“Good Morning! I just wanted to let you know that I really enjoyed yesterday’s class. I want to thank you for sharing your life story with the whole class. Listening to a teacher’s story is something you normally do not get to hear and I am very glad that I got to be a part of. I just wanted to drop you an email and tell you I am thankful for your presentation and that I really enjoyed it. Have a great weekend!”
Megan
I appreciated this breezy email from Megan. We were in the midst of finishing up the semester’s work, this group of first year, first semester students and I. The course is called, interestingly enough, Learners and the Learning Process and it is a requirement for all students who think they want to become elementary school teachers. I really like where I am positioned instructionally these days in my eled program. I teach the youngest and the oldest students. I get to see how far they come in their professional preparation, what they’ve learned to do, how they think differently, how their reasons for wanting to teach have matured over their time at UVM.
Sharing myself…my developing Whiteness
Megan was referring to a class in which I’d taken my first shot at what Tuitt had beckoned me to do (Chapter 10). I spoke to the class about my life, how I learned to be me, and how my class and color informed and was informed by that process. As I look back on that PowerPoint, I see it mainly captured events. I provided the “color commentary.” I remember spending perhaps 40 minutes going through it, selecting certain events, ignoring others, reading several things I’d written, one of them being my experience with the big red history book when I was very young (Chapter 1). I remember feeling unsatisfied when I’d finished. There was so much more to be said. Had I said enough and had I made visible the indicators and formative dynamics of privilege? Were they able to see how this position of social status got constructed and framed what I saw around me?
That was my expressed purpose for putting the PowerPoint together. I wanted to provide a reflection on my ongoing process of identity formation and I wanted to accomplish this in a way that opened up to the class the notion of Whiteness itself is a powerful social construction that determines much of what happens in our culture. In class, we’d been studying and thinking about the process of identity formation as a socio-cultural enterprise. This was all leading up to an essay they were going to have to write on the ongoing formation of their professional identity. We’d read Erikson and Gilligan. For most of my young charges, they centered squarely in the middle of their own identity formation process, this was a first opportunity to step outside the process and take a look at it. I’d recently shown them several typologies of identity formation for groups in our larger society that included African Americans, Gays, Women, Bi-Racials, and Whites. This idea that identity formation was an actual process that could be observed, researched, and described was a brand new thought to many of my young charges. Everyone had read something about the topic and we’d had fairly deep and searching conversations about the concept in general, debating (regardless of the readings) whether or not the concept was real or true or whether or not the various stage theories made any sense to them. As is usually the case, they were much better at seeing stages represented in friends than they were in themselves.
White people can think about these things
My presentation was geared to be one example of introspection, my attempt to take a look at various aspects of how my life developed over the years. I had them working in groups during the presentation and I’d asked them to integrate any of my examples into Helm’s stages of white development that Tatum uses in Chapter 4. of Why are all the Black children sitting together in the cafeteria? I was data, they were providing the analysis. I thought that was a rather nice way to go about this analysis, actually. I knew my deeper sharing would provoke curiosity and perhaps even controversy. I had my share of students who considered these group-based descriptions of identity development just so much political correctness. I decided they’d grapple with Helm’s theory better if they were applying it to me as a first cut, rather than taking on their own identity formation first time through. And to be honest, I was quite interested in what they might come up with as they considered what I thought were marker events in my life’s development thus far.
It is way too easy to treat this subject matter lightly. Instructionally, I have found that teachers and students can “play school” really well with this type of developmental information. Teachers can lecture, profess with PowerPoint backup, have students read and analyze life histories, and ultimately engage in a kind of identification game, the real purpose of which is memorizing the whatever stages of development are front and center at that particular moment. The fact that I’m working with predominantly white classes makes this game of coverage even more real. Most students at best don’t really believe the various stage theories have anything to do with them, (the post-modern generation) and at worst, are terribly offended that anyone would think Whiteness itself was a category worthy of socio-political analysis. This current generation also has the tendency to think we are way beyond the need for having to be concerned about racism in this country because their parents, thank you very much, did quite well rooting out its last vestiges. They see little connection with their lives and the occasional instance of blatant racism they read about or see profiled on the evening news. Any kind of systemic analysis of institutionalized privilege and oppression can be land way beyond their limits of awareness. They simply don’t believe it exists in any way that holds a personal connection for them. So I take a different route to work our way into dissecting the interconnections of power, privilege, and pigmentation.
