to Action

Elizabeth Birr Moje, University of Michigan

October 13, 2004

Good afternoon.  It is a pleasure to be with you all today as we come together to contemplate and to learn about how to make our School of Education a space for promoting social justice and equity in all realms of education.  It is a special pleasure to have the opportunity to respond to the work of Dr. Carol Lee.  Carol, as always, your words have inspired me and provoked a number of ideas, and I thank you for taking time out of what is supposed to be your time away—Dr. Lee is on leave at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences—to share your ideas with us and assist us in our work toward developing equitable and just professional education practice.

My task this afternoon is not only to respond to Dr. Lee’s talk, but also to bring her talk together with the comments offered by Dr. Gloria Ladson-Billings over the last 2 days and with the comments and conversations people have been having in the hallways, meeting rooms, and classrooms over the last three years as we have been struggling to take up the challenge of educating teachers, teacher educators, and educational researchers to engage in just and equitable education practices.  To that end, I’ve tried to pull together the points or themes that have stood out to me in the last few days.  You’ll notice in these themes my own theoretical, empirical, and practical biases, but I’m the one talking, so you have to put up with that for a few minutes.  For each theme suggested by our speakers, I try to offer a possible action or step forward that we could take as a School.  What’s important to note is that these possible actions are by no means fully developed in my thinking; I put them forward as fodder or springboards for conversation about how we might actually do the work that we often think and talk about. 

So I’ll begin by using Dr. Lee’s work on cultural modeling as jumping-off point for the discussion, and I want to review the four principles that Carol highlighted in her talk as critical for cultural modeling:  (a) Careful analysis of the target task, (b) Careful analysis of interpretive tasks in the cultural experience of students, (c) Extracting strategies common to both school-based and culturally based tasks, (d) Designing activities that promote self-reflection on strategies.  Keep those in mind as I suggest some possible action for our School.

I start with Carol’s notion of cultural modeling because I believe that her focus on teaching deeply in the disciplines meshes quite well with one of the greatest strengths of our School of Education.  Associate Dean Jeffrey Mirel said recently, in fact, that if he had to choose an identity for the School of Education, he would highlight the strong commitment to deep subject matter teaching that the faculty and students (both undergraduate and graduate) share.  I concur with Jeff:  Regardless of education level (pre-K, elementary, secondary, or post-secondary), we are deeply committed to supporting students’ disciplinary learning.  We have faculty and graduate student colleagues who study the teaching and learning of literature with pre-schoolers, the mathematics with second-graders, history with fourth graders, science with middle-schoolers, algebra and geometry with high schoolers, composition with high schoolers, civic education with undergraduates:  the list could go on and on.  At the same time, we have colleagues who study the identity development of children, youth, and adults; the cultural practices of resilient youth and those of marginalized youth; and the institutional and interpersonal resources afforded to youth of different backgrounds as they seek higher education.  Finally, we have faculty and student colleagues who study the education of teachers across those same disciplinary commitments, highlighting aspects of teaching as a relational and moral task that is always situated in particular contexts and cultures, examining policies for teaching and assessment practice, and developing strategies and curricula for enhancing teaching, learning, and assessment at multiple levels of education.

Thus, we have all the pieces to build what I like to call—drawing from Dr. Lee’s work, in particular—culturally responsive subject matter teacher education.  We have, that is, a commitment to deep disciplinary learning; we have a commitment to study teaching and the learning of teaching well; we have a commitment to understanding the cultural practices and identity enactments of teachers and youth across a variety of contexts.   What we do not have is the active integration of those pieces, nor do we have the structures in place in our program to do the work required for culturally responsive subject matter teacher education.  My response to these 3 days of conversation is to argue that we must build the framework necessary to engage in culturally responsive subject matter professional education.  But what would that take?  Well, I have a few ideas.  These ideas are in no particular order; to be honest, I have no idea whether there should be a particular order to how we would approach this work.  I suspect, in fact, that these things need to happen simultaneously, which makes, of course, the work that much more complex.  But here’s an attempt at a list of tasks:  (A caveat here:  I’ll root my examples primarily in teacher education, but I see these as possibilities that would extend to all areas of our work as professional educators, including the development of teacher educators and education researchers).

