Empowering Students of Color (Part 5 of 8)

Dr. Gail Thompson and Rufus Thompson at EY Awards Gala (June 16, 2017).

Source: Vanessa Carroll, used with permission

On June 12, 2017, I (JR) had the honor of sitting down with Dr. Gail Thompson (GT) and Rufus Thompson (RT) to discuss their book: Yes, You Can!: Advice for Teachers Who Want a Great Start and a Great Finish With Their Students of Color (Thompson & Thompson, 2014). Thompson and Thompson have won numerous awards in the field of education and are tireless advocates for students. Their extensive careers in education – including being teachers themselves – give them each the powerful perspective of both the educator and the researcher.

Their recent book offers too many strategies to fit within a single piece, but in this eight-part interview they offer a sampling that can be used to acquire added insight and start crucial conversations. See previous posts (beginning with Part 1) of this interview for previous questions. Additional posts in this series will address additional questions.

Interview Part 5 of 8

(Question 6 of 10)

JR:

You mention a few times in the book that it’s common for African American students to be outspoken. How can such a trait be channeled as an advantage rather than treated as a flaw?

I get really excited about this one because, for me, when a kid is outspoken that is an advantage. That’s great. I want my daughter to be outspoken. As a girl, that often gets discouraged (e.g., labeled “bossy”), but I want her to be a girl and eventually a woman who can stand up for herself and speak up when there is injustice and know how to share her needs and feelings. Yet I know it is often treated as a flaw, which is so sad, and some teachers might see it as a challenge or a behavior problem. To me, I think this is a big problem. What would be some good advice on how teachers can perceive and channel outspokenness as an advantage and not a flaw?

RT:

I think it’s a cultural issue. There’s an author, and I think Gail speaks about this in her writing, about in the traditional black church you have the preacher who preaches and then the audience responds; it’s “call and response”. In homes, often if you’re not told to be quiet and go to the corner, you’re being encouraged to engage in conversation. The more you’re engaged in conversation, the more you want to converse, and so you feel like you’re part of the conversation. So, when you have a teacher in front of the classroom, and they are presenting or teaching, and they give an opportunity, often an African American child is going to want to become part of that conversation and put in their two cents. What teachers should do is structure the lesson or structure the teaching so that students know when it’s appropriate rather than reprimanding them. The reprimanding comes from the fear of that perception or image of that African American becoming confrontational. And that comes from our cultural insensitivity and ignorance and the stereotypes that are promoted in the media, whereas if that’s an Asian child, or if that’s a Caucasian child, or if that’s another child, or an Italian or Irish child who has that same passion built into their culture, it’s not considered a threat. So, the same discipline where the African American child (primarily boy) will be sent to the office for discipline, another child from another culture will be applauded for speaking up.

GT:

…and viewed as gifted. That’s what the research tells shows. Kochman (1983) wrote a book called Black and White Styles in Conflict, which I talk about a lot and write about a lot. He did a study and he found that there’s such a mismatch between the way that white middle class teachers have been trained to communicate, and black kids from the hood. So, a lot of these teachers feel threatened when this child is questioning, instead of saying, “OK, let me see why the child is questioning and what the answers are,” they say, “OK, you go to the office, you’re being disrespectful.”

He said that often when black children are passionate about how they speak, teachers automatically assume the kid is angry and the kid is kicked out of the class, because the teacher cannot differentiate between persuasive speech (“I’m trying to persuade you to listen to me, or I’m passionate about this topic, I’m really excited, and you only see anger, because you have been socialized to believe that whenever emotion is present, then there’s anger”). That was very, very eye-opening for me, to read his book and to understand that often it is the way certain teachers (because most teachers are white middle class women) have been socialized, and the way these kids have been socialized.

I do it still. I went to Texas with a group from the Claremont Graduate University when I taught there, right when No Child Left Behind was just getting passed, and they were talking about the legislation at this conference. They were bashing, “The democrats messed up the education system!”, and I’m the only African American at this table, and I blurted out, “That’s right, blame the democrats for everything!” The people from Claremont were like “Sh!” [elbowing GT], but that was me, and a lot of those kids are that way.

My point is, when I was growing up, I had been taught you can be emotional and you can be passionate, but you need to learn how to say it at appropriate times and in appropriate ways. Being at a conference at that table, when someone was giving a keynote, that was not the right time to yell it out. My point is I still haven’t learned it, and I have to really control myself a lot of times. If teachers can start to let kids know, “That’s a great question! But I need you to raise your hand, wait until you’re called on, don’t blurt it out, and I’ll answer. Or write it down – if you feel like you just have to say it, write it down and wait until it’s an appropriate time.” They have to be trained that it’s OK to have questions, but there’s a time to speak, and a time to listen, and a way to express your question or concern.

You really have to train kids, because, I never really learned it. When I even got hired at Claremont, I remember David Drew my mentor saying you have these outbursts during our meeting (and he used the word “outbursts”), and it was true, it was an appropriate word. There was a cultural mismatch for sure. I had never been taught, “OK, when you’re in these settings, you wait. You may be emotional and you have to get it out, but you wait, and you try to take some of the emotion out of it so that people don’t feel like they’re being attacked when you say it.” I’m sure that when the [people came to our office] to talk to us, when I was asking questions about the hiring process, I’m sure one of them felt she was being attacked, because I was being emotional. At my age, I’m probably not ever going to learn it, but teachers can train kids while they’re very young that there’s a way to do it, there’s a way to say it. “Great question, but wait your turn,” and all of that.

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JR:

I love that the affirmation is in there: “Great question.” Because, don’t we want kids to connect to the lesson? Don’t we want kids to participate, and don’t we want them to be passionate about it and interested in what we’re teaching? I think too many classrooms use that outdated model where the teacher lectures and the kids are all supposed to be quiet…

GT:

…and they’re bored to death.

JR:

…and they’re bored to death. Some teachers think that silence and compliance means the kids are learning…

RT:

…and they’re not.

JR:

…and they’re not. Our English language learners need to be using the academic language as they’re often not speaking this language at home, and our kids in low-socio-economic brackets need to use the vocabulary they aren’t necessarily using in a low-education home, and there are so many reasons we should be allowing kids to participate and to jump in. I hope that as classrooms shift to a better model for everybody, that they will also be aware of this and how finding ways for children of color to participate can fit so well with good instruction.

GT:

I think the good teachers who really want to get better – they will. When they learn these things, they’ll keep trying, and trying, and trying.

JR:

You mentioned earlier gifted kids. African American kids are half as likely as white kids to be labeled gifted, even when their test scores are comparable (Grissom & Redding, 2016), which is heartbreaking. I can’t help but think of how gifted kids generally have at least one of five overexcitabilities, and when you talk about the blurting out, the emotional overexcitability and psychomotor overexcitability (where kids often blurt out), those are things that frequently come along with being gifted (Rankin, 2016). I have those things!

GT:

I saw that in your book! As I was trying to articulate my answer, I was thinking about how you described gifted kids in your book. Because I thought, “Wow, so much of that was me, but I was viewed as this kid with no potential.”

JR:

I use you and your story as an example to open all my presentations on identifying giftedness! I think when you talk about the African American child who is outspoken, oh how that can be compounded for these gifted African American children who are being completely overlooked and labeled as behavior problems.”

What Next?

In my next post for this column (Part 6), Dr. Thompson and Thompson will answer more questions concerning how teachers can best support students of color.