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For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood... and the Rest of Y'all Too: Reality Pedagogy and Urban Education
A New York Times Best Seller
"Essential reading for all adults who work with black and brown young people...Filled with exceptional intellectual sophistication and necessary wisdom for the future of education."—Imani Perry, National Book Award Winner author of South To America
An award-winning educator offers a much-needed antidote to traditional top-down pedagogy and promises to radically reframe the landscape of urban education for the better
Drawing on his own experience of feeling undervalued and invisible in classrooms as a young man of color, Dr. Christopher Emdin has merged his experiences with more than a decade of teaching and researching in urban America. He takes to task the perception of urban youth of color as unteachable, and he challenges educators to embrace and respect each student’s culture and to reimagine the classroom as a site where roles are reversed and students become the experts in their own learning.
Putting forth his theory of Reality Pedagogy, Emdin provides practical tools to unleash the brilliance and eagerness of youth and educators alike—both of whom have been typecast and stymied by outdated modes of thinking about urban education. With this fresh and engaging new pedagogical vision, Emdin demonstrates the importance of creating a family structure and building communities within the classroom, using culturally relevant strategies like hip-hop music and call-and-response, and connecting the experiences of urban youth to indigenous populations globally.
Merging real stories with theory, research, and practice, Emdin demonstrates how by implementing the “Seven Cs” of reality pedagogy in their own classrooms, urban youth of color benefit from truly transformative education.
"Essential reading for all adults who work with black and brown young people...Filled with exceptional intellectual sophistication and necessary wisdom for the future of education."—Imani Perry, National Book Award Winner author of South To America
An award-winning educator offers a much-needed antidote to traditional top-down pedagogy and promises to radically reframe the landscape of urban education for the better
Drawing on his own experience of feeling undervalued and invisible in classrooms as a young man of color, Dr. Christopher Emdin has merged his experiences with more than a decade of teaching and researching in urban America. He takes to task the perception of urban youth of color as unteachable, and he challenges educators to embrace and respect each student’s culture and to reimagine the classroom as a site where roles are reversed and students become the experts in their own learning.
Putting forth his theory of Reality Pedagogy, Emdin provides practical tools to unleash the brilliance and eagerness of youth and educators alike—both of whom have been typecast and stymied by outdated modes of thinking about urban education. With this fresh and engaging new pedagogical vision, Emdin demonstrates the importance of creating a family structure and building communities within the classroom, using culturally relevant strategies like hip-hop music and call-and-response, and connecting the experiences of urban youth to indigenous populations globally.
Merging real stories with theory, research, and practice, Emdin demonstrates how by implementing the “Seven Cs” of reality pedagogy in their own classrooms, urban youth of color benefit from truly transformative education.
232 pages, Hardcover
First published March 1, 2016
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 521 reviews
February 2, 2017
Handshakes? "Take 'em to church?" This book really and truly is for white folks that teach in the hood.
Here's the trick to effective teaching: see your students as individuals and recognize that they may have a different background or experiences than you. Work hard to reach them anyway and check your biases -- we all have them; don't disregard them, but be aware and acknowledge them.
I'm hesitant to give a harsh review of this book because for someone it may be beneficial. For me, I was waiting for the "aha" moment, the enlightening part, the new information and it never came. But maybe I wasn't the target audience.
Talk to your kids, listen to them, make adjustments accordingly. Don't be so stuck in your preconceptions; ask and assimilate.
Here's the trick to effective teaching: see your students as individuals and recognize that they may have a different background or experiences than you. Work hard to reach them anyway and check your biases -- we all have them; don't disregard them, but be aware and acknowledge them.
I'm hesitant to give a harsh review of this book because for someone it may be beneficial. For me, I was waiting for the "aha" moment, the enlightening part, the new information and it never came. But maybe I wasn't the target audience.
Talk to your kids, listen to them, make adjustments accordingly. Don't be so stuck in your preconceptions; ask and assimilate.
March 8, 2016
Excellent distillation of urban studies, race-gender oriented critical-theory, and education philosophy applied to the urban classroom, for a non-academic audience.
