About the author
Shauna Brown was the project coordinator for this issue on multiculturalism; she is now a teacher in Montgomery County, MD.
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In it together: teacher networks support multicultural education
PhilWP, Project SEED, and “Going Deeper” have helped teachers grapple with hard issues
by Shauna Brown
For over 15 years, teacher networks in Philadelphia have provided opportunities for teachers to support each other in creating inclusive school climates for all students.
Networks offer a forum for educators to voluntarily engage in hard conversations about race, class, gender, language, religion, and sexual orientation and their role in shaping relationships in schools and the identities of students and staff. The teacher networks develop a cadre of education professionals committed to multicultural education as a tool for educating and empowering all the children in our public school system.
The School District benefits from teacher networks because teachers dedicate personal time and contribute personal resources to improving their practice and their schools. Teachers with varying levels of experience around issues of multicultural education participate.
Support for teacher networks is a plausible, economically viable strategy for developing a homegrown capacity for change.
The Philadelphia Writing Project (PhilWP), Project SEED (Seeking Educational Equity and Diversity), and “Going Deeper” (a teacher-research project) are three such networks that have provided professional development opportunities for diverse groups of educators to discuss multicultural issues and improve their practice.
All three networks are grounded in a belief that inclusive classroom cultures, curriculum, and teaching methods will enhance student achievement. This view is supported by research on culturally relevant pedagogy and curriculum and is embedded in Policy 102, the School District’s multicultural education policy.
PhilWP is the oldest teacher network that has made an explicit commitment to address issues of race, ethnicity, gender, class, sexual identity and culture. PhilWP offers three-week summer institutes at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education for 25 to 30 teachers, and a host of teacher-led professional development sessions throughout the year. About 500 teachers are involved districtwide.
SEED leaders attend a week-long national training which equips them to facilitate SEED seminars upon their return. Since 1990 SEED leaders have been holding monthly three-hour seminars for several groups of about 20 teachers, parents, administrators, or students. Their sessions have been held in schools, churches and other public meeting spaces throughout the city and have engaged educators, parents and administrators.
“The participants are regular people who volunteer to do this work,” commented Paula Paul, a SEED Leader in the North regional office. No formal prior experience with multiculturalism is required.
The “Going Deeper” project was a two-year, Spencer Foundation-funded endeavor in which 10 teachers systematically looked at their own classroom practices. Many of the teachers were PhilWP participants who had attended a District-sponsored multicultural institute and wanted to continue to focus on those issues.
All three networks have established diverse communities of learners from all grade levels, with a wide range of teaching experience and varying levels of experience with issues of multiculturalism.
Beyond heroes, holidays and test scores
PhilWP, SEED, and “Going Deeper” help teachers break the silence and isolation that often limits issues of diversity to celebrations of heroes and holidays. They do this by providing opportunities for teachers to come together across grade level, subject area and experience and to collectively develop strategies to confront the obstacles that they experience in their work.
They also seek to broaden conversations about strategies for school success to include more than analyses of test scores.
“We don’t start with how to help kids achieve better on tests. We start with how you create a vibrant, significantly rounded learning community in your classroom,” explained Susan Lytle, founding member and co-director of PhilWP. “From there we build some understanding of how to help students perform in ways that can be measured by the various measures that are out there.”
In these settings, issues of race, class, gender, sexual orientation and identity are central and seen as integral to teaching practice and the culture of classrooms.
“We can’t take multicultural education aside as a subject. It’s the fabric of what we do,” said Lytle.
To this end, these networks provide safe spaces for participants to hear multiple perspectives, to be self-reflective and self-critical, and to build intellectual professional communities in which they can learn strategies to improve their practice from and with a diverse group of colleagues.
“Knowing yourself and beginning to unveil your own assumptions is really important if you’re going to be doing multiculturalism. If you’re just coming in with material and disseminating it, and you’re not really knowledgeable about it, then what are you really doing? You’re just exposing kids to holidays and customs, or food, but that’s just the surface,” explained Gratz High School teacher Geoff Winikur, who has been involved in both “Going Deeper” and PhilWP.
Models of empowering pedagogy
Facilitators in the networks recognize the diversity of their participants and work to meet people where they are while challenging them to engage in this difficult work. They begin by focusing on the teacher as a learner.
“Our project begins with the assumption that you can’t teach in a way that you haven’t experienced as a learner,” Lytle explained.
Part of this process is helping teachers get accustomed to learning about themselves.
“The most important part of SEED for me was learning about myself as an individual and how my individuality affects my teaching,” said Karen Garrow, a middle school teacher.
The network approach differs from traditional professional development opportunities because it is inquiry-based and shaped by the needs and interests of the participants.
They are not workshops where techniques are taught. Instead they are more like focused conversations fueled by teacher inquiry and collective thought.
“Our professional development contexts are efforts to deal with what’s right in front of people’s faces in classrooms. They try to be real and helpful and specific, and also to suggest that teaching is researching; it is an act of inquiry,” Lytle said.
To this end, networks provide readings, films, and connections to other people as resources for teachers to continue learning. They build intellectual professional communities such as teacher-research groups, that engage in focused conversations around individual teachers’ efforts to take an intentional, systematic look at his/her own practice.
Rethinking classrooms
Through these networks, some teachers come to recognize cultural confrontation as part of the rigorous and robust learning environment in which they live and work.
For example, Bruce Bowers, a veteran middle school teacher, said that his participation in these networks helped him to realize that “classrooms have to be uncomfortable sometimes. They have to be seen as contested spaces where confrontation needs to be acknowledged and seen as part of the process.”
From this perspective, teachers are better prepared for their work in diverse classrooms when they understand that the power dynamics and cultural conflicts that define our world also emerge in the classroom context.
Paul explained, “We’re trying to get people to the point where they realize that you didn’t make [these systems], you didn’t create them, but if you’re not aware of them and you don’t work to counter them, they’ll just go on and you’ll be perpetuating them. Unwillingly, perhaps unknowingly. But, we’re for people being social changers and conscious of what’s going on.”
To this end, Paul says SEED groups have explored issues such as “the concept of white privilege, what is culture, and how to create a classroom that balances the life experiences of children, whoever they are, with the life experiences shared through books and academia.”
SEED and PhilWP participants develop strategies that use writing and literacy to include and honor the voices, experiences, cultures, and identities of students, as well as challenging dominant paradigms that determine which voices get heard and validated in classrooms.
Lana Gold, a retired middle school teacher and “Going Deeper” participant has used her own classroom to explore what happens when she intentionally uses a multicultural curriculum. Geoff Winikur has explored the inclusion of “noncanonical works that raise issues of race and culture and class in deep ways.”
Modest resources are one limit on the impact of networks. For example, this year three SEED groups will operate in the District. This is down from 20 in 1998. District support for SEED has waned significantly, despite its efficacy as a professional development program.
Winikur describes teacher research as “a good form of professional development that the District does almost nothing to support.”
While none of these networks provide all of the answers, they do provide spaces for teachers to discuss and confront problems, and to solve them collectively – an invaluable resource to teachers like Lana Gold who concludes, “It’s all about gains and nothing about losses.”
For more information on Project SEED, call Paula Paul at (215) 438-9319 or e-mail to ppaul@phila.k12.pa.us.
The Philadelphia Writing Project can be reached at (215) 898-1919.
For other organizations working on multicultural education, see Multiculturalism has triggered change across the curriculum.