A Delicate Balance: The Choreography of Equity in the Classroom
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How do we balance the demands of DEI in education with the perennial demands for education to prepare our students for a world that they can only begin to imagine? Our moral imperative as education practitioners is to provide students with an education that allows them to envision and create the society that should be, not what was. In Paulo Frieré’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, he criticizes the (outdated) banking model of education, wherein students are viewed as passive receivers of knowledge, and teachers are viewed as depositors. Talk to any student today and you know they are anything but passive. They come to us with funds of knowledge, so why not cash in? This where we assert that an intentional balance of instructional and assessment techniques are important.
As educators, we all are inundated with the notion that we must provide sound instruction through a scientific and artful approach. And while diversity, equity, and inclusion work in education has been around for a bit, conversations about diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) have become more overt as of late. In our home, conversations about how to artfully weave these educational imperatives together often end without conclusion. Noah, the active practitioner, is constantly balancing the pragmatism needed when working in a challenging building with his dreams of changing the educational experience for his students. Rachel, the practitioner-by-trade-turned-district-consultant, is constantly balancing the systemic undoing of racism in education with the recognition that she supports 50+ schools with myriad unique needs. Oftentimes, our work creates conflict because of the dissonance between enacting big ideas and the daily reality in the school building. The sands of education are constantly shifting beneath our feet, and oftentimes it feels impossible to find solid footing when public and private interests dominate the landscape of education reform. How then is it possible to determine what is best for our students?
Education is a delicate dance. Watch two trained dancers and you will see, when looking at them from afar, art in motion. Rewind the tape and you will see micro-adjustments that are responsive to the moment when someone’s step is slightly off or someone gets off balance. As teachers, we need to recognize that when kids are just not getting it, direct teaching in short bursts is equitable when paired with a more student-centered, inquiry-based model. Enter Frieré’s “problem-posing” approach, which acknowledges students’ strengths and cultural norms, encouraging them to grapple with real-world academic challenges that emulate the challenges they may face in their current and future lives and allows them to “cash in” on the funds of knowledge they bring to the classroom.
We argue, then, that educators must engage in carefully-choreographed dances each day. They do so when selecting developmentally-appropriate learning experiences that are robustly aligned with content standards, purposefully-selected tasks, aligned assessments, and skills that will allow our students to be competitive and successful in the future. When all of these elements are interdependently brought together through intentional instructional design, we truly allow our students to see where they are going, where they are, and most importantly, who they are.
That is equity in action.
Equity is when we consider the individual in front of us and their lived experiences they bring with them. This dance indeed requires us to authentically know our students and to understand what they need in a given moment to truly excel in the modern classroom.
The reality is that this endeavor will often leave you with more questions than answers. For every solution you find, you may find holes needing to be filled. And that is ok. Embrace that dissonance, because in doing so, you will constantly seek ways to get better. Anti-racist pedagogy, by its nature, is contextual and nuanced. DEI work is not new and has been iterated upon for a long time. The science of learning, while changing, has also been around for a long time. What is new, however, is how these two fundamentally important conversations in education intersect. We all are a part of an emerging science, so while being part of the grand experiment is frustrating, remember this— your work, your findings, and your impact not only matter, but will continue to grow our collective consciousness to create a better future society.