This book was written for me (And for you, too, especially if you teach or are interested in the education debates). A personal anecdote: Kids hang out in my room after school, including many I don't teach (they come with friends). Anyways, the other day, I had to kick everyone out due to a faculty morale-building activity (well so that wasn't the name of the event, but its purpose, close enough). When I told the students where I was going, one of the friends, looked at me and said,
"Why do the teachers need morale building? Is it because they feel so bad working with all the black children?"
I think that's the first time I've experienced the phenomenon known as "mouth gaping open". I was just completely shocked, because the only reason I'm still here, 10 years later, despite all the bull bursting the seams of the system and despite the current atmosphere of teacher-demonization, is my kids.
But, after thinking about it for a moment, the comment made sense: here we are, a staff of majority-white teachers, a 99%-black student body, and there's the news everyday, another black kid getting shot by authorities, droves of teachers leaving the cities (5-year turn-over rate in DC Public Schools where I teach), etc. & so on.
My school is not quite like those Emdin describes, because we are an application school in not-quite-the-poorest part of DC. Teachers at my school have stuck around (not all, but a lot more than in the rest of our District). In Southeast DC, for example, there are some schools that have a turn-over rate of 1-2 years, meaning every other year, 100% new staff is in place. And, we've been making some progress on the issues Emdin describes, like truly engaging children on their own terms. Still, there's so much to learn here, and it saddens me that there really are schools (probably a majority of urban schools, I would not be surprised) where the situation is as bad as described by Emdin.
The other aspect of this work that saddens me is that, read away from the academic world, it might even sound radical, when all it is is a reiteration of basic commonly accepted paradigms in the education-research world. Reminds me of my eternal struggle in grad school: the disconnect between academia and "the real world" (ever notice there are no people with education masters or PhDs making education policy decisions? Next time you wonder why there is an "education crisis" in the US, start here).
Basically, the premise is the obvious fact that we have mostly white teachers imposing pedagogical methods and employing experiences born in privilege, teaching black and hispanic urban children. (Sigh, already I am imagining the hate-filled comments on a Hill or Politico forum if I were to post even just that sentence. Thank goodness this is GoodReads). The problem is even broader, because the entire system is constructed on a structure that privileges some over others (just take a look at American jails as an example). What this means in education is that it's not just white teachers who adopt these pedagogies of subjugation, but really, most teachers, because most have been taught to teach in ways that value obedience, physical rigidity, etc.
Emdin employs the term neoindigenous to draw parallels between colonized indigenous groups and urban students in public schools, and frames urban pedagogy as an extension of Freirean critical pedagogy. Like Freire, who drew from a rich tradition of liberation theology, Emdin uses the black church as a model for implementing the "Seven Cs" of urban reality pedagogy: cogenerative dialogues, coteaching, cosmopolitanism, context, content, competition, and curation. After introducing the framework (25%), the remainder of the book is an exploration of the 7-Cs in practice, with some beautifully illustrated examples.
I have one major complaint, but it's not detracting from my rating: Emdin should have done more to contextualize his research and to broaden its appeal. Sadly, much of the U.S. (judged by The Hill and Politico forums, which I sadly visit too frequently) isn't ready for this, as it stands. I was thinking the whole time, if I was some of the commentators I've seen on said forums, I would be denouncing this book as radical trash. But that just couldn't be farther from the truth: Emdin's research is really no great revolution, I mean, of course it's important, but it's in no way radical based on other prior research. It's just that that research never makes it public, so this may seem to come out of nowhere. I would have appreciated a chapter placing this work in a broader context, explaining it as a logical and natural extension of everything that has come before. That probably wouldn't convince those who believe academia is the spawn of the devil, but still, it'd do something.
*I received a free copy through the GR giveaways program. For which I am eternally grateful, because I needed to read this book, and I should have bought it regardless of whether I won.
This book was written for me (And for you, too, especially if you teach or are interested in the education debates). A personal anecdote: Kids hang out in my room after school, including many I don't teach (they come with friends). Anyways, the other day, I had to kick everyone out due to a faculty morale-building activity (well so that wasn't the name of the event, but its purpose, close enough). When I told the students where I was going, one of the friends, looked at me and said,
"Why do the teachers need morale building? Is it because they feel so bad working with all the black children?"
