We can't teach what we don't know: White teachers ...

Multicultural Education Review

ISSN: 2005-615X (Print) 2377-0031 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rmer20

We can’t teach what we don’t know: White teachers, multiracial schools Gang Zhu To cite this article: Gang Zhu (2017): We can’t teach what we don’t know: White teachers, multiracial schools, Multicultural Education Review To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/2005615X.2017.1383814

Published online: 24 Oct 2017.

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Date: 24 October 2017, At: 08:32

Multicultural Education Review, 2017 https://doi.org/10.1080/2005615X.2017.1383814

BOOK REVIEW

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We can't teach what we don't know: White teachers, multiracial schools (3rd edition), by G. R. Howard, New York, Teachers College Press, 2016, p. 224, $26.31, (paperback), ISBN-13: 978-0807757314 In this national acclaimed book, Gary Howard insightfully examines the intricate reasons underlying the widespread racial and cultural mismatch between White teachers and coloured students in urban schools. Specifically, Howard mainly draws upon racial identity development lens to map the journey of White educators’ identity development. To dismantle the white dominance in multicultural schools and further facilitate social justice, Howard proposes the transformatist pedagogy to the ‘unfinished work’: to be a transformatist educator by constructing authentic White transformatist identity. Initially, Howard invoked his personal stories related to the antiracist identity transformation by breaking the ‘cultural encapsulation’ he was enmeshed in since his childhood period. He also shared his rich professional development experiences in fostering authentic white identity in the form of research and workshops. After many years of ‘dancing of racial diversity’ (p. 30), Howard reflected that this adventure is a choreography that will transcend the limitations of the past rhetoric and best intentions. Co-currently, Howard pinpointed that White social dominance is achieved through the minimal group paradigm, social positionality, privilege and penalty. Furthermore, Howard decoded that the methodologies of dominance include disease, warfare, land theft, religion, missionaries and bureaucrats. The embedded complication here is that White educators, like fish immersed in the normalcy of water, have been swimming unaware in the medium of the White dominance. Thus, only when White teachers continually re-examine their racial identities, will they have real and in-depth conversations on social healing and justice. To better understand White identity development, Howard foregrounded White identity development stage. The first phase is abandonment of a racist identity, which entails contact, disintegration and reintegration. The second phase is establishment of a non-racist White identity, which incorporates pseudo-independence, immersion-emersion and autonomy. The implication of this theoretical construct is that it provides us a model of identity chronology, although it cannot be precisely applied to each person. Against this multicultural educational backdrop, the White identity development construct provides an avenue for White educators to reflect their ‘ways of being white’, i.e. the fundamentalist White identity. In this lens, Howard summarized that the system of White dominance is reinforced through the interaction of three powerful dynamics: the assumption of rightness, the luxury of ignorance and the legacy of privilege. Simultaneously, these three mechanisms collectively serve as the ‘deeper causes’ to the perpetual educational inequities in ways that favour the privileged position and continuing power of White people. In Howard’s viewpoint on the present school reform, the corporate reformers have an unquestioned assumption of rightness regarding the appropriateness of their particular approach to school change. A telling example is that many school reformers narrow learning and evaluation to standardized tests and take them for granted. The luxury of ignorance means that the reformers have seldom invited educators to have direct influences on the design and implementation of school reform efforts. To combat this negative reality, Howard advocated that school reformers


