Strand 2 tbts: Role of Self

Role of Self: Thinking Behind the Strand

Develops an on-going critical awareness of one’s self and establishes a critically aware teaching presence in the classroom to teach for equity.

Coming to know who we are as human beings and as teachers is an on-going and never-ending process. As teachers, we strive to continually examine, with a critical eye, our teaching identity and consider the ways in which who we are impacts how and what we teach as well as how we are perceived by our students, their families, and our colleagues.

Examine your own lenses

Our own identities and experiences shape the ways we see and understand others and the world around us. Just like when you put on a pair of tinted sunglasses, you are aware that the world did not darken, but that you are wearing lenses that alter what you see. Our gender, racial, ethnic, linguistic, religious, and socio-economic identities all color and frame what we see of the world and how we see it. We must take the time to, first, recognize the lenses through which we view and interpret the world around us and, second, question how our lenses alter what we see and understand.

Check your assumptions

One story among the teacher candidates sounds like this:

I grew up in a tiny unincorporated town in rural WI. Everyone I knew was white. It wasn’t until I got to the U of M that I met someone who didn’t look like me. Once I arrived on campus though, I realized there were all kinds of things I didn’t know. As a teacher, I recognize that every year, I have more work to do unlearning my assumptions and biases and getting to know my students. I can’t generalize about any of them or I’m in trouble. Each individual kid brings their own story to the classroom. It’s worth the time to get to know those stories.

It is this questioning of our identities and experiences that informs the way we see and understand the world and leads us to a process of checking our assumptions. The more we unpack our understandings and interpretations of the world, the more we start to question the validity of those assumptions. This is a critical task for us as teachers, because every child deserves to be known as a whole and complex, unique individual, and not simply as a member of a sub-group, neighborhood, or category. If we base our educational decisions on assumptions we make of students, families, or their communities, we can negatively impact our students’ sense of self-worth, their learning, and their educational opportunities.

Establishing a teaching presence

We must also examine the ways in which our students read us, as teachers, and our many identities. Who we are, how our students identify us and place us within larger systems of power and hierarchy, impacts our teaching. As teachers, we must all learn to establish a commanding teaching presence, grounded in mutual respect, a commitment to educational equity, and relentless determination that all students can learn. This can only happen if we have a strong sense of our own identity as a person with a history and set of experiences that shape our understanding of the world, as a person who is also being read by others through their assumptions and desires, and as a teacher who is committed to providing an equitable and meaningful learning experience for our students.

For example, an alum of the UMN social studies program draws a connection between her skin color and considerations she makes when teaching U.S. history: “I know as a white woman, when I teach the history of slavery in the United States, my students hear my words, my descriptions, my judgments of the texts we examine and the questions we raise differently than they might if I were African American. That awareness pushes me to think carefully about how to teach this unit, so that it’s clear that am an ally for justice and fairness.”

The ways our students read us impacts our classroom management choices as well. Another middle school teacher explains, “I’m a big guy, 6’4”. My cooperating teacher is this smaller woman, maybe 5’2”. Her classroom management style has everything to do with her physical size and her gender. She has to be fierce in a way that I might not.” These examples show us that our presence in the classroom is complex and our teaching will be shaped by who we are and how others respond to the presence we bring into the classroom.

Taking a critical inquiry stance

Critical inquiry as a stance sees equity (and liberation) as the goal of education and encourages us to locate the political implications of education. If we view education as being political, we see that particular decisions and traditions are based in power structures that confer privilege to some groups and systematically disadvantage others. Moving toward equity based teaching requires taking a critical inquiry stance (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2009) in order to actively examine biases, attitudes, and orientations that create multiple and intersecting oppressions and violences in our society.

A critical inquiry stance also contextualizes micro and macro contexts, power structures, complicated histories, and emotional/embodied intensities, social location, and relational positioning in one’s practice. Think of these as the some of the lenses that we wear when we interpret the world. Critical inquiry acknowledges the enduring systemic racism within schools along with the processes of racialization and histories of exploitation, domination, and oppression that still affect the lives of students of color today. Through critical inquiry, we can explicitly engage with, listen to, and understand others in ways that resist giving in to dominant narratives, allow us to perceive differently, develop counter-narratives, and create the promise of transformation in our classrooms and schools.

Critical inquiry should not be regarded as an isolated or abstracted activity that a teacher does occasionally. It is also not about taking up a hyper-aggressive or destructive position to evaluating others’ knowledge and language. Rather, critical inquiry is a reflexive and ongoing investigative process that carefully and humbly interprets our role as educators and the changing contexts, activities, and processes we engage in to facilitate reciprocal and transformative change for more ethical possibilities in the world.