I think that's the first time I've experienced the phenomenon known as "mouth gaping open". I was just completely shocked, because the only reason I'm still here, 10 years later, despite all the bull bursting the seams of the system and despite the current atmosphere of teacher-demonization, is my kids.
But, after thinking about it for a moment, the comment made sense: here we are, a staff of majority-white teachers, a 99%-black student body, and there's the news everyday, another black kid getting shot by authorities, droves of teachers leaving the cities (5-year turn-over rate in DC Public Schools where I teach), etc. & so on.
My school is not quite like those Emdin describes, because we are an application school in not-quite-the-poorest part of DC. Teachers at my school have stuck around (not all, but a lot more than in the rest of our District). In Southeast DC, for example, there are some schools that have a turn-over rate of 1-2 years, meaning every other year, 100% new staff is in place. And, we've been making some progress on the issues Emdin describes, like truly engaging children on their own terms. Still, there's so much to learn here, and it saddens me that there really are schools (probably a majority of urban schools, I would not be surprised) where the situation is as bad as described by Emdin.
The other aspect of this work that saddens me is that, read away from the academic world, it might even sound radical, when all it is is a reiteration of basic commonly accepted paradigms in the education-research world. Reminds me of my eternal struggle in grad school: the disconnect between academia and "the real world" (ever notice there are no people with education masters or PhDs making education policy decisions? Next time you wonder why there is an "education crisis" in the US, start here).
Basically, the premise is the obvious fact that we have mostly white teachers imposing pedagogical methods and employing experiences born in privilege, teaching black and hispanic urban children. (Sigh, already I am imagining the hate-filled comments on a Hill or Politico forum if I were to post even just that sentence. Thank goodness this is GoodReads). The problem is even broader, because the entire system is constructed on a structure that privileges some over others (just take a look at American jails as an example). What this means in education is that it's not just white teachers who adopt these pedagogies of subjugation, but really, most teachers, because most have been taught to teach in ways that value obedience, physical rigidity, etc.
Emdin employs the term neoindigenous to draw parallels between colonized indigenous groups and urban students in public schools, and frames urban pedagogy as an extension of Freirean critical pedagogy. Like Freire, who drew from a rich tradition of liberation theology, Emdin uses the black church as a model for implementing the "Seven Cs" of urban reality pedagogy: cogenerative dialogues, coteaching, cosmopolitanism, context, content, competition, and curation. After introducing the framework (25%), the remainder of the book is an exploration of the 7-Cs in practice, with some beautifully illustrated examples.
I have one major complaint, but it's not detracting from my rating: Emdin should have done more to contextualize his research and to broaden its appeal. Sadly, much of the U.S. (judged by The Hill and Politico forums, which I sadly visit too frequently) isn't ready for this, as it stands. I was thinking the whole time, if I was some of the commentators I've seen on said forums, I would be denouncing this book as radical trash. But that just couldn't be farther from the truth: Emdin's research is really no great revolution, I mean, of course it's important, but it's in no way radical based on other prior research. It's just that that research never makes it public, so this may seem to come out of nowhere. I would have appreciated a chapter placing this work in a broader context, explaining it as a logical and natural extension of everything that has come before. That probably wouldn't convince those who believe academia is the spawn of the devil, but still, it'd do something.
*I received a free copy through the GR giveaways program. For which I am eternally grateful, because I needed to read this book, and I should have bought it regardless of whether I won.
July 28, 2016
This style of teaching is unreal. The author makes it seem like urban children are hard-wired to rowdy, boisterous, and overly-social, and that we should accept that as part of black and brown culture and recalibrate our teaching to accommodate it. As a black man, I disagree with almost all that he has written....but the author would most likely say that I'm a traitor/sell-out who has stripped myself of my real true identity in order to appease white traditional America...
This man is insane...
If you want to discuss this book, just message me..I have a lot to say.
This man is insane...
If you want to discuss this book, just message me..I have a lot to say.
September 21, 2020
Emdin's main idea is solid: White teachers need to understand and value their students' culture. What is not solid is the practical conclusions for instructional practice that he draws based on this idea. Emdin's suggestions fall into 3 groups: (1) intriguing but WAY too complicated to implement in real life, (2) insultingly simple, and (3) good ideas but nothing new that research hasn't been saying for YEARS.
