Katie Booth: Hi, everyone, thank you for joining me on
Multicultural Day 2021. My name is Dr. Katie
Booth and I teach in English department here at
Moorpark College. And I'm genuinely sorry not to
be able to present this work to you live or in
person. This is for reasons not related to Covid.
For those of you that don't know, I will tell you
in brief, I have Crohn's colitis, which is an
inflammatory bowel disease, and when it flares, it
ruins the good majority of my life. I am currently
in a flare, which is why I'm coming to you through
a recording. And frustrated though I am, I'm
really grateful to the Multicultural Day Committee
and team for finding a way to make my presentation
still proceed. And in thinking about this. I
realized that it was their empathy and their
understanding and their flexibility and their
creativity that enabled this to happen. And it
seemed fitting to open my presentation, which is
precisely about all of those aspects of humanity.
So without further ado about poo, let's begin,
Warning: This talk will be full of shameless
amounts of Disney puns and memes. Why? Because I
love Disney. I have never been ashamed of this
fact and have spent many hours since my childhood
debating the larger messages of Disney's animated
films from the seemingly innocuous Tinkerbells
series to the beautifully moving and inspiring
Coco to my current obsession Frozen 2. While I
completed my doctoral dissertation, I learned the
importance of taking the project where my heart
let it. For me that was straight into the rabbit
warren of popular culture. In learning to see the
literary world as reflective, or not, of the society
that produces it, I was able to make more
connections across time and texts than I thought I
could. And before I had that epiphany, I wasn't
able to envision the power that this work could
wield. I learned how to be metacognitive and the
importance of learning to think about my thinking
continues to inform every aspect of my
professional and personal life. I think it's
fairly safe to assume that everyone here believes
that education is a vehicle for transformation.
But it's less safe to assume that we all know how
to harness that system to truly work for all of us,
for our students, and especially historically and
currently marginalized learners and teach them to
do the same. This challenge informs every aspect
of my teaching, and I'm excited to share with you
some of my personal experiences with and research
into culturally responsive teaching and how I
believe this is the essential work that enables
educators to become allies for their students of
color, working in the spirit of equity to support
and empower students that have traditionally
comprised the most vulnerable populations of
learners. And I do this by using Disney. But wait,
I hear you crying. Disney was white. The bulk of
Disney movies feature white characters and white
Western stories. Surely a Disney themed course is
culturally insensitive and surely this work on
Multicultural Day is inappropriate. I hear you. I
really do. And I appreciate the questions. I hope
you'll bear with me. I promise that this talk is
not an opportunity for me to peddle the benefits
of whitewashing our work with our students. In
2013, the Walt Disney Company released Monsters
University, let me move that down, which was the
prequel to the 2001 Monsters Inc. My now, almost,
my gosh, nine-year-old daughter was one when we
first watched this movie. And as you can see, she
fell so deeply in love with it that she decided to
be its protagonist for Halloween that year. The
film also made quite an impact on me. In Monsters
University, audiences watch the educational
development of the heroes and villains of Monsters
Inc.. Specifically highlighting the journey of
Mike Wazowski the ambitious, determined,
ambulatory eyeball hell bent on becoming a
professional scarer when he grows up. Despite not
being classically scary, In Mike's world of
monsters, just trying to grow up, get through
school, find a job and live a fulfilled life, he
experiences a great deal of what I realized first
year students experience on their own journeys
towards similar outcomes, particularly students of
color. From elementary school to college, Mike
battles social prejudices and confronts head on
privileged, elitist icons of university life. From
terrifying deans to righteous teachers to classist
students who repeatedly tell him that he cannot
make it, that he doesn't belong, that he doesn't
have what it takes, and that he's simply not
enough to be what he aspires to be because of who
he was born as. But in true Disney fashion, Mike
wins out in the end, shattering core beliefs about
individuals and the academy and social values at
the same time. How can we not envision this world
of monsters as our own, one that perpetually and
unfailingly struggles to define and identify and
put into boxes every individual that it holds
within it, often to their detriment and over all
of our own. Two years after Monsters University,
Tony Wagner and Ted Dintersmith published Most Likely to
Succeed: Preparing Our Kids for the Innovation Era.