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should incorporate stakeholders such as teachers and parents who have actual experiences getting involved in school reforms. Finally, the legacy of privilege has allowed those school districts that serve predominantly White and economically advantaged populations to remain relatively untouched by the school reform mandates and the punitive consequences for failure to comply. Consequently, this situation continues to disproportionately and deleteriously impact the marginalized groups. Howard concluded that these dynamics of dominance are perpetuated in school reforms in the form of race-based educational disparities, which enormously have contributed to the current academic achievement gap. To tackle the aforementioned problem, Howard noted that since White teachers occupy the great majority of teacher workforce in this nation, it is pressing for White teachers to become transformatist educators by developing their authentic transformatist racial identities. In order to facilitate the growth of transformatist White identity, Howard stated that White teachers need to commit to three arenas: (1) Race matters; (2) Change begins with us; (3) Teaching is a calling, not just a job. Intriguingly, Howard proposed the achievement triangle to visually represent three dimensions of knowing that are necessary for White teachers to function well in many culturally and racially diverse educational settings. The first dimension ‘knowing my practice’ entails that White teachers need to align a set of professional knowledge including curriculum, pedagogy, and cross-cultural communication to the development of students with diverse backgrounds. Meanwhile, this task is challenging and thus it requires lifetime long efforts. The second dimension is ‘knowing myself’, which has been paid little attention right now. In the perspective of Howard, ‘knowing myself’ is perhaps one of the most critical factors in determining White teachers’ effectiveness in multiracial schools. The reason is that the more often White teachers examine their experiences related to race, cultural and differences, the less likely that they will consciously or unconsciously expose themselves to coloured students by ignorance or racial dominance. The third dimension is ‘knowing my students’, which is similar to students’ funds of knowledge (González, Moll, & Amanti, 2005). This arena of knowing includes students’ culture, family background, learning style and personalities. However, from Howard’s standpoint, this aspect of knowing is complex and is hard to reach the full capacity. To better deal with the achievement triangle, Howard offered three points of intersection which function as doorway connecting the three dimensions of knowing: rigour, relationship and responsiveness. Rigor means being relentless in our belief in our students’ capacity to learn and equally vigilant in improving our capacity to teach. Relationship is about building authentic professional relationship with students through the sense of connection. Finally, responsiveness has to do with teachers’ capacity to know and connect with the actual living experiences, personhood, and learning modalities of the students who are in the classroom. At the end of the book, Howard argued that the journey to become a White transformatist educator is rustic and bumpy. More importantly, White educators alone cannot achieve the goal of educational equity. As the saying goes well, if you want to go fast, travel alone; if you want to go further, travel together. Accordingly, White educators need to be immersed in a co-responsible community of supports with a richly diverse group of peers, mentors and allies. Gradually, each group of educators will cross the borders of their own particular group identities and reach the heightened land of multicultural consciousness, a place from which we nurture and sustain our vision of educational and social change. In Howard’s word, this process is a persistent and collective commitment to La Tierra Transformativa and E Pluribus Unum – the multicultural space of vision, healing and positive change where we will inhabit. Howard poignantly argued the ‘fierce urgency of now’ to cultivate the transformatist racial identity and become a transformatist educator which is different from the traditional approach to addressing multicultural teacher education issues. In his book, Howard elaborated the developmental stage of White identity, the perpetuating mechanics of ‘being white’, the achievement