The thing that most distressed me about the book was Emdin's oversimplification of the process of connecting with your students and their culture. For example: Emdin actually claims that buying and wearing "cool" sneakers like the ones your students are into will create connections with them. Setting aside the problematic assumption that there is a single kind of sneakers (or music, or food, or language, or religion) that all urban students are into, Emdin's recommendation is just insulting. Kids are smart. If a teacher (of any race, but especially a white teacher) suddenly flip-flops on style and starts dressing like them (or pairing Jordans with their work slacks instead of Oxfords), kids will see through the artificiality of the gesture. Does Emdin really think that urban kids are so simple-minded that putting on a pair of Jordans will win their affection and bridge all cultural divides? If so, then he has a greater deficit view of black kids than the teachers he's addressing the book to.
The thing that most distressed me about the book was Emdin's oversimplification of the process of connecting with your students and their culture. For example: Emdin actually claims that buying and wearing "cool" sneakers like the ones your students are into will create connections with them. Setting aside the problematic assumption that there is a single kind of sneakers (or music, or food, or language, or religion) that all urban students are into, Emdin's recommendation is just insulting. Kids are smart. If a teacher (of any race, but especially a white teacher) suddenly flip-flops on style and starts dressing like them (or pairing Jordans with their work slacks instead of Oxfords), kids will see through the artificiality of the gesture. Does Emdin really think that urban kids are so simple-minded that putting on a pair of Jordans will win their affection and bridge all cultural divides? If so, then he has a greater deficit view of black kids than the teachers he's addressing the book to.
February 9, 2017
This review is lengthy and also gets quite personal, since I can’t help but examine For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood …and the Rest of Y’all Too in the light of my own experiences as a teacher.
TL;DR: Christopher Emdin is awesome, and this book is too. It’s short and accessible, but it has such staying power. I wish this were mandatory in teacher training everywhere. Also, minor spoilers for Anne of Green Gables in the next paragraph. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
When I was a wee boy, I read the Anne of Green Gables series, as many Canadian children do. It’s fascinating what sticks with each person from the books they read in their youth. I don’t remember a lot of the series, but of course, I identified with Anne’s desire to become a teacher. And one part stays with me to this day: Anne’s resolve not to use corporal punishment, and the heartbreaking moment she breaks that promise to herself. The feeling of that moment is one that stuck with me as I went through high school and university and completed my own teacher training, and now it is one I understand more completely. While, of course, we teachers today do not use corporal punishment, like Anne most of us begin our careers with naivety and idealism, promising that we will not succumb to the rancour within the system that we want to change. And, inevitably, all of us fall.
After I graduated from my teacher education, I taught in the UK for two years. And boy, do I wish I had this book at the beginning of that journey (though I probably wouldn’t have been as equipped to recognize myself in it at that time). I chose to go to the UK, having decided I wouldn’t be getting a job back home, because it seemed relatively “safe” as far as exotic locales go. There were jobs up North too, but I don’t much enjoy outdoor activities, and I knew that if I didn’t want to participate in those, I wouldn’t fit into the community very well—something Emdin discusses in Chapter 7, Context and Content. I figured a country that produced Monty Python and shared my love of tea would be a good fit for me—and largely it was. But teaching there was still challenging, and while the school where I taught was not poor per se, the socioeconomic status of its students was definitely lower than in other parts of the UK. While the students were largely white, there was a diversity of ethnicities, from British students to Polish, Latvian, Lithuanian, Portuguese, and other children of immigrant parents. Combine this with an education system that is literally the antecedent of the oppressive systems in place in Canada and the US, and you have a population of students who largely don’t see the value in what they are doing every day. And I can’t blame them.
I won’t be too hard on myself: I think, by and large, I was a good teacher while in the UK. I was new and inexperienced, of course, so I made a lot of the typical noob mistakes. I yelled (a lot). I got frustrated when I felt the students were not appreciative of my brilliance and my dedication and my oh-so-intricate lesson-planning. I made myself sick (like, shingles sick). Still, I enjoyed my time there. I loved living in the UK; I loved my colleagues; I even loved the students, as challenging as they might have been. I learned a great deal and grew, both as a teacher and as a person, and it will indubitably become one of the most significant and formative periods of my career and my life.