And that was in 2015 and the result of more than
10 years of research into the history and
evolution of American education systems. And in it,
they highlight the many ways that these systems
are no longer fit for purpose in the 21st century,
particularly interviewing millennials and
publishing their first hand accounts of jumping
through high school hoops to engage in more
sophisticated yet still circus-like rounds of hoop
jumping at prestigious American universities.
Wagner and Interest have built a strong case about
the failures of institutional education, citing
the outdated curriculum, the problematic test
industries, and the simple fact that the Academy
remains structured to support a largely outdated
industry and job sector. According to Wagner and
Dintersmith, university education simply cannot
deliver its promises to its students anymore. When
my children's remarkably innovative elementary
school hosted a viewing of the Most Likely to
Succeed documentary accompaniment to this book in
2015, I was there and my mind was well
and truly blown. I saw that Monsters University
was no longer just another beloved Disney film,
but rather a reflection of the challenge we
continue to set our contemporary learners of
succeeding in a broken, archaic system of college
education. Add to this discussion those about how
American education systems continue to reject, to
erase our students of color and well, how much
time do you have?
This talk is as much about education as it is
about empathy, and it feels right to share my own
story here in brief, I promise, and I want to make
some important connections between it and the work
that I do, the connections I made between my
academic experiences and those I watched and read
about in Monsters University and Most Likely to
Succeed, became the foundation of the class theme
I started teaching in my English 01a
composition courses here at Moorpark College. As
much as I struggled to excel in this same system
that often wasn't serving me, I was and continue
to be immensely privileged. I am white,
heterosexual, cis gender and while I lack
privilege in certain aspects of my life, I'm a
woman. I am Jewish. I live with a chronic disease.
I battled daily mental health conditions because
of my skin color. I have a voice that gets heard
and a visage that emerges consistently in
curricular systems. It's therefore my job to
actively de-center the whiteness of academic
systems I work within. And it just so happens I do
this with Disney. I always tell my students that
this current course, now in its fifth semester of
realization, was seven years in the making for me,
three years into tenure tracking, I completely
redesigned my freshman composition courses in
direct response to Assembly Bill 705. And
this was the mandate that requires all California
community colleges to allow students to begin
their English and math studies at transfer level.
This bill directly addresses the data that shows
how Black, Latino, Indigenous, Pacific Islander
and other students of color are disproportionately
impacted by conventional remedial course pathways.
In layman's terms, students of color have
historically spent more time taking classes that
don't count towards their transfer and thus
transfer less than white students do. I do not
belong to any of the disproportionately impacted
student groups. I can, however, empathize,
empathize with some of their experiences in very
small ways. I finished high school with a hard
earned three point four GPA, an abysmal 980
out of 1600 on my SATs.
Alongside a sometimes debilitating anxiety and
eating disorder, I miraculously got into one
university, UC Santa Barbara. Out of the three
that I applied to, I was admitted as a pre biology
major, which I pretended to be for exactly one
quarter, during which I struggled to barely pass
my classes and knowing full well I would not
academically survive in their next levels. I
distinctly remember telling my high school
classmates about my acceptance to UCSB and being
met with disbelief because I had gained an
acceptance when they did not, despite their
markedly better GPA, test scores and
extracurricular resumes. Those conversations
unnerved me so much that I carried copies of my
acceptance letter with me wherever I went in my
freshman year. I also had copies on hand in my
dorm room just in case somebody questioned my
presence there. When I successfully persisted
through my undergraduate education, became an
English major. I prepared for graduate studies
mostly because I didn't know what else to do. Yet
again, I managed to gain a single acceptance, this
one to Loyola Marymount University, where I earned
my master's in English literature. Finally,
finding my place in the world of English studies,
I confidently applied to 14 PhD programs across
the US when it was finished at Moorpark sorry,
Loyola Marymount, and I was confident at that
point that my three point nine GPA might outweigh
my still subpar GRE test scores. I earned
entrance into exactly none of the universities I
applied to, and for twenty four hours I didn't do
much more than cry and rage at the injustice and
then committed myself to believing that I wasn't a
true academic, that I couldn't make it in these
programs or institutions because I wasn't one of
those kinds of people. Oh, this was also the point
at which my anxiety tipped over into major
depressive disorder, which made the rejection feel
profoundly worse. But after some life changing
faculty intervention from the one Jewish professor
at the Loyola Marymount English Department, I was
encouraged to research other ways to achieve my
goal, which involve confronting parts of my
identity that I hadn't before wanted to wrestle
with. After few weeks of dedicated research and
writing, I applied to 13 British PhD programs at
universities across England to research a once
popular but now forgotten 19th century Anglo
Jewish authoress. This time I received 12
acceptance letters, and in 2010, I graduated from
the University of London with a PhD in English
literature specialising in nineteenth century
British historical romances and the ways in which
the fears about Judaism's Jews and Jewish bodies
threat to the white supremacy culture in this
period across the UK and America was mitigated by
Jewish women writers. Ironically or not, the
jury's out. It was my engagement with my mental
illness and racial and ethnic identity that
enabled me to achieve my academic and professional
goals and also to heal. I genuinely believe that my
experience of studying a generalized human as a
woman that intersects mainstream and minority
culture informs everything I do in my classrooms.
