Christopher Emdin

For anyone who is ready to learn: pick this up. Especially white people. Firstly, it was always my assumption that the way my schooling worked - from the mid 50s to 1970 - was THE WAY IT SHOULD BE FOR EVERYONE. And if there were kids who had a hard time with it, well, that was their fault. Or their parents. Or the neighborhood. Or that they didn't value education. Well - I WAS WRONG. This is a primer for those who hold that same errant belief. The author is an African American educator who show more started his teaching career in the same place. He came to realize that the virtues of the hoods - cohesiveness, energy, excitement - were being left at the (metal detected) door by kids who had different learning styles. The author's primary premise is that if teachers employ strategies that encourage students to take leadership in determining how they learn, there will be a great deal more engagement and accomplishment. Some of his recommendations are: create "cogens" - small groups of four students of different ability levels within the larger group; teach "code switching" by alternating hood and non-hood languages so that both teachers and students are fluent in both; "chuuuuuch" - observation of ministers in pulpits and how they hold their congregations spellbound; and many other strategies. The result will hopefully be "transformative teaching". This is an inspirational book. It has completed turned my head around. show less

Emdin frames teaching black and brown kids in urban/poor environments as a matter of neoindigeneity; the book is about the encounter between the kids and well-meaning teachers (whether white or otherwise, as he discusses how he—a black man who’d come from the same environment—was socialized into thinking of the kids as deficient and opposed to the “right” way to learn). Many kids are looking for the “socioemotional stability” of a family, and can find it in school—or they can show more find it in a gang, which they will often think of as their family if it’s the group that values them.

I was struck by his discussion of how the kids often thought of themselves as ready to learn and on time when they were near the classroom and prepared to borrow materials from classmates if they needed to write something down or read. (I did wonder how the classmates ended up with the materials if that counted as ready to learn.)

But the broader point was about, basically, presuming good faith and lack of deficiency—understanding that there’s a culture clash and not assuming that the traditional white school culture is in the right. He responds to scholars who conclude that black kids view doing well in school as acting right by noting that they fail to consider “that teachers may perceive being black as not wanting to do well in school”—that resistance to methods may be misread as resistance to education, to everyone’s detriment but most of all to the kids’. “In a school system that positions black and brown boys as loud, abrasive, and unteachable, and that rewards black and brown girls for being submissive, teachers often give students good grades for being ‘nice and quiet’ at the expense of ensuring that they are learning.”

Emdin argues that students “who receive preferential treatment because of their performance of teacher-defined smartness become targets of ridicule by the students who refuse to perform, not because of any false notion of ‘acting white,’ but for being fake.” Those who can’t or won’t do that perform disruptiveness by exaggerating elements of themselves and their experience that teachers have chosen not to recognize. Students who perform smartness are busy performing rather than learning, while noncompliant students lose the opportunity for academic challenges by focusing on disruption.

Emdin advocates “cogens”—collaborative teaching with students, selected at first by the teacher and then by the students. Students who prepare lessons learn the material better and are empowered to interact with—even interrupt—a teacher who isn’t doing it right. Students should get credit for teaching—tests and classroom behavior shouldn’t be the only things that schools value. Indeed, not compensating students for doing classroom work like this can be more demotivating than ordinary bad grades—when students get bad grades for “not engaging in school in the ways they are expected to, there is some satisfaction that comes with knowing where one stands within the institution,” but if students engage and still fail to get recognition, the alienation may be terminal. Students should also work in pairs with complementary strengths/weaknesses, and the stronger student should get points for how much the weaker student’s scores increase. Emdin also suggests routine use of competitions like Jeopardy-style quizzes (and rap battles), which are fun and motivating and shouldn’t just be used at the end of the year for relaxation.