One move would be to develop a better understanding of culture, and particularly of the relationship between the individual and culture, between micro-processes of everyday life and macro-structures of school and society.  In the Monday session, Dr. Susannah Hapgood, a recent graduate of our program, asked a great question of Gloria Ladson-Billings:  Why not call what we do “people relevant/responsive pedagogy” rather than “culturally relevant/responsive pedagogy”?  In other words, why put culture in the equation?  Orrin Murray, a current graduate student, and I pursued this conversation yesterday afternoon, with Orrin arguing that we should study individual difference because culture is lived by individuals and with me arguing that individuals are never outside of cultures.  Conversations like this are important and need to become more of a mainstay in our teacher education program, rather than happenstance inspired by a visit here or there. 

To make such conversations the fabric of our work here, however, might demand a radical restructuring of how we do teacher education.  We currently require, for example, that our preservice teacher education students develop a strong understanding of individual difference, and we give them one whole class in which to do so (ED 391).  We simultaneously require that they develop a strong understanding of the many different cultural practices and systems of power in our society, and we give them another whole class to build that in-depth understanding (ED 392).  Now leaving aside the question of whether a single class can really contribute to the deep learning of major concepts underlying educational practice, we should ask ourselves, “When do we provide students with opportunities to examine the relationship between the individual and culture?”  How do students come to understand what it means for an individual to enact culture or for cultures to shape individuals?  Certainly, individual faculty members and GSIs may take up these relationships in explicit ways at points in their teaching, but I would argue that as a whole we offer our students discrete representations of complex concepts such as culture and individual and then hope that they will make connections. 

Thus, a first step toward building culturally responsive subject matter teacher education might be to build structures in our programs (TE and graduate) that encourage conversation across such courses, that strategically or planfully integrate a discussion of culture and the individual into all of the other courses our students take in our professional program, and that provide opportunities for students to experience different ways of being an individual in different cultural settings.  This last point taps into several points that Dr. Ladson-Billings made on Monday:  We all need to develop more equal status relationships with people whose cultural backgrounds may be different from our own, and we need to develop a discourse for talking openly about race and racial identity.  I’m not sanguine about our ability to do that if we don’t confront the dichotomies around culture and individual inherent in our own education programs. 

In addition, I think we need to do more work in and with the disciplines themselves.  Just as we need a better understanding of culture, we need a better of understanding of the disciplines.  We need to recognize the disciplines as not only mediated by broader culture but also as cultures of their own, with particular epistemologies and cultural practices that have certain kinds of capital or currency within and across groups.  And it’s not enough for people to nod their heads in agreement with such a statement.  We need to analyze the cultural practices and epistemologies of the disciplines as part of deep subject matter teacher education, rather than simply accepting disciplinary knowledge as a given.  We need to ask ourselves and our teacher education students what it takes to be a member of a discipline and what it might take to disrupt a discipline’s conventions or practices.  We need to help our students figure out just how much of those cultural practices they should teach their pre-K, elementary, secondary, and post-secondary students.  I know that Dr. Lee is doing that work as part of her own research, and we can definitely learn from her model.  Such work would also probably require that the SOE partner with members of the disciplines in LS&A or across other schools and departments on campus.  We have to figure out how to integrate such discussions and analyses into teacher education and into disciplinary course work.  I don’t think that we can do this work alone, especially not in the very few classes teacher education students actually take as students in this professional school.

