Teaching in the Politicized Educational Climate by Kate Steilen

Last fall, sixty high schools in states across the US piloted an AP course in African-American studies (International Business Times 2022). The pilot responds to years of activism and educational research supporting culturally responsive teaching, a pedagogy that links learning with “deep understanding of (and appreciation for) culture” (Ladson Billings 2014, 76). Culturally responsive teaching focuses on students as subjects, not objects, to ameliorate social difference in the classroom through three domains: academic success, cultural competence, and sociopolitical consciousness (Ladson-Billings 2014). By teaching about identity, culture, and race, culturally responsive teaching has found a place in American schools; however, conservative activists have launched a counter political movement to contest how culture and racism are taught (Wallace-Wells 2021). 

This polarizing movement has had consequences for educators. A recent survey by RAND investigated the topics of teaching about racism and cultural bias as sources of conflict; they found that 48 percent of principals and 40 percent of teachers reported that the intrusion of political conflict over curriculum has become a “job-related stressor” (Woo et al. 2022, 5). Yet a recent NPR/Ipsos poll found that a large majority of parents approve of how their school is teaching about race – only 19 percent of parents say their child’s school curriculum on race and racism “clashed with their family’s values” (Kamenetz 2022). This finding suggests that educators should feel confident that their communities largely support teaching about race and racial bias, but as the RAND survey found, a large percentage experience stress with this topic. 

This article explores the particular environment for educators in diverse public schools and suggests a starting point for classroom resilience: culturally-conscious trust. In this moment, culturally responsive teaching exists in a climate where educators’ present views, their cultural competence, and the voice of students and families will all influence how educators experience work. The RAND survey recommends that educators will need to work together to build resilient school communities that can withstand the stress of politicization (Woo et al. 2022). 

Skilling Teacher Trust

In order to confront political conflict, educators need to have clear, explicit plans for how they will practice inclusion and cultural responsiveness in classrooms. In view of educators’ reported stress, it is crucial to define how culturally responsive leadership might evolve in the classroom. Teacher trust describes a dynamic process of outreach to students; this work is political, confronting issues of power and privilege (Nieto 2007). For educators, the act of building authentic relationships with students must first bridge social distance by acknowledging background experiences of racial identity. This work sees trust as a two-way street or dialectic by acknowledging distrust, knowing that Black families in particular may expect anti-Black racism and adopt an “orientation of vigilance” (Hill 2018, 3). This extension of teacher trust might be called culturally-conscious trust because it includes an awareness of the negative experiences of Black families in urban schools (Khalifa et al. 2016; Hill 2018; McCarthy Foubert 2019). In this way, culturally responsive leadership work includes teachers, who might begin their outreach with critical consciousness.

Naming trust as a form of skilled practice extends the reach of culturally responsive leadership (Khalifa et al. 2016). Trust engenders not consensus, necessarily, but offers a path through mismatched expectations, different standpoints, and conflict. Trust work helps teachers thrive in urban schools, promoting intrinsic satisfaction that results from building relationships (Kokka 2017). Described as two-way relationships, giving and receiving, teachers enjoyed learning from their students and gained motivation and meaning from work when they formed positive perspectives of their students (Kokka 2017). While minoritized teachers expressed their understanding of stereotypes of Black youth and counteracted racism by having high expectations for their students, white urban teachers were found to either downplay or avoid their own ethnic identity. Kokka (2017) named this avoidance “race-evasive discourses” (p. 175). Kokka (2017) suggests that white teachers can learn, while teaching, to understand racial facts, gain cultural competence, and potentially employ a more race-conscious discourse. 

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Building Trust with Cultural Competence

In elementary schools, teachers do not differentiate their trust between parents and students (Goddard et al. 2001). This finding tightens the relationship between teacher-student-family; teachers see elementary students as extensions of their families. However, the higher the numbers of students surviving poverty in a school, the lower teachers’ perceptions of trust (Goddard et al. 2001). While it could be reassuring that this finding does not indicate race, stereotypes of Black students and anti-Blackness may aid the conflation race with economic status in school contexts where students are surviving poverty. Goddard et al. (2001) posit that cultural differences arising from class differences might be harder to overcome than other factors in establishing trust. If teachers racialize class–if they are inclined to see all Black students as without resources, lowering trust–then low measures of trust become problematic and durable. Race-consciousness will not help teachers foster trust if it furthers deficit thinking and does not build asset-based, culturally competent views of students.