From my choice of materials, to my interaction with
students. And it's why I believe I focused my work
and truly my life on offering alliance through
empathy to my students that need it most. Over the
years, I have accumulated 15 years of middle
school through college teaching experience both in
England and California, and I'm finally able to
look back at my journey as reflective of a flawed
education system. For a long time, I thought the
problem was me. Sure, I ultimately worked it, but
I had the advantage of my whiteness to bolster my
success, even at my lowest times. It's also very
easy for me to bury my Jewishness under my
whiteness, to bury my depression, under my joy and
my eating disorder under exercise and diet. And
I'm guilty of doing all of these things when the
circumstances have suited. There are so many
others out there that do not or cannot or will not.
And in many ways, therefore, the larger impetus
behind being the professor that I am is to help
students to see themselves as valuable, essential
and successful and most definitely not reducible
to a test score or a rejection letter. Teaching
English at community colleges, in my opinion, the
best place to do just this, while we at the same
time help to fill in the gaps that Disney and
Wagner and Dintersmith reveal to be more than
just potholes on the bumpy road of academic life.
This is the space in which I believe educators
evolve from instructor to ally through the
acquisition, use and teaching of empathy, which
emerges from shared experiences of being human.
And it's this evolution that enables us to
champion racial and cultural equity for all of our
students.
Edwards Said in his seminal work, Orientalism,
published in 1978, explains that
the West has consistently designated the East as
Other. And this concept of othering and otherness
is important to discussions about racial and
cultural intelligence to the social justice
reckoning America continues to confront. I know
that Walt Disney was white and that the bulk of
the material from his company has been equally so.
And I think this explains in so many ways some of
the racist and anti-Semitic propaganda that
emerged from the company in the 40s and 50s and
even as recent as the 90s. But that's a talk for
another time. For now, I'm more interested here in
other animated films that appeared on the screens
to much less acclaim, at least at first. Take the
2002 film Lilo and Stitch. I'll bet that not
everyone here is familiar with this one or as
familiar with it as they are with Frozen Beauty
and the Beast, Cinderella and all the other
princess films the franchise is best known for. In
Lilo and Stitch, the audience gains a window into
the life of Pacific Islanders, Hawaiians,
particularly as Lilo and her sister Nani,
struggle to remain together after their parents
die. They're forced to navigate the failure of
their community to take care of their needs in a
culturally sensitive way. Nani, 19, is left to
care for her seven-year-old sister, Lilo. This
means she has to work to earn enough for them to
survive and look after her sister. Most of the
time, their life is a disaster, but their core
value is that of Ohana. And I quote from the film
Ohana means family. Family means nobody gets left
behind or forgotten. This value drives Nani's
determination to keep her sister out of the foster
system despite her inability to care for Lilo or
herself. That system does not hold the same value
that they do, and so this little and broken family
is at odds with it until an alien creature helps
everyone see a way forward together with Nani and
Lilo's family emerging as a protected entity by
all sides. I have learned that family is the heart
of success as well as productive struggle, much as
is the case in this film. And I was raised with
the belief and practice that Disney is family. So
in bringing together my experience of ohana and
classrooms in America and England, I have always
imagined my classroom communities as families. And
I use this connection to build on the premise of
heart being home and tapping into what is deeply
entrenched in American experiences, the Disney
phenomenon and industry, and being the machine
that it is, Disney is constantly updating its
offerings and they are becoming quite taken with
exploring more prominently all of those others
that are so fully, truly part of everything we all
are.
