Abstract
A course for freshmen boys teaches them about the black experience and each other — and leads to improved self-concepts and academic performance.
I have never encountered any children in a group who are not geniuses. There is no mystery how to teach them. The first thing you do is treat them like human beings and the second thing you do is love them.
— Asa Hilliard
That, unfortunately, appears to be an ever-unfulfilled expectation. Across the country, there is a collective failure to teach young black men. In 2009, the most recent aggregation of national reading and math scores, “white 8th graders scored an average of 26 points higher on the National Assessment of Educational Progress reading test than did black 8th graders, and an average of 31 points higher on the NAEP math test” (Koebler, 2011).
Socioeconomic marginalization only provides a partial explanation for the achievement gap. White students enmeshed in poverty do just as well in school as their African-American counterparts outside of poverty (Gabriel, 2010).
No community in America seems to be immune. In Union City, Calif., a Bay Area city riven with ethnic, religious, and racial peculiarities, black students comprise 10% of James Logan High School's population but a substantially smaller portion of its graduates. Even fewer go on to four-year colleges. This failure, coupled with high rates of delinquency and the social exclusion of black youths at Logan High, prompted speech and debate teacher Tommie Lindsey to create a “lifeskills” class exclusively for 9th grade African-American males.
Fifty-three students enrolled in the course in the 2007-08 school year. But a few months after its start, the program suffered a blow to its moral authority when a student in the class was gunned down while picking up his younger brother from middle school. Resultant racial tensions fractured the city and left many in the lifeskills class wondering why they should attend a school that failed to protect them. The class finished out the year, but then went on hiatus.
One of the principal causes of the undereducation of students of color is the imposition of a curriculum that is utterly alien to their own experience.
A few years later, many of the soon-to-be-graduating students from the first class encouraged Lindsey to offer the lifeskills program again.
In fall 2010, the lifeskills class was reborn with 40 students and five instructional aides — the latter drawn from a diverse group of students on Lindsey's speech and debate team. The aides were upperclassmen and received elective credits for the class, and the course was required for all 9th-grade African-American males, though opting-out was made possible some months before the school year began. The curriculum developed by this class has been implemented again for the 2011-12 school year, and planned for subsequent years.
To design the course, the teaching team borrowed liberally from the Motivational Framework for Culturally Responsive Teaching by Margery Ginsberg and Raymond Wlodkowski (2000) to fashion a model with four important supports: establishing inclusion, building security, enhancing meaning, and engendering competence.
#1. Establish inclusion
Students bought into the inclusion concept almost from the beginning, but not without some convincing. It seemed the students had been conditioned to hold certain beliefs regarding skin color. Several of the young men's remarks would have made slavemaster Willie Lynch proud. But after studying passages from Lynch's speech, “The Making of the Slave,” students understood the gross inhumanity of dividing themselves by the tone of their skin. Then, taking a more positive approach, the class studied two poems — “America,” by Claude McKay and “I, too, Sing America,” by Langston Hughes, each addressing the significance of cultural identity. The discussion that followed reinforced the importance of that lesson.
As the year progressed, the curriculum content remained highly inclusive. While reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X, the teaching team constructed two activities — “Malcolm and Me” and “My Nightmare” — that asked students to compare and contrast the life of Malcolm and their lives. Such activities emphasized the importance of being able to share with each other, openly, honestly, and respectfully. During a discussion about society's pressure to be hypermasculine, for example, one student said he had tried on a dress and a bra when he was younger. While an observer might have expected the students to laugh at this admission, that didn't happen. Empathy already had been established.
Students learned that earning an education is resisting racism.
Having open conversations with each other also helped build positive relationships. A few months into the year, a musician visited the class to help students with an audiovisual production. Students organized themselves, separating into writers, actors, musicians, and various other roles associated with completing the task. They gauged each other's strengths and weaknesses and made sure everyone was included. Here, as always, bonding was the goal.
