I’ve found it hard to write since moving. I think that movement often means that we simultaneously engage differently with the world and the world engages us differently than we are used to. It’s been a challenge to take up the perspectives I’ve learned in a place that is much more conservative than the one I was accustomed to. I also realize I now end every sentence with a preposition. Recently, I began teaching at the University of Nebraska Omaha in the Teacher Education Department. Nebraska is simultaneously the most grossly conservative place I’ve been and a bastion of public schooling. While I believe deeply in protecting public schooling, I’ve also been driven to question the ways that teachers are trained. If we are not supporting them to take up critical perspectives, then our public schools do not serve our students from historically marginalized backgrounds any more effectively than the charter and private schools that take public funding and reduce access to services and programs in other states. This week I had a student who inadvertently uncovered the racism inherent in our teacher training program.
I had a long conversation about pettiness yesterday and it’s gotten me thinking about compassion. Holding compassion for people can be a strange kind of interest convergence if we’re not careful. Compassion, unchecked, has potential to reinforce racism by forgiving the actions of individuals because of systems. But I also wonder what kind of world we live in if we refuse to let others grow. I don’t believe it’s the job of people of color to have compassion for people who uphold white supremacy. I do wonder if it is perhaps my job. Antero Garcia wrote today that he was tired and so was putting messy words upon and in front of messy words to write. It’s something I avoid because I’m afraid of saying the wrong thing. But what if I wasn’t?
The university has a rubric that is used to determine our teacher-candidates’ readiness for the classroom. Most of the categories are relatively innocuous when taken at face value because they are so open to interpretation. Things like, “communicated clear expectations” or “addresses behavioral concerns” are paired with modeling for students and offering a number of ways for youth to access materials. I have always hated rubrics because they’re so open to interpretation, but I also understand that when they are used as a formative assessment, they can allow candidates to track their own progress and growth. The problem is when a formative assessment is wielded as a weapon to gate keep the profession against people from historically marginalized backgrounds. I do not believe that this wielding is purposeful, but it is all the more insidious because it is invisible to my white colleagues and highly visible to my colleagues of color. This semester, I have a bilingual student of Mexican descent who was unable to meet the targets on the rubric without substantial coaching. The thing is, she was only unable to meet these metrics under a white gaze. This student was translanguaging the entire time she was in the classroom. She was successful in translating her lessons into Spanish for the students in the classroom (which was at least half of the class). She is quiet, but students were not “misbehaving,” they were interacting in Spanish. When I asked the question about how the rubric was developed, nearly all of my colleagues stated that it came from the state education department.
White supremacy is slippery because when addressed for one, the larger issues remain. How are we choosing whose standards to implement? How am I, a white, non-Spanish speaking woman to judge whether youth participation in a classroom that takes place in their language is to be counted?