Schools foster trust through encouraging parent-school relationships, but they can also become objects of institutional trust, where trust may relate to a school’s community reputation (Bachman and Inkpen 2011). I focus on teacher initiative as one starting point, because it empowers teachers in spaces that they control, where they would potentially experience dynamic feedback and intrinsic rewards. Teacher trust is a key relationship because of the daily contact with students. The teacher-student-family relationship is, to some extent, workable; it is more autonomous, variable, and flexible, as relationships can be both unique and consistent. Hill (2018) reiterates that trust research findings are “messy and complicated” (7) because trust is a process: “trust, while future-oriented, is influenced by past experiences and socialization. Trust can be cultivated, maintained or damaged over time” (16). Hill suggests that schools may support students’ socio-cultural needs by being receptive to the particular distrust of Black families and their protective vigilance. 

Because district policy typically measures family engagement in race-evasive ways, teachers need to know that trust can work differently for Black families (Hill 2018; McCarthy Foubert 2019; Bryk and Schneider 2002). For example, educators perceive the attitudes of low-income Black families to be guarded and confrontational (Hill 2018). But Black parents of all class backgrounds experience repeated microaggressions that influence their sense of belonging in educational spaces (Posey-Maddox 2014). In this context, many teachers have felt that urban Black parents are less involved and concluded that they do not value education (Hill 2018). Black parents also have an awareness of disparate educational outcomes for Black children. They have to intervene to insist that children are given adequate access to resources and opportunities for learning (McCarthy Foubert 2019). However, Black parents do not necessarily see their agency, their vigilance, or their engagement work pay off—parents in McCarthy Foubert’s (2019) study expressed frustration that despite “doing everything ‘right,’ they were unable to fully protect their children from experiencing anti-Blackness of/at school” (9). While Black parents showed up and advocated for their children as a way of expressing agency, they were not necessarily rewarded with trusting relationships. 

Practicing Culturally-Conscious Trust

If teachers can incorporate the experiences of Black families into their model for teacher trust (Hill 2018; McCarthy Foubert 2019), there are several concrete steps teachers might take. First is to understand the reasons for Black parents’ distrust. Then, they need to use this understanding of how they might be seen to strategically bridge social distance. For example, Hill (2018) found that whether schools “suppressed or respected” parental vigilance was consequential in the development of authentic trust (66). Schools cannot ignore racism and anti-Blackness by assuming behaviors of parent engagement are race-neutral. Teachers need to do more than be welcoming. They can take a more receptive stance to engagement by asking Black families how they prefer to engage. They can make what might be implicit in their model of teacher trust more explicit. As they gain trust with cultural competence, they can extend their learning to the specific cultural identities of their students and families. 

For example, teachers could proactively share the Bryk and Schneider (2002) components of relational trust: reliable, competent, respectful, caring. The teacher and family could define their expectations jointly. Teachers can ask families what their expectations are for their child and discuss how that would look in the classroom. Teachers can express what their own model for trust looks like. And finally, teachers can prioritize addressing anti-Blackness in educational spaces and empower Black parents to speak up if they perceive anti-Blackness in the classroom.

Bridging Community Cultural Wealth with Trust

In this way, teachers can build on community cultural wealth to develop competence with their students and parents (Yosso 2005). Incorporating community wealth recognizes and builds on the cultural values, knowledge, and competencies that students already possess and questions the historical dominance of white , middle-class values as the standard. Adopting a community wealth perspective acknowledges that there are multiple, intersecting forms of capital and that culture is dynamic (Yosso 2005). To move beyond superficial engagement with students, teachers must practice learning from them. Schools could also have teachers stay with or loop with their students beyond one grade level to allow for teacher-family relationships to deepen. Schools could also encourage minoritized parents and teachers to form affinity groups that advocate for minoritized students. 

For many Black families, schools do not always feel like community or a place of opportunity (Hill 2018; McCarthy Foubert 2019). Understanding this distrustful view of education could become a way for teachers to initially grasp social difference and begin building authentic cultural competence. Redefining trust as work helps describe the role that complex cultural relationships play in teachers’ ability to support students. Teachers may both understand Black parents’ racial realism and acknowledge their vigilance as agency in order to build trust. 

Culturally-conscious trust urges teachers to make explicit what they might have assumed was implicit for families. In the current political climate, educators need to have explicit goals for how they will promote inclusion and cultural responsiveness while teaching. Teachers can confront the stress of politicization by increasing relational trust within their own classroom communities. Some teacher education programs focus on developing educators’ critical consciousness about privilege and white supremacy without teaching cultural competence for communication and relational trust. And some teacher-educators avoid race discourses altogether, leaving teachers racially illiterate, unprepared to recognize how racism functions in educational settings (Chang-Bacon 2022). Educators will need to initiate ways to build cultural competence while teaching, and understanding trust as a dynamic, cultural process is one place to start. 

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About the Scholar

References

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