Student-to-student relationships were only half the puzzle. What was equally important were the relationships that the teacher and his senior aides built with each student. To build those strong teacher-student relationships, the teacher and aides shared personal stories whenever the entire class was sharing, and they always took part in the same activities as the students, which may have appeared embarrassing to students and senior aides alike. While the class was lucky enough to receive singing assistance from the renowned choir director Sandra Iglehart, perfect pitch was far from the point. For example, while teaching the class “Lift Every Voice and Sing” and “Unchained Melodies,” the teachers and aides were either part of the harmony of voices or asked to sing alone. Such acts worked wonders to strengthen the teacher-student relationships. The group effectively broke down the “I am the (superior) teacher; you are the (inferior) student” dichotomy so often found in classrooms. Our actions showed that we cared about them, that we loved them.
#2. Build security
A student learns best in an environment where he feels comfortable. A student will only get out of the class what he feels is worth putting into the class.
Despite their African-American cultural connection, this group was far from cohesive. Students who knew each other from middle school would inevitably group together, which was probably natural given the foreign environment in which they found themselves at high school. Even more interesting, however, was the denominator they used to draw a line between groups: skin color. Lighter students congregated with lighter students and darker students with darker students — even when they didn't have any prior acquaintance. The one African National student who spoke with an accent was almost universally excluded.
Forming these groups was clearly a defense mechanism. None of the students had ever before been in a class composed entirely of African-American males; at most, they had only a few other black students in other classes. In a class entirely composed of that single group, they homed in on other physical traits, which resulted in a segregated class that mimicked the Jim Crow South where darker-skinned blacks were viewed as more primal and less white.
This was not acceptable. The students inherently had a poor understanding of their past, where whites encouraged segregation among African-Americans to prevent a strong, cohesive front. The curriculum began by breaking down the distinction between skin color.
The year started by identifying the students' common enemy by reading the infamous Willie Lynch speech from 1712 that detailed the process of breaking slaves mainly by keeping them in a constant struggle with one another. Lynch urged the slavemaster to divide the old from the young, the light skinned from the dark skinned, the short from the tall — the same divisions that the class was grappling with in the first weeks of school. Lynch concluded that this system of slavery would support itself for hundreds of years to come, as long as those in power could “leave the body, but take the mind.” This showed students that divisions among them were a coordinated attack by society to separate them and to control them.
The idea of being controlled was unappealing to students as they recognized that slavery was not and is not merely the physical control of the body, but also the enslavement of the mind. One of the oft-repeated mantras throughout the year became “keep the body, take the mind.” “Those words hurt,” admitted one student, Jaelen, and yet the recognition “of my ancestors' suffering and struggle motivated me to change … my teachers noticed the improvement.”
By the end of the year, everyone was freely associating with everyone else. The class was a safe environment in which every student equally participated, where there was no hierarchy and no exclusion.
Students often arrived to this first-period class as much as a half-hour early. For them, the classroom was a safe haven. Lindsey and his senior aides talked with them before class on any number of subjects, approached them about their problems, and even offered morning tutoring. Some of the senior aides tutored students after class and even intervened with other teachers to support class members. The teaching team's interest in the students was reciprocated in the classroom through enhanced student interest in what was to be learned. Students understood that the class was structured to assure they did well; they weren't forced to do so. Students were always provided the security to make that choice.
#3. Enhance meaning and relevance
American writer Sydney J. Harris once noted that “the whole purpose of an education is to turn mirrors into windows.” His argument was simple: Education is about the loss of objectivity — the ability to subtract ourselves from our own subjective experience or our own socioeconomic disposition, and analyze things from a transcendental position.
This idea has become all too popular in contemporary American education. The curriculum we pass on to students is far from relevant and certainly not meaningful — especially to black males. It seems as if our education could use a few more mirrors reflecting our personal character in the content we teach. As many students agree, one of the principal causes of the undereducation of students of color is the imposition of a curriculum that is utterly alien to their own experience. Amaris, a freshmen in the class, said, “The current curriculum either ignores our history or depicts the negative parts of our past,” something he says can be detrimental to “students of color getting involved in learning.” Students who are unable to identify or care about the work in front of them will become alienated from the process of learning altogether.
As a lifeskills elective, this course avoids the tangle of state-mandated standards and has the freedom to craft curriculum that promotes historical and cultural literacy related to the black American experience. Here is a brief sampling of our rigorous curriculum, which helps students make personal meaning of several California high school standards delivered in other classes:
Basic rights and liberties, as well as the importance of navigating the criminal justice system;
Thoughtful analysis of African-American poetry from Langston Hughes, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Claude McKay;
Historical and literary dissection of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” which is often called the black national anthem, accompanied by the students' performance of the hymn;
Reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X;
Historical lessons on “medical apartheid” — the exploitation and significance of Henrietta Lacks, the Tuskegee syphilis experiments, and other contemporary cases;
Reading and discussing the writings of Willie Lynch; and
Understanding the current state of black education in our district and nationwide.