One really interesting point was about style: “the art of teaching the neoindigenous requires a consideration of the power of art, dress, and other dimensions of their aesthetic. Teachers often fail to understand that the bleak realities of urban youth and the drab physical spaces they are often confined to contribute to an insatiable desire to engage in, and with, artistically stimulating objects and environments.” This has implications for how the teacher should dress and decorate a classroom as well as what projects might be appropriate. “Reality pedagogy functions with the general principle that the work of raising rigor or guiding students to think more deeply is achieved through identifying phenomena that emotionally connects or motivates the student, and that the most significant emotional connections we have are to the art we consume and the most powerful and healthy emotional releases we have is through the art we create.” And yet students are expected to learn in environments hardly distinguishable from prisons (which themselves shouldn’t be soul-destroying, by the way).

In order to equip students for the expectations of the dominant culture, Emdin argues for explicitly teaching them to code-switch; uniforms and standard vocabulary/grammar are not required as long as the students can recognize which modes are important in which contexts. “To validate the codes of young people in the classroom and then fail to arm them with the tools they need to be successful across social fields is irresponsible; students must use what emerges from the enactment of their culture in schools to help navigate worlds beyond the classroom that have traditionally excluded them.” Likewise, he advocates integrating social media into the school experience, and tells a really sad story about laptops that were brought in with great fanfare, then crippled so that all they could do was play a dumb math game, then vandalized by the now demoralized and bored students, then removed because the students “couldn’t be trusted” with the equipment.

In the end, Emdin says, teachers must decide whether “to do damage to the system or to the student.” show less

For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood...and the Rest of Y'all Too: Reality Pedagogy and Urban Eduction, by Christopher Emdin, is a fascinating and exciting work that challenges teachers who work in urban environments "in the hood" as to how they approach their work, adapt their teaching practice to the needs and the strengths of their students, and reflect upon their own biases and willingness to change.

The book brought to the surface assumptions I was unaware that I even had which was, at show more times, uncomfortable. On the other hand, there were so many concrete suggestions as to how to create classrooms that were more authentic learning spaces that I left my pride behind.

Emdin refers to the urban population of students of colors as neoindigenous and compares much of current educational practice to the way in which Native American students were taught 100 years ago. He talks of the socioemotional violence that demands that students leave their culture and own ways of being outside of the culture and are forced to conform to behavioral/learning norms that have little or nothing to do with them. While he acknowledges the need to help students learn how to function within the dominant culture, he primarily addresses the urgency of celebrating these students' own culture and ways of learning so that their brilliance can be seen as well as experienced by themselves.

The continuing "achievement gaps" indicate that our current paradigms of "interventions" are not working. Emdin presents practical strategies such as co-teaching with the students, connecting context to content, and enlisting student input into classroom practice in authentic ways as some of the means of achieving what he refers to as a "cosmopolitan classroom": one in which a variety of experiences and means of learning are not only permitted but also celebrated.

I strongly recommend this book to anyone teaching in urban environments with students of color as well as to anyone who is interested in education. Emdin's writing is compulsively readable and his concepts are dynamic and challenge preconceptions people may have about "those" children's ability to connect with the educational experience, engage with content and enjoy academic success.

My thanks to LibraryThing which gave me this book in exchange for an honest review. show less

I received this book through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program.

I am one of the White Folks Who Teach, but I do so about as far from the Hood as can be imagined in the U.S. I read Dr. Emdin's work with a mixture of pleasure and pain -- it is a serious contribution to the national conversation on education.

The major strength of this book, unlike so many I've read, is that it contains specific, practical suggestions that are based in reality and are ready to be implemented in classrooms show more -- though maybe not without a struggle. Emdin calls teachers to prioritize student success over their own comfort with "the way it's always been done." He acknowledges the need for genuineness on the part of teachers, which invites the suspicion that he has had success in the classroom not because his teaching methods are categorically good, but because they grow authentically out of his persona, his experience, and his relationship with his students.

We who teach must grapple with Prof. Emdin's challenge to our preconceptions and our biases about what good students look like. For me, it takes work to imagine how Emdin's "reality pedagogy" might be applied to my white rural college, but there is enough substance to his arguments that the attempt is worthwhile, and his brief conclusion is quite generally applicable. I encourage teachers to give this book a receptive reading. show less