Nevertheless, I recognize myself in many of the mistakes or missteps that Emdin shares in For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood. Some of these come from teachers he has observed, but some of them come from his own experience, and I really admire someone who can own up to their mistakes. If there is a common thread throughout the chapters of this book, it pertains to one’s attitude as a teacher. Somewhere along the way, thanks to the droning of academia we inhabit during our training, and the pressures of the system we inhabit during our employment, we form a lot of assumptions about what “teaching” and effective teaching looks like. And Emdin is really keen on the idea that we need to have more of an open mind. We need to remember we can learn from our students, and that we can make mistakes—and that this is not the end of the world. Most importantly, the things we try and implement, whether they are suggestions from this book or any of the others out there, are not quick fixes. Real change and real improvements to teaching and learning take time.
I follow a fair number of educators and educationally-minded folks on Twitter, or through other venues. However, I largely stay out of the ed chats. I’m a bit disenchanted with the amount of buzzwords and lingo that fly around on social media; it feels a little like I haven’t escaped university still. Don’t get me wrong—there are so many awesome teachers out there sharing real experiences and actual ideas and lesson plans with each other, and I try to look for and pay attention to them. These pieces of gold are mixed up in less interesting conversations, at least to me—do I really care if the buzzword of the week is empowerment or engagement? Why should I compete to see who can shove more synonyms for “differentiated student-led student-centred inquiry-based rich open high-ceiling” lesson into 140 characters?
What I’m saying is that while social media offers a great deal of promise for its ability to connect educators, there is also a temptation to communicate very shallowly. Hyping up buzzwords might make us feel good and re-energize us with respect to the practice of teaching—and that might be fine in the short-term. But it’s also important to have discussions that reach past the most popular language and concepts of the day. One thing I find so compelling about For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood is how it kind of does both: Emdin certainly coins his share of buzzwords, from reality pedagogy to cogens and cosmo duos, but he also backs this flash up with substance. The result is a book that both reinvigorates my enthusiasm for teaching and leaves me with very practical ideas for experiments I can try in my classroom.
I’ve seen some criticism levelled at the dearth of research to back up this book. Firstly, I’m not seeing it—every chapter has references that Emdin draws on. Secondly, it means one has probably missed the point, because this entire book is predicated on the idea that pedagogy as it stands is biased towards academic (code for white) research that marginalizes and erases other ways of knowing. There is so much research in this book—but it’s research that Emdin has collected in ways not necessarily kosher among academics. It’s personal and experiential but no less valid for it. And you are free to disagree with that, but it’s disingenuous to expect this book to be anything else when Emdin signals it upfront at the end of the first chapter:
Fun story, since clearly I haven’t spent enough time being personal in this review already: during my teacher training year, multiple professors told me I should think about applying to the Masters in Education program. They meant that I should do it before I had even taught in a classroom. I was shocked by the idea that they thought I could try to tell other people how to teach without having taught myself! Now, they meant well, and it was flattering that they had such high regard for my academic abilities and my potential as an educator—but it was also clear to me, then and now, that they spoke from a position so completely divorced from the reality of the classroom. Theirs was the area of the professor, the academic, the researcher. But I knew that, while I could easily spend the rest of my days lounging around university soaking up more credits, if I wanted to be a good teacher, I needed to get out of that space and get into classrooms.
Emdin sticks to this idea for the rest of the book: reality pedagogy is about what we really have to work with in our classrooms, not what we might want to have, or dream of having, or what the curriculum, tests, or administrators tell us we should have. We teachers tend to forget that sometimes, if we ever knew it in the first place. I was certainly guilty of it in the UK: I got so caught up in doing what I felt I was “expected” to do, from enforcing stupid uniform codes to preparing students for their GCSEs, that I forgot I should, you know, actually be trying to help them become better people. Part of my journey post-UK has been towards becoming more “fearless” when it comes to what I actually do, day to day, to help my students learn.