I believe that allies use their privilege to make
visible what has been rendered invisible, and I
pulled blinders off white and marginalized
students through the seemingly innocuous Disney
animation that we use. And these texts enable
anyone to enter a whole new world and explore why
and how they haven't been able to see themselves.
In 2016, Disney and Pixar released
Zootopia, and much to my delight, I found it a
powerful, race centric extension of Monsters
University. In this film, the main protagonist
dreams, big dreams and like Mike Wazowski in
Monsters University, she's mocked and dismissed
because of who she biologically is a bunny. Just
by looking at her, others believe she isn't good
enough, big enough, strong enough to become a
police officer. And like Mike, Judy succumbs to a
few moments of self-doubt and emotional lows. But
these ultimately mobilize rather than derail her
from pursuing her ultimate goal of joining the
police force. Notably, the presentation of
institutional education in this film is
overwhelmingly negative, and the bullying and
abuse she experiences is justified because the
system and its educators believe that these are
the best ways to prepare cadets for policing in
the real world. I believe that this image from the
film that summarizes the harrowing experience Judy
has at the Zootopia Police Academy gives a
snapshot of the many inequities our students of
color face in the education systems. With Judy as
the symbol of these students, the ice walls get
bigger and more slippery when we factor in the
fact that students of color are disproportionately
placed in special education classes during their K
through 12 experiences. Think about the many
issues with SATs and other standardized tests
and how it's very easy to buy your way through
them. Think about access to AP and IB classes and
bias against community college enrollment. How can
Judy, symbolically our most vulnerable student
populations compete, let alone succeed in a system
built for those completely unlike her and which
actively discourage her success? She can't, not
unless things change. I want to play a clip from
the film for you.
And anyone could be anything. Turns out your
life's a little bit more complicated than a slogan
on a bumper sticker. Real life is messy. We all have
limitations. We all make mistakes, which means hey
glass half full, we all have a lot in common. And
the more we try to understand one another, the more
exceptional, each of us will be.
But we have to try. So no matter what type of animal
you are, from the biggest elephant to our first fox.
I implore you, try. Try to make the world a
better place. Look inside yourself and recognize that
change starts with you.
it starts with me.
It starts with all of us.
Stil get emotional, and I've seen it so many
times, change does truly start with educators. It
needs to be done. As creator of the Framework for
Systemic Racial Equity Transformation, Glen
Singleton emphasizes urgently and radically.
Yes, understandably.
The other barriers to student success,
particularly for students of color, include bias
that informs classroom progress. And the antidote
to this is culturally responsive pedagogy. And the
best part of this approach to teaching and
learning is that it helps all students succeed,
whereas a lot of current practices only help some
students because many of us teach in the spirit of
our favorite teachers and are the product of a
system built on systemic racism, there are many
things we don't know that we don't know. Now we
know better. And it's time to embrace the suck,
lean into the struggle and Brene Brown all over
the system. I cannot recommend highly enough
Zaretta Hammon's work on culturally responsive pedagogy
and brain function. When she spoke at a California
Acceleration Project conference two years ago, I
was riveted. I laughed. I cried. I nodded so
hard, I morphed into a bubble head. And the best
part is that the concept she builds upon is simple
and familiar. We have to understand and protect
hearts to educate heads, exactly the premise that
informs my pedagogical values. One of her most
powerful metaphors illustrating this point is the
culture tree iterated in many forms in recent
pedagogy. You've probably seen it as the iceberg.
By understanding, she argues, where our cultural
values influence us at the deep the roots, shallow
the trunk or surface the leaves level of our day
to day existences we can build on what students
come to us innately awesome at and show them how
to capitalize on their existing strengths as they
hone and learn new ones, rather than threaten
their cultural and emotional roots, trunks and
leaves. Because of stereotype threat, students of
color often don't come to school feeling very good
about very much. And it's these simple shifts in
an instructor's approach that can make all the
difference to them. The fundamental take away from
Hammond's work about culturally responsive
teaching is its focus on evolving students from
being dependent learners to becoming independent
ones. And this means that we're not only focusing
on diversifying our learning materials or that
we're only using our classrooms to explore
microcosms of our world. We're teaching students
how to use the essence that defines them to
advocate for their learning and their lives. In
order to be truly independent learners, students
need skills that are compatible with their values.