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triangle and the transformatist pedagogy that ensued. All these theoretical constructs surpass the superficial ‘Heroes and Holidays’ approach in multicultural education. Along with Howard’s personal racial identity transformation stories, this book persuasively takes the reviewer to a complex and demanding journey towards a transformatist educator. Essentially, education is a political enterprise (Apple, 1982, 1990). In this vein, education is value-laden and it involves a recurring process of racial negotiation. However, traditionally White educators treat students from minority groups as ‘other people’s children’ (Delpit, 1988, 1997). Consequently, most White teachers are colour-blind. As Freire (1968/1998) said that if there is no a sense of identity, there can be no real struggle. Following this line, the transformation of identities is crucial for educators, especially for White ones. The journey involves many aspects of fundamental changes such as deep belief on racism, multiculturalism and sexism. More in-depth, compared with some traditional technical approach to dealing with social justice such as minority cultural appreciation, the authentic transformatist identity is more profound. Up to now, the identity transformation is still ‘unfinished work’ and it requires us to build the collective capacity to dismantle White dominance and further facilitate social justice. Admittedly, the author highlights the chronology of White identity development and the achievement triangle. However, the author failed to acknowledge the influence of the multiple contexts on the construction of authentic transformatist identity and the cultivation of transformatist educators, especially in the lens of knowledge communities (Craig, 1995; Olson & Craig, 2001). The fundamental change of racial identity cannot be achieved alone without the interactions of the bounded contexts and educators’ knowledge. Research reveals that there is a dynamic triangulation relationship between identity, context and knowledge (Zhu, 2017). In this vein, the author did not adequately address the contribution of context and knowledge to the White identity shifting and the ensuing culturally relevant pedagogy. Another source of criticism is that when the author discussed the dimension of knowing my students, he did not incorporate students’ community cultural wealth (Yosso, 2005; Yosso & García, 2007), which is different from the traditional Bourdieuean approach to theorizing social and cultural capital. By drawing on critical race theory, Yosso (2005) incorporated six forms of capital such as aspirational, navigational, social, linguistic, familial and resistant capital into community cultural wealth. Yosso’s innovative conceptualization has been widely cited in research related to cultural diversity and multicultural education. If the author had included this persuasive construct in his book, he would have more eloquently addressed how to shift the deficit views of coloured students to acknowledge the multiple strengths of the communities of colour. Overall, Howard’s book provides us more inner side of teacher education in multiracial and multicultural settings. Much of the research Howard offered is invisible and thus, many White educators take them for granted for long time. However, arguably, these constructs provide us a lens to analysing the past and present social inequality. In addition, these constructs will act as catalysts for us to adopt transformatist pedagogy in the increasingly multicultural classroom settings, which will make our teaching more contextual and culturally responsive (Gay, 2010). In another perspective, Howard’s book also offers the rational for us to engage in a culturally relevant pedagogy (Ladson-Billings, 1995).

Funding This writing project is funded by College of Education and Human Development, Texas A&M University, USA.

References Apple, M. (1982). Education and power. Boston, MA: Ark Paperbacks. Apple, M. (1990). Ideology and curriculum (2nd ed.). New York City, NY: Routledge & Kegan Paul.


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Craig, C. J. (1995). Knowledge communities: A way of making sense of how beginning teachers come to know in their professional knowledge contexts. Curriculum Inquiry, 25, 151–175. Delpit, L. (1988). The silenced dialogue: Power and pedagogy in educating other people’s children. Harvard Educational Review, 58, 280–299. Delpit, L. D. (1997). Other people’s children: Cultural conflict in the classroom. New York City, NY: The New Press. Freire, P. (1968/1998). Pedagogy of the oppressed (Rev. ed.). New York City, NY: Continuum. Gay, G. (2010). Culturally responsive teaching: Theory, research, and practice. New York City, NY: Teachers College Press. González, N., Moll, L., & Amanti, C. (2005). Funds of knowledge: Theorizing practices in households, communities and classrooms. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). Toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy. American Educational Research Journal, 32, 465–491. Olson, M. R., & Craig, C. J. (2001). Opportunities and challenges in the development of teachers’ knowledge: The development of narrative authority through knowledge communities. Teaching and Teacher Education, 17, 667–684. Yosso, T. J. (2005). Whose culture has capital? A critical race theory discussion of community cultural wealth. Race Ethnicity and Education, 8, 69–91. Yosso, T., & García, D. (2007). “This Is No Slum!”: A critical race theory Analysis of community cultural wealth in culture clash’s Chavez Ravine. Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, 32 (1), 145–179. Zhu, G. (2017). “Traditional teaching method still holds water.” Narrative inquiry of student teachers’ professional identities at the intersections of teacher knowledge and subject matter knowledge. In G. Chan, D. Keyes, & V. Ross (Eds.), Intersections of teacher knowledge and subject matter knowledge: Narrative approaches at the crossroads of the classroom (pp. 225-247). Bingley: Emerald Group Publishing. doi: 10.1108/S1479-368720160000028018

Gang Zhu Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, USA [email protected] © 2017 Gang Zhu https://doi.org/10.1080/2005615X.2017.1383814