Emdin’s “For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood… and the Rest of Y’all Too” Is a book about how he, as a student of color, felt undervalued and invisible in his education experience. With this book Emdin offers approaches to current and future educators like my self to teaching and learning in school districts with Diverse learners. Throughout this book, there is great insight for us, future teachers, that we can develop our curriculum and instruction around.
Here are 5 key insights I thought would be useful as a future teacher:
- Cultural Relevance – This is a topic that was heavily emphasized throughout the book, Within the book Edmin claims educators must acknowledge and respect individuals backgrounds. A lot of times we don’t realize we have cultural biases within our instruction. So some ways I plan to infuse this into my teachings is taking time to learn about my students, and reviewing my material to make sure none of these are present.
- Genuine/Authentic Relationships – Edmin discusses a lot about the importance of the student-teacher relationships, viewing the relationship that they have as co-learners with their students. I want to incorporate this into my teachings by finding opportunities to build rapport with my students inside and outside of the classroom. Such as supporting them in school events, in other classrooms, at science fairs etc…
- Students Voices – The book highlights significance of the students voice in the classroom, believes that students should be actively participating in their education. This looks like leading discussions, contributing perspectives, experiences, thoughts, ideas into the classroom. In my teaching I plan to implore this by being a facilitator of students learning, allowing for their own exploration of material, giving them opportunities to lead discussions, and contribute their input to discussions.
- Inequalities within the system – This is a problem Emdin addresses, and mentions it is important to actively work towards addressing them. Challenging policies and practice of peer teachers, and the administration to actively advocate for all of your students. What this looks like in my classroom, is ensuring that students feel like they can have a safe level of communication, between their teachers, and administration, giving them any support and resources they need to address problems.
- Teacher Reflection – My final insight deals with a topic that Emdin encourages which is crucial for all teachers. It is the ability to reflect on our own biases, and assumptions, and working towards self-improvement. I plan on incorporating this all throughout my teaching experiences. It is important to reflect when students raise problems with curriculum, as well as at key points throughout the semester, such as after tests, or important events outside of the school.
Community Action Project – This project is based around their community, in which they will find an issue that exists within it, and develop a plan of action that address it.
- This project takes into a lot of the key insights I addressed previously, specifically my thinking has changed to want to incorporate more of the importance of students voices. In this they will be advocating and addressing problems THEY see within the community itself, some of which they personally may be affected by.
- The second way this book has changed my thinking towards teaching that represents itself within this project is the idea of relevance to the students, students will be encouraged to dive into the problem they are interested it, and work with the surrounding community to solve these problems. They are actively reaching out and trying to better the community around them, and places they see issues in.
- The final way my thinking has changed, is the importance of advocating for students, especially with inequalities within systems that sometimes I may even work in. This takes a deeper look at Teacher reflection as well, being able to take a step back– looking at what inequalities am I supporting, without actually knowing I’m supporting them, and how do I address these?
Hi Quinten, I loved reading your post. I love the idea of a community action project, it is so important to get students to be active members of their communities. How do you think that our conclusions from this book may differ from the conclusions our white peers made As they read the book?