Teachers must show them how to celebrate and use
their hearts and their heads. And they have to
give students practice in engaging in productive
struggle so that they construct new neural
pathways and quite literally grow their
intelligence. This isn't just about implementing
growth mindset. It's about showing students that
they can defy stereotype threat, implicit bias and
other racial injustices that threaten to get in
their way. One of the most powerful metaphors in
pedagogy supporting how to empower students is
what James Nottingham imagines as the learning pit.
Contrary to popular belief, educators aren't meant
to throw their students in there, wish them luck,
put their feet up and sit back and watch. No, our
job is to lead students to their individual pits,
which are different for every student, and ensure
that they have all the equipment they need to
survive in them before gently pushing them in.
Watching them navigate a host of tools, offering
help when they need it, and ultimately celebrating
their emergence from them through collaboration
and on their own with classmates and instructors.
And it's what happens in the pit that is most
important. This is the time in which productive
struggle happens. Students reflect on, try out and
ultimately solve the problem of getting out of the
pit. And they have to rely on what they know and
how they go about using that knowledge to get out.
Sometimes they emerge autonomously. Other times
they emerge through the help of peers, instructors
and support services. All the time they emerge and
they do so because they independently make
decisions that allow them to resurface. Even
better is that there's no one way for them to do
this. What this means for instructors is that we
now need to rethink our learning activities and
assessments, embracing a wide variety of
opportunities and ways to allow students to
demonstrate competency and mastery that
capitalizes on their innate cultural strengths.
The ways that students are encouraged to struggle
on their own and with each other is the process of
moving from dependent to independent learning
cognitive wobbles, as James Nottingham calls them.
And these involved evolve into Eureka moments
which are equally important. I'm going to show you
just a very brief clip from his work.
James Nottingham: How does it feel if you've really been struggling
with something and then you eventually get it?
It's great, isn't it? It's that Eureka feeling. I was
presenting in Sweden two or three years ago and I
use this example as a Eureka moment, at which
point this woman in the audience jumped up and she
says, I just got married. I'm really happy
for you, love. She says I just got married to a
Greek man, but I thought we got Shirly Valentine in the audicen what is she going on about? So she said now I just
got married to a Greek man and so I've been learning Greek and Eureka
is Greek, for I found it. I thought to myself, I
bet you have. But I didn't mention that the Swedes
don't get innuendo. But I found it. It doesn't
mean Natalie the navigator got me to the answer
It doesn't mean my teacher gave me the
answer. It means I found it. And how good does
that feel?
Dr. Booth: It feels very good for sure.
It's shifts like these in our thinking as educators
that shift the entire paradigm of teaching and
learning, moving closer towards equitable,
empowering classrooms for all of our learners. And
this is where Disney and my heart family dynamic
enters the classroom.
Rather than learn from Disney
and the various pedagogical materials I engage
with, I bring students into the classroom so that
students can learn about the systems that they
have to navigate from the inside out and not just
acquire the skills that academics deem essential
knowledge.
Here are my courses, key points, topics and goals.
I use a variety of student learning activities
designed to accommodate the increasingly diverse
classroom of learners comprising our English
composition classrooms. And I'm going to give you
a detailed account of how I implement them. At the
heart of everything we do is empathy. They need to
be gentle and understanding with themselves as
much as with others in order to grow as English
students and as humans. Spring boarding from four
recent Disney Pixar films. My zero textbook cost
classes invite students to enter without barriers.
They explore contemporary American understandings
of institutional, cultural and personal education
experiences while acquiring and practicing growth
mindset and academic habits of mind reading and
writing skills and critical thinking capacity. By
reframing my role as a composition instructor into
one that is also focused on being a good host as
well as ally, I've shaped a class that offers
students high challenge, high support and high
interest activities that are, above all,
humanizing both of myself and of the academic
process for my students. On the first day of the
semester, when I teach on ground, I adopt a
practice that my daughter's elementary school uses,
which comes from the program called Responsive
Classroom. I stand at or outside my classroom door
and welcome each student individually as they walk
into the classroom. And yes, I get a lot of looks.