Another step would be to continue to develop research on the cultural practices and epistemologies of learners outside of school, in homes, families, peer groups, and communities.  More to the point of teacher education, however, would be to involve pre- and inservice teachers in that research as a means of building deeper understandings of various cultural practices and of the complexities in talking about cultural practice.   Think of how much our students could benefit from learning—indeed experiencing—how much their students actually know and can do in their lives outside of school.  Living and working with people whose cultural experiences may differ from one’s own can reveal a great deal about the experiences, beliefs, and values that people share across cultures, underscoring what Dr. Ladson-Billings said on Monday, that often more intragroup difference exists than does intergroup difference.  It is also a critical step in Dr. Lee’s call to build learning environments that support the development of interpersonal relationships, relationships that, in turn, support deep learning.  This isn’t a simple matter of sending our students “out there” to watch people in “other” communities.  Too often, such practice simply reproduces stereotypes and uninformed practices.  I’m thinking of something more systematic, more carefully constructed—perhaps a set of courses, perhaps a set of experiences we cannot even imagine at this point—in which UM teacher education and graduate students have opportunities to work side by side with people from many different communities over time and to work with community members, school personnel, and SOE faculty to examine their observations and their assumptions about “the other.”

A fourth possibility builds on something that Dr. Patricia King said on Monday in her response to Dr. Ladson-Billings’ talk.  Pat argued that in addition to understanding the epistemologies and cultural practices that our students bring to the classroom and, I would add, the cultural practices and epistemologies of the disciplines we teach (or teach teachers to teach), we should also analyze the cultural practices and epistemologies of schools in which teachers and students come together to teach and learn subject matters.  Pat’s point is important because the disciplinary subject matter does not enter schools untouched by the cultures of those schools.  Judith Green, among others, has written about the fact that the practices of disciplinary classrooms are just that:  classroom practices, which are shaped by discourses of authority and control, practices framed by unique understandings of what counts as knowledge and of how one demonstrates knowledge.  By the same token, the cultural practices and epistemologies of students and teachers are not untouched by the school’s culture. 

Recognizing that the disciplinary practices and students’ and teachers’ practices do not translate neatly into classroom disciplinary teaching and learning practices requires that we continue to learn from the kind of close classroom research that many of our faculty members do.  It may also require, however, that we find different kinds of spaces for preservice and inservice teachers to try out culturally responsive disciplinary teaching.  Perhaps we need to construct lab schools or experimental education settings or simply different kinds of partnerships with schools; I’m not sure how we’d do this, but I agree with Pat King that it is critical to examine carefully the cultural practices and epistemologies of the places in which we expect teachers to engage in culturally responsive subject matter teaching and then to figure out what the means for what we expect preservice teachers to learn when they participate in practica or student teaching.

Finally, there is a great deal of work to be done on the doing of culturally responsive subject matter teaching.  We can learn from cases of practice, as Dr. Virginia Richardson suggested and as many of our faculty members demonstrate through their varied research projects.  But what remains a question for me, on a personal professional level, is the relationship between the teaching of skills—let’s say mathematics skills, for example—and the teaching of navigational and critical practices across groups.  In other words, how does a first-grade mathematics teacher teach her students basic mathematics facts while also teaching them how to navigate cultural practices of mathematics as a discipline?  Or is first grade not the place for such teaching?  If not, then when should it begin?  And what should it look like?  I do not wish to suggest with this question that it is impossible to do this work or even that there is a hierarchy of development (e.g., skills first, navigation second).  What I do want to argue, however, is that we need to provide more models for our students of such complex teaching and then we need to provide them with supported practice in the doing of such teaching themselves.  Again, such a move may be likely to require new sites for engaging in culturally responsive subject matter teaching.  It is, I believe, the rare public school classroom into which a preservice teacher can march in and start experimenting, even if he has a university faculty member guiding his work.  We may need to construct sites for such experimentation, sites in which we teach and learn side by side with our students.

I could go on and on with the list of ideas inspired by the rich presentations of our two guest speakers and by the thoughtful conversations of the past three days.  The conversations are, I believe, just beginning.  And to allow for more conversation I would like, at this point, to turn the conversation back to Dr. Lee and the audience, so that we can use the remaining time to tap Dr. Lee’s extensive experience in doing this work and doing it so well.  Thank you.