Racism affects every person’s views of every other person in our society. It just does. Period. A young nation doesn’t spend three fourths of its history constructing and maintaining a racist structure and then avoid its effects just because laws are passed. Old habits die hard. Primal feelings and emotions are difficult if not impossible to weed out of our reptilian structures. We feel racism in this country whether or not we care to try to put those feelings into words. Race is a social construction as is are the various cultures of Racism, whether they be White racism on Blacks, dark skinned Black racism on lighter skinned Blacks, Blacks vs. Koreans, Whites vs. Asians, whatever. Racism and its manifestations are out there as social constructions, which are at their heart, cognitive structures formed in the heat of strong emotion. I want my students to 
understand race and racism from the vantage point of viewing them as cognitive structures because we can work on cognitive structures, we can alter the pattern of cognitive structures, we can understand cognitive structures as an abstraction and we can work to change our thinking should we so choose. So before we every talk about identity formation, I want my students to build the concept of what a conceptual structure is, how they are built, and how they develop over time. I invite them to analyze differences between simple and complex conceptual structures. We read about the costs and benefits of simple and complex structures and study the natural development of conceptual structures over time. My students will tell you if they’ve learned anything with me, they’ve learned to look at thought through the lens of cognitive structures.
Thinking about learning who I am
They place I am trying to get them to involves two perspectives on thinking and learning. The first is that any kind of thought is grounded in content provided by biology and culture and the effects of both of these are not easily altered. Biology, we can affect with nutrition, drugs, and surgical interventions. Culture we can affect by metacognitive understanding and cognitive action. The second point I want to make is that the more complex our cognitive structure, the more adaptable and flexible will be our thought and perhaps our behavior. We ground this study several ways:
- in events they recall from their own lives (Describe in 3-5 pages your most recent learning; what was it, why did it occur, who encouraged you if anyone and why, what happened, what do you think about what you learned, now),
- we read what significant others have had to say on the subject (Piaget, Vygotsky, Clark, Grolman, Tatum),
- we look at how the interaction of cognition and culture develops across the childhood years,
- we try to see connect different theoretical language that describes similar behavioral events, and
- we watch video examples of teaching and learning to see how different classroom environments support and limit the range of thinking.
They begin to see there is a lot more to thinking than they thought and they begin to understand the importance of context in learning. They also begin to understand the interplay between environment and other constructs such as intelligence, ability, personality, and performance. Then and only then do we begin to look at identity.
They enter the discussion of identity with a relatively thorough grounding in cognition – for first year students. That writing assignment concerning their own professional identity gives them a reason for paying attention here that goes way beyond the daily assignments. They actually have to show that they can integrate some of this theory with an analysis and projection of their own identity as a newbie teacher.
So when someone gives me a response that is a thinly veiled “its just being pc” comment, the question we all can raise has to do with identifying that response as characteristic of a kind of conceptual structure. We are then free to ask what kind of structure, how did it arise in the life of the respondent, and what role does it play in their current thinking? What would happen if they created another kind of structural response to identity development? How would that feel to them and what might they gain from it? What would it sound like and how would their behavior change if they lived it out as a firm belief? Identity development, in other words, gets grounded in a much larger discussion about thought, culture, and language. It all gets pretty interesting and it all gets a little uncomfortable. When Megan sent that breezy email about enjoying the class, she brought an understanding to my remarks that were certainly deeper than, “Gee. I really liked your stories.”
And still, in follow up discussions with regard to racial/ethnic identity formation, even for the white ethnics, it was very hard to get this class to respond with much personal sharing of their own. And this was a class that had no trouble with classroom discussions. We’d done a fair amount of Groupwork, we’d switched the groups a number of times, people knew each other as more than just another student in my class. Still, conversations about race, including the more difficult conversations about the effects of skin color on status and privilege were difficult to bring out into the open. Until the day Vanessa suggested we do the discussion utilizing the anonymity of technology.
