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That universal question: “Am I doing enough to challenge my students’ perspectives without making them too uncomfortable?” 

April Baker-Bell and Jessica Edwards remind us (in Linguistic Justice and “Inclusive Practices in the Technical Communication Classroom” from Citizenship and Advocacy in Technical Communication: Scholarly and Pedagogical Perspectives, respectively) that educators are still actively ironing-out the best pedagogical practices to empower Black students. And not just Black students, but of course the many intersectional community members who find themselves marginalized and oppressed in and through language. 

As teachers and specifically teachers of language and communication, we must take an active role in shaping an equitable pedagogy: one that sees similarities and sees differences, and actively makes space for both; one that challenges us– as the educators of our students– too. 

We must do so with an active and ongoing understanding of the system we uphold as educators in a public institution. We belong to– earn our livelihood from– a culture that actively stifles and even sometimes ‘demonizes’ the perspectives and existence of Blackness, queerness, disabled-ness, and more experiences that our students bring to the classroom. We can’t ask our students to leave parts of themselves at the door. 

But sometimes I wonder if we’re focusing so hard on our classrooms, on our curriculum, and our students, without first looking inward and challenging our own perspectives.

Who Are The Readings For, Anyway? 

I was fortunate enough to work at a local high school for a year after graduating with my undergraduate degree in writing and communication. I liked camping out with my colleagues in one classroom after 2:17 pm, and projecting our weekly Wednesday professional development– “PD” – meetings for us to participate in together. We weren’t full faculty, but we loved being a part of their conversations that were meant to shape their curriculum and the experiences of all our students.

When The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas was introduced to the curriculum, it was well-received. It might have had something to do with the fact that students had just struggled through The Cask of Amontillado, but unanimously, our student body refused to complain about their assigned reading when it was as relevant and contemporary as The Hate U Give. 

You’d expect the tone of a PD meeting to be light and jovial, at least when the topic is, “The students really like the assigned reading this month!”

But goodness, those conversations about Thomas’s new novel and its place in our curriculum were dry. We would climb to that peak– “Students seem to be enjoying the reading and participating in classwork and discussions,” – and then we’d flatline. Why? Why did these conversations about diversity fail amongst educators who were actively trying to diversify their classroom curriculum?  In her work, Edwards leads a series of conversations with educators that may enlighten us. 

One of the professors Edwards speaks to describes that diversity is “an approach to making the familiar unfamiliar, and the unfamiliar familiar,” (206). As a white-passing Latina, this is what that statement means to me:

 

• Scrutinize “Whiteness” as a concept until we begin thinking about it differently than we have before, and
• Listen to and learn the experiences of marginalized community members. 

 

Thus, make the familiar (Whiteness) unfamiliar; make the unfamiliar (the experiences of individuals in communities I do not belong to) more familiar and thus, more comfortable. How does The Hate U Give fit into this approach to diversity? 

Well… The Hate U Give is about a Black student who goes to a dominantly white high school but generally balances her life in two separate worlds: home, where she interacts with Black peers, and school, where she interacts with more white peers (long story short, of course). If we think about the students at this local high school, where:

 

• 15% of students are Black,
• 45% of students are Hispanic, and 
• 18+ % of students identify as Other-than-white,

 

… then who is The Hate U Give introducing new, “unfamiliar” concepts to? Certainly not the students, who ARE primarily Black and Hispanic. The idea of being a BIPOC and attending a school with dominantly white-centered systems is not an unfamiliar concept to the students of the local high school I worked for. So, for whom are these concepts “unfamiliar?”

The answer: The teachers– the instructors, educators, other professionals attending the professional development meetings– who did not challenge themselves to discuss what it is like, to teach a book about Black students as a white instructor. The Hate U Give is not being used by educators to consider how our own notions of familiar/unfamiliar can be critically thought through.

To Question Our Pedagogies

Listen. PD meetings happened on Wednesdays, the middle of the work week. They happened after school, and we weren’t paid additionally for staying outside of our scheduled hours. Most of the time, each meeting centered a specific department or type of faculty, and if that wasn’t you, they were not necessarily enriching enough to feel “worth sticking around for.” I wholeheartedly understand the tug to disassociate as soon as that 2:17 pm bell blares.

But maybe we’re wasting time on the wrong questions! Instead of asking, how do we bring a diverse classroom to our students? Why aren’t we asking, “Am I challenging myself as much as I am challenging my students?”

We may be the experts on pedagogy, on curriculum, on class activities, on teaching. But we’re students in the field of diversity just the same. And we should act like it! 

At the local high school I worked for, I wonder how our conversations could have developed if our teachers shifted their perspectives from “How do these readings expose my students to diversity?,” to “How do these readings expose my classroom to diversity?” We are part of that classroom, too.po

As Baker-Bell describes, our experiences with language cannot be separated from our experiences with race (2). If the language we as educators are using is nestled safely in the familiarity of whiteness, then how are we supposed to emulate scholarship and growth to our students? The readings we choose should cause us to reflect, too. We need to be making the “unfamiliar, familiar,” but we also need to scrutinize what is “familiar” and look at it in new ways. It shouldn’t just be our students carrying the work toward a diverse classroom; educators have their place in this familiar/unfamiliar binary, too.