Reading the World: Men of Color and Education Panel

Reflection:

While I sat in Avery Fisher Hall in Lincoln Center listening to the above panel, my mind kept drifting back to the ideas and themes that we were discussing in 5037.  I was also reading the world and attuned to the organizational culture of Teach For America.  This is an organization that I have been a part of since 2004, but have not been active in since I was a corps member in 2006, and never outside of New Orleans.  This gap in time and the new knowledge and perspective that graduate school has added, allowed me to "make the familiar strange" in my analysis of TFA.  I was struck by the professionalism and corporate feel of the event, it was very high profile.  The sponsorship of the event by large corporations, State Farm and FedEx was overt.  This caused me to reflect on what views and assumptions about public education and capitalism were hidden in the discourse of this event.  

The sold out crowd filled the seats with predominantly young educators of color (I was able to tell they were educators by their conversations).  All moderators and participants in the panel were individuals of color as well. There was an energy in the room that was palpable as we began.  When the panel finally began, the moderator asked the crowd to repeat back (and made us do it twice because our energy wasn't high enough the first time) "IT'S ON TONIGHT!"  I thought back to the panel that I had attended at Teachers College with Arne Duncan earlier this year, and how different it had felt.    

Much of the content of the panel was fascinating; Dr. Pedro Noguera exposed that black males are often read by the public as "repositories of violence."  There was a discussion of how easy it is to leave a school, but how difficult it is to get in.  This was in reference to the metal detectors and security at the entrance, but the ease of cutting class and dropping out.  Dr. Marc Lamont Hill spoke about some of the practices that he believes are most effective with African American boys.  He recommended a discipline style of the "warm demander" and said that a multi-voice classroom which allowed for more "calling out" had been showed to be promising.  

I chose to include some of my thoughts from this evening at Lincoln Center for two reasons.  First, I think that this was one of my first experiences in which I was consciously "reading the world" in the moment that it was occurring.  I was using critical analysis to help me make visible some of the organizational and cultural nuances of the event.  Secondly, the content of what was shared caused me to ask, given my positionality, how I can I be the best teacher of African American boys possible.  The evening brought to light the reality for me that there are certain things that I simply cannot provide for the boys of color in my classes.  I made a commitment to try and help facilitate relationships with more role models for my boys with men of color in the community.  In this case, it took seeing myself, my culture, my limitations to be able to more fully provide for the needs of my students.