Confronting the reality of the students one has also means, for me as a white person, confronting a very pernicious facet of my white privilege: entitlement. White people tend to get told that the universe owes them, and that their anger and disgruntlement when the universe reneges on that “promise” is totally justified (whereas the anger of Black and Indigenous and other groups is threatening). Growing up we’re told we will get careers handed to us out of school (that proved a huge lie). Teachers, so fresh and ready to “make a difference” and so secure in their knowledge of the content, feel like they deserve students who are likewise “ready to learn.” I know I did. Even now I still occasionally yearn for a mythical classroom of 14–18-year-olds who just want to learn calculus and read novels and have great intellectual discussions, as if those children or those moments will somehow exist in a vacuum.
Pop that bubble, and we see the world for the more complicated place it is. As Emdin articulates in this book, it’s not that students in urban environments are unready to learn: it that’s the systems in place do not recognize their expressions of readiness or validate their modes of learning. He coins the term neoindigenous so that he can liken these students’ experiences to those of Indigenous populations, which for the past several centuries have been subject to colonial policies designed to exterminate them through a combination of assimilation and outright genocide. Similarly, many of our educational practices extend this colonial mindset to the neoindigenous, rewarding students for “acting white” or for fulfilling our racist idea of what a “good” student behaves like.
This makes sense to me. Moreover, while I do not “teach in the hood”, I do work largely with Indigenous students these days in my capacity as an adult education teacher. So they have been through the traumas of the regular school system and, for whatever reason, didn’t succeed enough to get their diploma. Hence, much of what Emdin discusses resonates with me and reflects what I myself have been seeing in the year and a half I’ve been doing this.
That’s the …and the Rest of Y'all Too part of the title, of course, and it’s why this book is so good and should be mandatory everywhere teachers are trained. While Emdin’s own experience and practices are rooted in urban schools with predominantly Black populations, meaning he draws from hip hop culture, that doesn’t make his pedagogy or his suggestions any less relevant for other types of students. It just means that the specific cultural context will be different. The underlying ideas are the same: listen to the students, work with them, be open to criticism and changing your teaching style, and try to involve the wider community.
I’m looking forward to trying out Emdin’s ideas. Some of them are simple and won’t take too much effort to try; others require a little adaptation for my particular situation. Some will work out; others might not—such is the nature of experimentation. I’m not expecting it to be easy. But I’m convinced it’s worth that effort for me to be a better teacher, and for my students to get more out of their time with me.
My time in the UK was invaluable, and I learned a lot. That system tho! The system ground me down and nearly spat me back out, and I know I’m not alone—it’s no wonder so many teachers leave the profession that entire agencies make their money by recruiting overseas. It’s not education; it’s industrial warehousing of children until they can be press-ganged into the workforce. And I have so much empathy for my UK and US colleagues who are trapped in a hell of standardized tests, school inspections, and administrators who care more about appearances than actual learning.
It’s not all roses here in Ontario, but I think it’s a little better (and I certainly have a fair amount of freedom in adult education that I don’t have even in an Ontario high school classroom). Even so, one of the first and most daunting hurdles to reality pedagogy must be that fear of what happens if you screw up and something “doesn’t work” and suddenly you feel you’re behind on “curriculum” or haven’t prepared your students for that major test. And I really just want to say … so what? Curriculum is important, and it’s there for a reason—but it’s not the reason, if you get me. Tests can be useful, data can be useful, but it shouldn’t be an end unto itself. If you get caught up in that thinking, you’re not focusing on what teaching should be.
In my Philosophy of Education class, we once had a debate about whether education should/could be neutral or political. I maintained, and still maintain, even more fervently today, that education neither cannot nor should not be neutral. Education is inherently political; educating people is a political act. As a teacher, you are engaging in those politics every time you walk into that classroom, whether you work with the system or push back against it. Emdin summarizes it so well in the conclusion: “It essentially boils down to whether one chooses to do damage to the system or to the student.”