In my online asynchronous classes, this activity
has had to evolve and in its place is an
introductory discussion forum on which I comment
on every student's post individually and in depth,
meeting and greeting them, engaging with what
they've shared, drawing up connections between us
and so on. In my Zoom office hours, I begin every
meeting with something that has to do with what I
can observe about them from their zoom-in location
or draw out something from that initial discussion
post or email exchange. My first priority in
everything I do with my students is to connect
with them through empathy as a human. In Unit one,
we lay the foundation for our course, themes and
workings, we look at college level study habits of
mind and so on. And by working with the concept of
definition, students aren't threatened by the need
to assert their perspective right away. And their
first work is very personal based upon their
experience of the definitions that they are aware
of. And this is a theme I carry with me through
every unit. I scaffold the development of the
unique voices through a number of activities in
which they engage with the material and their own
experiences, gradually gaining confidence in the
exercise of their voice and opinions in a
carefully monitored discussion forum setting as
we're online so that everyone feels safe.
Everything they do in this unit earns full credit.
I'll get to the grading later. And their first
essay always ends with a comment, something along
the lines of this. This is an original, exciting
exploration of education from your perspective. I
appreciate your sharing these experiences with me
and enjoyed the vivid details offered about your
personal history. Build on these strengths as you
continue to learn about expository writing at the
college level. I'm always ultimately asset minded
in my grading, though my in text comments will point
out areas needing attention. I still focus on
teaching students to find ways to grow in positive
ways. In Unit one, I begin how I mean to carry on
in the media and readings we engage with outside
of Monsters University include a range of
materials more conventionally found on pedagogy
courses. Again, I want to make visible the systems
that operate on all my learners and therefore I
get to them to not only define their understanding
of education from their personal experiences, but
also to learn about the invisible systems that
inform the experiences they have that create these
definitions. And I challenge them to reflect on
these definitions and to see them in new ways.
They first learn about metacognition from Carol
Dweck's work, The Power of Yet. And then we read a
wide variety of personal experiences of education
from, for example, Patrisse Khan-Cullors' When They Call
You a Terrorist, a Black Lives Matter Memoir in
which she shares her experiences as being the only
black learner at a private school in Southern
California. Tara Westover's Educated helps them
to see experiences of entering college from her
family's survivalist value system and ultimately
having to relearn and unlearn and learn to embrace
conventional ways of thinking. Phuc Tran's Sigh, Gone,
in which he details what it is like to go through
school as a Vietnamese American, and the pressures
from his parents that he navigated along with
racist bullying from educated educators and peers
helps them to see that their experiences are not
only located in their experience. I also make a
real point of spelling and saying names as
correctly as possible, including using accent
points in my links to the material so that
students can see I value true renderings of name
and identity as much as the experiences those
identities share. And following from the personal
reflections, we turn to studies and research about
institutions and individuals that navigate them.
We look at Most Likely to Succeed and Zaretta Hammond's
work. And then we add to this Paul Tough's
The Years That Matter Most, How College Makes Us
and Breaks Us and the adorable Rebecca Chang's.
2019 TED Talk Growth Mindset for kids
in which as an elementary school student, she
talks about how she had to learn persistence. I
want my students to leave Unit one with a clear
sense not just of what they think, but what
systems have operated on them to influence their
thinking. And I want them to practice
metacognition and begin to challenge and involve
their concept of self and academia. Now that
they're aware of these structures, Unit two builds
on the concept of definition and extends that to
develop students understanding and use of the
concept of academic conversation. Using Zootopia to
guide our investigation of different types of
educational experiences, the unit focuses on new
habits of mind and reading skills and writing
skills. And we use our calendar a lot so that we
always are driven by purpose and location. We know
where we've been, we know where we are, and we
know where we're going. In this unit, we define
and then juxtapose formal education with what I
call informal education. Students start to see
that education outside of the classroom and
traditional learning spaces is impactful and
powerful while they develop the reading and
writing skills we focused on in Unit one. In
particular. We explore readings that showcase
personal experiences of and opinions about
education through the lens of rhetorical analysis,
again making visible what has been invisible. Our
readings and media continue to vocalize people of
color and experiences of these people. And
students learn about how stereotype threat
condition, their reaction to learning spaces from
Claude Steele, how systems ignore the most
vulnerable students from Victor Rios, and why some