Using technology as a medium of research
Vanessa is a Philippina. She is a Vermonter. She is thoughtful, outgoing, and engaging. And still, she was reluctant to openly share. She came up to me after class the day I shared my story and said, “You know, you want us to share our stories. Nobody has yet. You know why, I’m sure…it’s a little scary. It’s more than a little scary. Here’s an idea. Suppose we set up another topic in our [web-based course site] discussion board called Personal Stories. I think it would be easier!”
She’d spoken the obvious. Too bad it wasn’t so obvious to me. Here I’d made the assumption that “if I built it, they would follow.” Well, this wasn’t Hollywood, this was real life. Of course it was hard for these eighteen and nineteen year olds who really didn’t know each other very to first identify, and then share personal stories related to identity formation, pigmentation, power, and privilege, especially since 90% of them were white kids of privilege who didn’t realize they had any stories to share in the first place. I thought it was a brilliant suggestion and frankly, I should have known to take this route myself. I should have remembered O.K. Moore’s “autotelic environments.”
Years ago – thirty to be exact – I’d read O. K. Moore’s description of autotelic environments as some of the first computer assisted reading instruction of urban children. Moore described the benefits to his young kids of being able to respond to a machine instead of a person. The children didn’t have to worry about what a human being thought about them and their reading ability or lack of ability. They just had to type in their answers and the machine would speak a response back to them. This was a machine, so there were no verbal or non-verbal statements for them to have to read and interpret. No invocation of Dubois’s double consciousness going here. Just a simple spoken right or wrong and here’s your 
next task. For kids raised in that double bind of double consciousness, this condition of immediate mediated technological feedback, this autotelic environment, was freeing! Sounds more than a little like what Tuitt found in higher ed. more than three decades later. When students were clear where the professor (or machine, in the case of the children) was coming from, they did better. Technology, evidently, provides a portion of the pedagogy of visibility.
I asked Vanessa to share her idea with the class when next we met again. In the meantime, I mounted the discussion topic. Within two weeks, fifteen students shared a story, thought, experience, or idea they’d not chosen to share in the blindingly visible spotlight of face-to-face in class. Here’s some of what the students chose to write.
“I knew about the concept of racism but I was never “victim” to it until a former friend of mine has said a rude comment as I was passing by in the hallway of my school. He had called me a ‘chink” – this work refers to people of Chinese decent (sic) – a gross socialization – although I am not Chinese I knew immediately what it meant and that it was derogatory in every sense. I think from then I became more aware of how different I truly was in the negative sense (Vanessa).”
“I was so sure back then that things were changing in the world – the older I get and the more I see…it feels like we have a long way to go. HOWEVER- I believe that we are moving in the right direction. I know that there is positive change all around us…we have to continue the process….for our children and future (Vanessa).”
“I was working at a Stop and Shop and met this kid Francois whose dad was from Haiti. We became friends and eventually started dating, but I never really talked about it with my family. My parents had friends of many different ethnicities, but somehow I knew this was going to be a touchy subject. …It was so weird because my dad works for a newspaper in NYC and deals with people of every background. He never criticized differences, or had a problem if I had friends that weren’t white. It was different when I wanted to date a black guy….My friends even started to have issues with me and Francoise. …it would make me sick. I ever realized how many “racial” issues there were surrounding me. I never thought my best friends would criticize me the way they did (Katie).”
“I went through a series of feelings including frustration, confusion and resentment, towards not only my town, but the people as well. I hated that these people seemed to accept and even worse, expect, that this was the way it was everywhere. It was as if the townsfolk hadn’t found it odd that there was only one black family LIVING within the town. When I was looking for colleges, racial diversity as well as personal diversity became a major factor. I was looking for a different kind of environment, and I suppose that’s what let me to VT – the diverse atmosphere. I immediately took to the ALANA center and wanted to partake in many of their events. I tried to join clubs that would help broaden my thinking and expand my life experiences. Today, I don’t see myself as racially sheltered, however I continue to long for further experience and knowledge about the world at large (Sage)”
“When discussing the four identities that we handed out in class we talked in our little group how we didn’t understand why blacks and minority was separate. I must admit though how I do understand that when people are from a certain ethnicity that they have a strong bias toward defending that one, for they have a strong tie to it. I would do the same. That’s why this has just been a huge eye opener for me how even though I am Korean I must never focus on that alone and neglect mentioning the discrimination that goes on in so many other ethnic groups and that diversity really includes all the colors of the world (Monica).”