The more I look back at my teacher training, the more I think about how it didn’t prepare me for being a teacher. All due respect to my teachers, because they cared and knew their stuff, and I enjoyed my time there. The very structure and assumptions of the program, however, need reworking. The best moments were when we got to engage with teachers who were still connected to the classroom. One Grade 7/8 teacher came in and told us that if we didn’t look back at our first two years of teaching with horror, we shouldn’t keep teaching (and he was totally right). I also had the opportunity to go listen to Christopher Emdin speak when he came to Thunder Bay, which is how he first came on my radar. I still haven’t read his first book, but I will hopefully get to it sooner now. I’m really happy I pre-ordered For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood, even though now I’m giving away this heavily annotated copy to a colleague and buying a few more as gifts … because I think every teacher needs to read this.
Teaching, for me, is all about critically examining what I do and the assumptions I have, and changing. Nothing stays still in this world, so why should my teaching? This book provides another opportunity to help me do that. While, at times, it reminded me of uncomfortable moments or made me cringe as I remembered less-proud actions, reading this is a largely positive, uplifting experience. It’s inspirational, but it is also not empty: Emdin presents eminently actionable ideas. The result is a balance between theory and practice. And that’s all I got, because it’s time to stop talking about this stuff and start doing it.
TL;DR: Christopher Emdin is awesome, and this book is too. It’s short and accessible, but it has such staying power. I wish this were mandatory in teacher training everywhere. Also, minor spoilers for Anne of Green Gables in the next paragraph. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
When I was a wee boy, I read the Anne of Green Gables series, as many Canadian children do. It’s fascinating what sticks with each person from the books they read in their youth. I don’t remember a lot of the series, but of course, I identified with Anne’s desire to become a teacher. And one part stays with me to this day: Anne’s resolve not to use corporal punishment, and the heartbreaking moment she breaks that promise to herself. The feeling of that moment is one that stuck with me as I went through high school and university and completed my own teacher training, and now it is one I understand more completely. While, of course, we teachers today do not use corporal punishment, like Anne most of us begin our careers with naivety and idealism, promising that we will not succumb to the rancour within the system that we want to change. And, inevitably, all of us fall.
After I graduated from my teacher education, I taught in the UK for two years. And boy, do I wish I had this book at the beginning of that journey (though I probably wouldn’t have been as equipped to recognize myself in it at that time). I chose to go to the UK, having decided I wouldn’t be getting a job back home, because it seemed relatively “safe” as far as exotic locales go. There were jobs up North too, but I don’t much enjoy outdoor activities, and I knew that if I didn’t want to participate in those, I wouldn’t fit into the community very well—something Emdin discusses in Chapter 7, Context and Content. I figured a country that produced Monty Python and shared my love of tea would be a good fit for me—and largely it was. But teaching there was still challenging, and while the school where I taught was not poor per se, the socioeconomic status of its students was definitely lower than in other parts of the UK. While the students were largely white, there was a diversity of ethnicities, from British students to Polish, Latvian, Lithuanian, Portuguese, and other children of immigrant parents. Combine this with an education system that is literally the antecedent of the oppressive systems in place in Canada and the US, and you have a population of students who largely don’t see the value in what they are doing every day. And I can’t blame them.
I won’t be too hard on myself: I think, by and large, I was a good teacher while in the UK. I was new and inexperienced, of course, so I made a lot of the typical noob mistakes. I yelled (a lot). I got frustrated when I felt the students were not appreciative of my brilliance and my dedication and my oh-so-intricate lesson-planning. I made myself sick (like, shingles sick). Still, I enjoyed my time there. I loved living in the UK; I loved my colleagues; I even loved the students, as challenging as they might have been. I learned a great deal and grew, both as a teacher and as a person, and it will indubitably become one of the most significant and formative periods of my career and my life.
Nevertheless, I recognize myself in many of the mistakes or missteps that Emdin shares in For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood. Some of these come from teachers he has observed, but some of them come from his own experience, and I really admire someone who can own up to their mistakes. If there is a common thread throughout the chapters of this book, it pertains to one’s attitude as a teacher. Somewhere along the way, thanks to the droning of academia we inhabit during our training, and the pressures of the system we inhabit during our employment, we form a lot of assumptions about what “teaching” and effective teaching looks like. And Emdin is really keen on the idea that we need to have more of an open mind. We need to remember we can learn from our students, and that we can make mistakes—and that this is not the end of the world. Most importantly, the things we try and implement, whether they are suggestions from this book or any of the others out there, are not quick fixes. Real change and real improvements to teaching and learning take time.