THE EDUCATION OF BLACK MALES | BY THE NUMBERS
High school graduation
The graduation rate for black male students for the nation as a whole in 2007-08 was only 47%; that is, most black male students did not graduate with their cohort (Schott, p. 8).
If current national trends continue to the 2020 target year for education reform, although both black male and white male graduation rates will be higher, the gap between them will get bigger, not smaller — expanding to 29% from 28% (p. 7).
This curriculum is both meaningful and relevant because it provides a context for all schooling to be important. First, students explore issues central to their identity. Second, students learn about the realities of the world around them, which provides meaning to the work that might otherwise alienate them. At the end of nearly every lesson, the class returned to Willie Lynch's framework “leave the body, but take the mind.” Students learned that earning an education is resisting racism. One of our students, Elijah, taught us that “there is an anti-intellectual stereotype for people of color and through education we break free of it.” Their grades, not only in our class, but in all classes, improved as a result.
While most classrooms are far more pluralistic than ours, we believe that the framework we've used can be passed along to other educators. Last spring, the class began a unit on William Ernest Henley's profound poem, “Invictus.” While the poem is written by a white male, the central concepts of the class were driven home again. The students analyzed the poem, and then asked: “How does this relate to our own lives, or, how does this relate to African-American history?” The young men's aptitude for developing quick connections shined through, as their own experiences mirrored those of a man with whom they had little in common.
It is the act of holding up a mirror alongside the curriculum that guarantees success for all students. Once African-American males can see themselves in their schoolwork, nothing can impede their success.
#4. Establish expectations
Lifeskills students said they were seldom expected to succeed. They told stories of how teachers neglected them in class, which influenced the future they expected for themselves. Teachers expected them to attend summer school, not college. During the first semester, most students laughed at the prospect of attaining reasonably high marks in high school; a few said they'd be able to make it to class on time.
Low expectations almost inevitably led individuals to resign themselves to mediocre performance. Thus, one of the primary goals of the course was creating external and internal expectations that would drive the young men toward college.
The teaching team began by asking students what they wanted from one another and from themselves. Students collaborated with the teaching team to establish classroom rules. By general consensus, they agreed they would not disrespect one another, would not wear hats in class, and would be in their seats on time. Because students helped set the class code, the teachers' external expectations were harmonized with the expectations students had for themselves.
However, students went beyond merely setting expectations to regulate discipline or behavior. They also pledged to each other that they would graduate together as a class. In this communal obligation, one could literally see the student's views of the future shifting toward a brighter end.
Students rose to those expectations. They didn't wear hats; they showed up on time. At the end of the first semester, the average GPA was 1.6; by the end of the second semester, it was 3.0. In January, 11 students were on the honor roll; by spring, that number jumped to 20, and the remainder of the class received “On a Roll” awards that signaled that students would likely be on the honor roll the next semester.
Our students are beginning to understand that, “The real gap is between African-American male's typical performance and the criterion levels of excellence, which are well within their reach. That is the gap that is unacceptable, given what we know about what good teaching can do, and given what we know about the genius of our children” (Perry, Steele, & Hilliard, 2004).
Conclusion
By embracing the Motivational Framework for Culturally Responsive Teaching (Ginsberg & Wlodkowski, 2000), our class has established an equitable, inclusive, and academic space for young black males to transcend the limitations of our pedagogic apartheid. The numbers speak for themselves: Reading scores for 9th-grade black males grew the most of any demographic in our school. But more important are the intangibles — a student's new sense of confidence that allows him to share his experience, thoughts, or feelings, a newfound love for reading, an ability to overcome intraracial hate or, even more destructive, self-hate.
The beauty of our lifeskills class is its simplicity. The district provided minimal funding, and aside from the senior aides, it functioned like a normal course. Any classroom could reproduce these results. Don't neglect any student's needs. Craft and link lessons to the identities of your students. Establish a sense of security and expect great things. In other words, treat them like human beings — and love them.