Sometimes We Need it Explained Like We're Five.

To be perfectly honest, Armstrong and Wildman’s article, unlike much of what we have read so far this semester, was difficult for me to connect with. I’m thinking it was a mix of the highfalutin language and (admittedly) waiting until Monday evening for a perusal of a very complex text; but as I was reading through, I kept coming back to an old adage: “You don’t understand something unless you can explain it simply.” I found myself wanting, as a reader (and educator who wanted the golden nugget of information to incorporate into my classroom instruction), that simple explanation of how “colorblindness is the new racism” and how to use the “antidote” of “Color Insight” to solve our problems. I was left with this feeling until I read through Kevin Roose’s article on Black Lives Matter (more specifically, GreekAesthete’s ELI5 post).  

 

I don’t think that there is ever a simple explanation, so we need Armstrong and Wildman to bring out the big guns and expand our lexicons by sending us to the dictionary to understand how multiculturalism and diversity studies are vulnerable to “corporate usurpation” and “over-particularization” (68). Despite the inaccessibility of much of the language, there are several merits to the article. Unlike Johnson and Delpit, Armstrong and Wildman provide meaningful and practical exercises to apply to the classroom to help students move towards color insight. The “racial observation exercise”, for example, is an excellent opportunity for students to be mindful, reflective, and productive observers (69). I think it might be a challenge to modify the exercise for a high school class, especially for, say, my classroom with a highly-structured special education setting, but it’s refreshing to get practical ideas for instruction. 

As with everything we have covered in class, I am constantly working towards incorporating it into my classroom to make me a better educator and my students more critical and reflective learners. While Armstrong and Wildman’s “dynamic postmodern Koosh ball” metaphor might not meet the needs of my group of learners, the ideas behind Reddit’s Explain Like I'm 5 do. Much of Reddit is NSFW or school, but there are many valid, applicable ideas that can be incorporated into and modified for class. If you’re not familiar with Reddit and its various subreddits, there are endless topic boards you can subscribe to follow. Many are unseemly (like much of The Internet in general), but others promote intellectual and informative discourse, such as ELI5 and TIL. ELI5 calls upon Redditors who have a comprehensive-enough understanding of a topic to explain it as if their audience were five years old. Every educator who has set foot in front of a classroom of young adults has found him or herself having to explain a concept to a group IN THE SIMPLEST TERMS POSSIBLE because for whatever reason (e.g. it’s Monday morning, they don’t care right now, they think you’re speaking a foreign language, etc.) it’s just not clicking. Much of Armstrong and Wildman didn’t click for me. Maybe I’m unwillingly and unwittingly (or “untwittingly”... wait for it...) falling into the mindset that information isn’t important unless it’s condensable into 140 characters or less. There is no way to boil down or "Twitterize" racism, colorblindness, and privilege. Still, I think about the ways we can affect the most change, both with our students and our peers, and there’s definitely merit in both the exhaustive and condensed responses.

First the Problems, now the Solutions: Oredola and the YIA Program

If Johnson and Delpit have articulated the problems of power and privilege, Oredola has proffered the solutions—at least viable ones for youths striving to be heard and affect change. 

In her article “A World Where Youth Hold the Power,” she addresses the issue of youths, especially youths in underprivileged districts, being excluded from the “arenas of influence” and demonstrates in four areas how they can move towards inclusion: 

1.) by promoting a new definition of “youth”

2.) by expecting youth and adults to grow together

3.) by regularly engaging in the practice of disagreement

4.) by focusing on learning and speaking truth even when it’s difficult or uncomfortable (49)

The Youth in Action (YIA) organization has striven to challenge the status quo of young people being relegated to the level of second-class citizens: as a kid, “it’s like you’re not even a person yet” (49). So often do we, as educators/adults/old people, dismiss the experience of adolescents and teenagers as being “phases.” We reflect back on our time in high school, see how “far” we’ve come since then, and chalk up our blunders to immaturity. Then we transfer that thinking to our students without considering the validity or relevance of their opinions, beliefs, or lifestyles. Often times adults and educators get hung up on the way they learned things as being the right way and get defensive and/or dismissive when the new generation thinks the “new” way. Our students and our children pick up on this and conclude that we just don’t feel that their experience is real, valid, or important. We need to grow and adapt as educators-- grow alongside our students-- otherwise we lose them and take one more step towards being that crotchety old coot admonishing the whippersnappers for their baggy pants and ridiculous haircuts. 

To avoid falling into that stereotype, we educators need to separate ourselves from stereotyping students. The suggestions from YIA for doing so, including the “Plus Delta Hot Seat” activity, involve placing equal amounts of accountability on students as on teachers (50). If we can’t grow through our support systems and feedback, how can we expect our students to?

Agitating for Change: Delpit’s “The Silent Dialogue: Power & Pedagogy in Educating Other People’s Children”

Perhaps what stood out to me the most as I read through the excerpt from Delpit’s Other People’s Children was a quote she pulled from the mother of a black student. The mother, frustrated with the “white liberal educators” who were pushing “dialect readers” in an effort to demonstrate their valuing of other cultures, exclaimed, “My kids know how to be black—you all teach them how to be successful in the white man’s world” (29). This quote, I feel, pulls together Delpit’s ideas about the “Silent Dialogue” and Johnson’s ideas of power and privilege. Those with privilege and power, especially once they’re made aware of it, must work to both enable those without privilege/power and mark and overcome gatekeeping points alongside students. 

What also stood out was Delpit's explanation of how explicit instruction to promote understanding the rules of the culture of power makes it easier to acquire a measure of that power. Knowing the rules—knowing how to live in the white man’s world—is one of the first steps in gaining the power and influence necessary to agitate for change. Knowing the rules is knowing how to play the game, and I often find myself uttering the phrase to my students, “Sometimes you just have to play the game,” when they become frustrated with their immediate lack of power. 

As a new(er) teacher that is the product of a 21^st century liberal education, I sometimes check myself on my use of power. One of the most profound memories I have of student teaching was issuing a test and watching all the students silently and intently work on their tests. In that moment I thought, “Holy s**t, they’re doing exactly what I want them to. It’s like I have control over them!” Reading through Delpit, I have a much firmer understanding of what that control means, where it comes from, and ideas on how to use it in an effort to bestow that control unto the hands of my students.