people value learning as they do from Michelle
Obama. They then learn about Walt Disney's
academic failures from his biographer and the ways
that professional academic spaces are riddled with
racism from Roxane Gay. After this, we look at the
impact of being undocumented on immigrants in
America from Janine Joseph and the ways in which
music sings about all of these challenges. From
the Roots and Panic! At the Disco. All of my
students have opportunities to see themselves in
the literature we explore, and all students have
opportunities to see students that they haven't
seen before. When they see themselves and see
others see them. Sometimes for the first time they
are different. Even the most reticent lose some of
their reserve and even the most hardened shows
some softness. And that's when the best part for
me happens. I get to learn from them. Moving away,
though not completely from rhetorical strategies,
Unit three is our literary analysis unit, and we
explore Coco and the impact of culture on
education by thinking about how and why people
tell stories and how these stories impact what we
learn, how we learn. And even if we continue to
learn. In this unit, therefore we focus on informal
education. The concept we started to unpack in
Unit two. Throughout this unit, students have a
chance to refine their argumentation and work
closely with textual evidence and the nuances of
language. And this unit asks students to read a
little bit more heavily the Disney work that we're
dealing with as I ask them to read the entire
script for Coco. The secondary readings and media,
therefore, are less in quantity, they're reading a
lot, so I try to balance that with less contextual
ideas. But this secondary material is
complementary and expansive. They learn more about
the impact of culture on their learning habits and
styles from Zaretta Hammond, and they acquire a new
sense of narratives and why and how they're told
from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. And they explore
the impact of real life Latinx art, history and
culture on the making of Coco from the film's
creators.
Though often dreaded by my students and me, the
research essay that comprises Unit four always
ends up being a favorite activity for students
because it's entirely self-focused and we all know
ourselves or think we do best. Rather than ask
students to piece together source material, to
develop an argument about a topic, something I
don't feel they're truly capable of doing well
yet I ask students to think about how they can use
research to educate themselves about their
education. They'll learn about the writing that
they need to perform in order to be successful in
their studies as well as in their future careers.
Because students have cultivated a tight knit
classroom community by this point where we have
shared many of our skeletons students come to
this assignment open and engaged, as well as
excited to find a way to glimpse their future.
This is their opportunity to show themselves as we
learn about in Frozen and find the music of their
life as we see happen in Soul. And they really do
love this. This assignment also helps them to see
English courses as relevant beyond English
classrooms, no matter how much they like to argue
the fact against the fact reading and writing
skills are life skills. If I said that everything
I detailed in this talk was easy to do, I would be
lying. This work is harder than any work I have
ever done, and it takes more time and energy than
I have to give sometimes. What's equally true is
that it's immensely transformative, professionally
and personally when this work is done. What I've
learned is that in order to lead my students here
and become allies for them and for our colleagues
of color, I have to take responsible for
responsibility for and actually do my work. I
personally began in therapy with a social justice
warrior therapist and researched my nerd heart, a
reading, reading, reading, reading and reading,
challenging myself to decentralize white
narratives and create a space for research and
stories emerging from communities of color. This
is what I spend my summers doing, since this is
the only time I have a dedicated amount of space
and energy to throw myself in and wander where my
wonderings take me. As a result, my term time work
always evolves. This year, for example, my English,
01b introduction to literature course is
almost entirely comprised of non white content.
And that was a huge shift for me personally and
pedagogically. In this course we reclaim the
multicultural origins of the Cinderella story and
reimagine it as a hero's journey, learning to see
as heroic the individuals that have persisted
throughout persistent marginalization across time
and space by Western societies' discrimination.
That is perhaps the talk for another multicultural
day. For now, I will conclude with this, there's
no quick fix for the systemic racism that pervades
everything we do in American education
institutions and beyond it. The work is hard, it
is painful, and human beings have primal brains
that operate in survival mode. We're programmed to
avoid difficulty and pain, but we have to remember
that we aren't primitive beings any longer when we
leap into those unknowns, many of which we didn't
even know existed, we must remember that the very
heart of our purpose is the catalyzing force
behind our courage. We can make education better
for all learners, and we can change the lives of
our students by inviting them into our classroom
families, and those that will become our students
as well, for the better. Thank you for allowing me
to share my journey with you, and thank you
especially for letting me walk alongside you in
yours.