Many college teachers want to respond to students’ identities and cultures with respect, accurate perceptions, and sensitivity. We may face challenges within ourselves that arise from being shaped by societal forces. A self-reflective, repeating process of “…awareness, analysis, action, and accountability” (The Adaway Group; Love 2010) helped me. I hope that sharing my experiences with this process can help college teachers already engaged in similar processes or those who want to try something new in order to become even more culturally responsive with their students.
- Awareness: Self-reflecting on my teaching and interactions with students to become aware of how my biases and identity could be affecting them.
- Analysis: Thinking through what I discover to see what is going on and “pivoting from problem to possibility” with the help of supportive colleagues. Thinking of ways to try to reduce the negative effects of my biases and identity on students.
- Accountability: Asking for help from supportive colleagues of different cultures and identities from myself to see my blind spots.
- Action: Acting on those new ways of teaching.
Awareness
My first step was to make regular time to reflect on my teaching and my interactions with students, using these questions, informed by the Illinois State Board of Education Culturally Responsive Teaching and Leading Standard A:
- What happened in my teaching and interaction(s) with student(s)?
- What ideas and biases motivated my actions?
- How might my identity have affected my perspectives and beliefs about students?
- How might my biases and perceptions have impacted students?
- What are ways to mitigate my bias and/or negative impact on students?
I made a list of some aspects of my identity and some of my probable biases to spark my reflections. Reviewing this list provided me a more defined path to follow:
- Race/ethnicity: White/non-Hispanic
- National Origin: United Stated of America
- Language: English (home language)
- Sex and gender: Cis-gendered woman
- Sexual orientation: Heterosexual
- Physical ability: Able with experience of temporary disability
- Developmental ability: Development of sense of self
- Emotional ability: Strong student of this
- Socioeconomic class: Middle class (maybe upper middle class)
- Religion: Christian/Lutheran
My probable biases:
- Racism
- Classism
- Sexism
- Homophobia
- Unearned privilege (white privilege)
- Eurocentrism
- Ableism
Here is an example of a self-reflection about my socioeconomic status and probable classism:
“I am not sure if this is about my identity or my biases or both: I noticed that I had internal negative reactions to how some students dressed for in-class presentations in a first-year education class. This is a diverse class of students from Latine, Black, and white backgrounds Several Black and Latine students revealed skin on their torsos and/or wore short shorts. I wondered if that is a way of dressing that they experience as dressing up. It is very different from my experience. I am also aware that as a teacher educator who teaches field experience courses where students go into classrooms in schools, I do talk with students in those classes about what is considered to be professional attire. I do not do this in classes that do not have this field component like this one. I am aware as I reflect that I associate this way of students dressing with attire for going to a night club and/or being sexually provocative.”
When I reflected on the impact that I may have had on students, I wrote:
“I may have looked askance at them, unconsciously expressing my negative judgment about their appearance. I can see that this could have impacted them negatively: they may have sensed some disapproval from me. If they did, this may have negatively affected their confidence in making their presentations.”
Analysis
I shared with supportive colleagues (in the Writers’ Collective of the Center for Success in High Needs Schools) how discouraging it was to discover this and other ways that my perceptions and biases may have negatively affected my students. They helped me “pivot” from “problem to possibility” by telling me about their own and Dr. Shawn A. Ginwright’s work (Ginwright, 2022). Ginwright writes, “…our job is to lean into the practice of possibilities and strive for the future we want to create.” (p. 179)
Colleagues Dr. Gloria McDaniel-Hall and Dr. Ava Belisle-Chatterjee shared their blog “Let’s Pivot for Change” where they discuss with blog visitors ways to reimagine justice and ourselves. When I felt down about what I was discovering in myself, I chose to put my energies into finding ways to reduce the effects of my biases on students.
Analysis, Accountability, and Action
In another example of my pivot from problem to possibility, when a proposal to present my self-reflective process at a conference was not accepted, I chose to use the reviewers’ questions to improve my process. They asked:
- “How is doing reflective work limited by whiteness?”
- “What role, if any, do other white people or people of color play in this reflective process?”
- “How do you know what your own socialization and/or knowledge base is limiting you from being able to reflect upon?”
I shared these questions with colleagues in the Writing Collective along with my reservations about asking for help from people of color. I explained that I did not want to ask people of color to do the work that I needed to do as a white person in uncovering my biases and reducing their effects. Some colleagues there were generous in their offers to talk with me.
Through a conversation we had, I see now that in order to mitigate my bias about students’ attire, I need to learn more about the ways in which what is considered to be professional is problematic and how professionalism can be considered as being equivalent to whiteness.
As a result of this conversation, I saw the importance of talking with students in all of my courses about the importance of doing what they can to be seen as professional in order to gain and keep professional positions and the problematic aspects of professionalism. In my current teaching, I am in the process of doing both with students.
Another example of my engagement in this multi-step process of self-reflection uncovered that my identity as able and white affected my perception of a student with a disability. As I worked to understand what was going on in myself, I saw that I minimized the effect of this disability on this student of color and their experience of school. I was unaware of what it could mean to an elementary student to be closely monitored by the school nurse in a classroom where the classroom teacher responded to this student by underestimating this student’s academic capabilities. For the rest of the semester, I tried to be very aware of this bias and allow the student to express her experience even more freely than I may have before then.
Conclusion
Responding to students’ cultures and identities with more accurate, respectful, and sensitive perceptions requires reflecting on our own identities and biases and how they can lead to our doing otherwise. This multi-step process of self-reflection has helped me:
- Recognize how my perceptions of students are influenced by my identity
- Notice how I act out my unconscious biases in my interactions with students
- Ask for help to see my blind spots caused by my socialization and knowledge base from supportive colleagues with cultures and identities different from mine
- Use my discoveries to enact ways of doing things differently and reducing the negative effects of my biases on students
What fuels my efforts is the possibility of creating a more culturally responsive learning environment in my classroom where the people I teach can be more free to be and become their wonderful, authentic selves, less hindered by my misperceptions and biases about their cultures and identities.
Dr. Elizabeth Meadows teaches a diverse population of undergraduate and graduate students in teacher preparation and related fields at Roosevelt University in Chicago and Schaumburg, Illinois. In her current research, she reflects on her own identity, motivations, and biases and their impacts on her teaching and on her students. Meadows’ main purpose in this research is to further her ongoing, anti-bias, and culturally responsive efforts as a white teacher educator to build and maintain learning environments, including her teacher-student relationships with students, that are most conducive for all future teachers of all cultures and identities whom she teaches. Another purpose is to publish her research in order to contribute to the literature on self-reflective, anti-bias efforts by teacher educators.
References and Resources:
The Adaway Group https://adawaygroup.com/
The blog and community forum by Dr. Ava Belisle Chatterjee and Dr. Gloria McDaniel-Hall called “Let’s Pivot for Change” https://pivotforchange.wixsite.com/connect
Ginwright, S. (2022). The Four Pivots: Reimagining Ourselves, Reimagining Justice. North Atlantic Books.
Illinois State Board of Education Culturally Responsive Teaching and Leading Standards https://www.isbe.net/Pages/Culturally-Responsive-Teaching-Leading-Standards.aspx
Love, B. (2010). Developing a liberatory consciousness. In M. Adams, W. J. Blumenfeld, C. R. Castañeda, H. W. Hackman, M. L. Peters, & X. Zúñiga (Eds.), Readings for diversity and social justice (2nd ed., pp. 50–58). Routledge.
The Writers’ Collective sponsored by the Center for Success in High Needs Schools.
For more information email Dr. Jan Fitzsimmons at jan@center4success.com and go to the web-site www.center4success.com