Context

About My Teaching Career

I've taught for more than 20 years. During the 2002/2003 school year, I began teaching in the Sausalito Marin City School District, a small district just north of San Francisco. The district serves approximately 200 students, primarily African American. Working in a small school setting, in a district in which the School Board and staff are pushing hard to ensure that each student achieves academic excellence, has helped me continue to examine myself and my teaching practices, as well as to seek out people who are working on issues of race, culture and class in school settings and society.

Until 2002/ 03 I worked in the Vallejo Unified School District, a large, diverse district in which on-going professional development was strongly supported. My experiences there shaped me as a teacher, helping to instill in me the notion that teaching, to be effective, must always be about learning and relearning, shaping and reshaping ideas and beliefs based on each student who appears before us, expecting to learn.

Material in this website grows out of my work to become a more "culturally-relevant" teacher (Ladson-Billings). As a white, female educator working primarily with African American students, I am learning to build bridges between my own cultural background and my students' as we strive towards achievement of academic excellence; I am learning to replace long-engrained cultural and gender-based patterns of behavior in myself (those that I now know have neither promoted nor supported my African American students' high achievement) with new patterns that I see do promote and support students' academic success; and I am learning to continually seek information and reflect on the variety of perspectives that exist on achieving academic excellence, as well as on how we as educators can help our students achieve nothing short of such excellence. I focus on two aspects of my current practice related to this quest to become a more culturally-relevant teacher: work with primary grade students on beginning physics and engineering concepts, and my relationship-building work with students and their families. I also provide further information and reflection on the journey in which I've engaged thus far as an educator.

About Me

Until 2002/ 03 I worked in a large, diverse district in which on-going professional development is strongly supported. My experiences there shaped me as a teacher, helping to instill in me the notion that teaching, to be effective, must always be about learning and relearning, shaping and reshaping ideas and beliefs based on each student who appears before us, expecting to learn.

From the beginning of my teaching career more than twenty years ago, I have worked mostly with children of color. While, as a beginning teacher, I sought out a teaching situation in an urban, low socio-economic setting, I understood little of the cultural differences between my students and myself. I had little notion of, and little preparation for, the issues of race and culture and class that most certainly underlay my work with children. Two experiences within the first few years of my teaching helped me become aware that such issues were impacting the learning of my students. First, a Speech and Language Therapist explained to me one day that Tanisha, a student I had referred for assessment (because she consistently dropped word endings) was simply speaking, as the Speech Therapist called it, Black English. This was the first time issues of language difference between African American and other students surfaced for me. Second, given my experiences with Tanisha, I enrolled in a staff development session introducing me to the district's Standard English Program, which focused on African American language patterns, their roots in African languages, and ways to enable students to code-switch between their home language and Standard English. The two days I spent in this session were a revelation, opening up worlds of questions and starting me off on what has become an on-going inquiry into what it is that a white, female teacher needs to know and do to effectively support the high achievement of African American students.

My teaching practices have shifted dramatically over time since then, based on what I have learned about lessening the cultural dissonances that exist between my students and myself. From seemingly small things such as the particular language I use to give directions, to structural issues such as the ways in which I work to create routines and construct tasks, I can see large differences in my thinking and teaching actions now compared to those several years ag

I also notice that my thinking about the need to articulate my thinking to others has changed significantly. I did not grow up talking about issues of race, culture and class directly and it is still not easy to do so. I understand now, however, the importance of learning to give voice to my thinking and my experiences in advocating for a system that brings about the high achievement of African American students. I now regularly make efforts, for example, to talk with student teachers explicitly about how my teaching practices relate to my thinking about lessening cultural dissonances and creating culturally relevant practices. I am learning to be a white teacher who no longer sits quietly, thinking to herself, as I have done for much of my professional life, but a teacher who will try to reckon, out loud, with these issues that underlie the success and lack of success of our students.