“My story is I have no story. I went to a well-blended school and race never meant a thing. I wasn’t aware that they were different…maybe it was just me but as a child I didn’t know that if your skin was brown and mine was white it meant anything. I was to love everybody for who they are and I never questioned that as a child (Jennifer).”
“Although as terrible as it was I was glad to have experienced it. I now am less naive in believing that feelings of racism don’t exist and feel more towards those of you who have experienced if first hand. The only thing I regret is being a bystander; I wish I could have done more to facilitate this issue. Now, whenever my cousins make a racist comment, I will never just not say anything to them but scold them for being ignorant. I am white and would never expect anyone to say any thing degrading to me because of my skin color or treat me in anything less than of a respectful manner. Skin color is not a divider of people…it’s your ideas and opinions and your willingness to be a bystander of certain situations that is the divider. I’m glad that we have had this discussion because talking about these issues always seems to be put aside in a place where I would definitely like to voice my opinion. Thank you to all of you who have shared yours (Stephanie).”
Rob’s story
And then, there’s the story that Rob told in class, the only personal story really shared before Vanessa issued the discussion board invitation.
“My Junior year in high school, my family decided to take us kids down South for a family vacation. We are Vermonters. We haven’t traveled out of Vermont very much and I suppose this was their attempt to get us out there to see the wider world. We were traveling down through Georgia, it was late afternoon after a long day on the road and we were getting hungry – me, my sister, my Mom and Dad. We pulled off the interstate and got off on this road looking for a place to eat. I don’t know what really happened, we took a wrong turn or something but it all got rural pretty fast and so we pulled up at the first diner we came to. We piled out of the car, grateful for the chance to stretch our legs, at walked into that fairly funky looking place. We were the only white people there. There were tables to spare, one or two waitresses and nobody greeted us or ushered us to a table. A couple of Black couples came in and were seated immediately. I remember getting really hot around my neck when I realized (I think) they weren’t sitting us down because we were white! It was like they were discriminating against us. Finally we ate, the food was okay but I don’t think any of us tasted it much because we were pretty upset. I think we might have left if we hadn’t have been starved. I’ve never forgotten how unfair that was to us. I learned that white people aren’t the only people who are prejudiced. This is the first time I’ve talked about this since it happened. Even my family doesn’t talk about it much. It’s like it isn’t okay for white people to say blacks can be prejudiced (Robert).”
The important consideration here is that students felt free to share, they could think about what they wanted to write before exposing their thoughts, they could see that others in the class stood in places of uncertainty and that it was okay to be exactly where they were. They were freer to reveal themselves as “flesh and blood, thoughts and feelings, people with a present and a past.” This was a first, an event we all could build upon as we worked together to bring the issues of power, privilege, and pigmentation from a place of hidden influence. Issues were real and on the table now, open for discussion, open for analysis, and available to everyone as we moved more deeply into the often invisible dynamics that determined how we are seen by others, and in turn, how we present ourselves to the world.
This was a significant fourth step: the first was Tuitt’s, the second was mine, the third was Robs, and the fourth was the other students.
The fifth I suggest is yours. What I have learned through writing about these unfolding moments of my career, is that my racism is a dynamic part of who I am. It shifts and changes as a result of the reciprocity I enjoy in my embedded relationships with the world around me, especially as I become more intentionally aware of the nuance in those relationships. Something in my daily life shifts, I shift. Someone new comes into my life, I adjust. Such is the mechanism of reciprocity. My early study of the lynching photographs, my work with the youth group at Grace Episcopal, my trip to Montgomery, getting to know Ray and Donny and Henry at GLS, my work with multiage learning environments, learning how to affect gender biased learning outcomes, creating equitable cooperative learning settings, taking more deliberate stands against racism – each of these pealed back another layer of how I understood the world around me, most particularly my instructional worlds. Awareness has led me to be more awake at all moments in my life to the role racism has played in my life and I believe, has better equipped me for the days to come. These are good outcomes. Very good outcomes.
CR