I follow a fair number of educators and educationally-minded folks on Twitter, or through other venues. However, I largely stay out of the ed chats. I’m a bit disenchanted with the amount of buzzwords and lingo that fly around on social media; it feels a little like I haven’t escaped university still. Don’t get me wrong—there are so many awesome teachers out there sharing real experiences and actual ideas and lesson plans with each other, and I try to look for and pay attention to them. These pieces of gold are mixed up in less interesting conversations, at least to me—do I really care if the buzzword of the week is empowerment or engagement? Why should I compete to see who can shove more synonyms for “differentiated student-led student-centred inquiry-based rich open high-ceiling” lesson into 140 characters?
What I’m saying is that while social media offers a great deal of promise for its ability to connect educators, there is also a temptation to communicate very shallowly. Hyping up buzzwords might make us feel good and re-energize us with respect to the practice of teaching—and that might be fine in the short-term. But it’s also important to have discussions that reach past the most popular language and concepts of the day. One thing I find so compelling about For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood is how it kind of does both: Emdin certainly coins his share of buzzwords, from reality pedagogy to cogens and cosmo duos, but he also backs this flash up with substance. The result is a book that both reinvigorates my enthusiasm for teaching and leaves me with very practical ideas for experiments I can try in my classroom.
I’ve seen some criticism levelled at the dearth of research to back up this book. Firstly, I’m not seeing it—every chapter has references that Emdin draws on. Secondly, it means one has probably missed the point, because this entire book is predicated on the idea that pedagogy as it stands is biased towards academic (code for white) research that marginalizes and erases other ways of knowing. There is so much research in this book—but it’s research that Emdin has collected in ways not necessarily kosher among academics. It’s personal and experiential but no less valid for it. And you are free to disagree with that, but it’s disingenuous to expect this book to be anything else when Emdin signals it upfront at the end of the first chapter:
Reality pedagogy does not draw its cues from “classroom experts” who are far removed from real schools, or from researchers who make suggestions for the best ways to teach “urban,” “suburban,” and “rural” youth based on their perceptions of what makes sense for classrooms.
Fun story, since clearly I haven’t spent enough time being personal in this review already: during my teacher training year, multiple professors told me I should think about applying to the Masters in Education program. They meant that I should do it before I had even taught in a classroom. I was shocked by the idea that they thought I could try to tell other people how to teach without having taught myself! Now, they meant well, and it was flattering that they had such high regard for my academic abilities and my potential as an educator—but it was also clear to me, then and now, that they spoke from a position so completely divorced from the reality of the classroom. Theirs was the area of the professor, the academic, the researcher. But I knew that, while I could easily spend the rest of my days lounging around university soaking up more credits, if I wanted to be a good teacher, I needed to get out of that space and get into classrooms.
Emdin sticks to this idea for the rest of the book: reality pedagogy is about what we really have to work with in our classrooms, not what we might want to have, or dream of having, or what the curriculum, tests, or administrators tell us we should have. We teachers tend to forget that sometimes, if we ever knew it in the first place. I was certainly guilty of it in the UK: I got so caught up in doing what I felt I was “expected” to do, from enforcing stupid uniform codes to preparing students for their GCSEs, that I forgot I should, you know, actually be trying to help them become better people. Part of my journey post-UK has been towards becoming more “fearless” when it comes to what I actually do, day to day, to help my students learn.
Confronting the reality of the students one has also means, for me as a white person, confronting a very pernicious facet of my white privilege: entitlement. White people tend to get told that the universe owes them, and that their anger and disgruntlement when the universe reneges on that “promise” is totally justified (whereas the anger of Black and Indigenous and other groups is threatening). Growing up we’re told we will get careers handed to us out of school (that proved a huge lie). Teachers, so fresh and ready to “make a difference” and so secure in their knowledge of the content, feel like they deserve students who are likewise “ready to learn.” I know I did. Even now I still occasionally yearn for a mythical classroom of 14–18-year-olds who just want to learn calculus and read novels and have great intellectual discussions, as if those children or those moments will somehow exist in a vacuum.
Pop that bubble, and we see the world for the more complicated place it is. As Emdin articulates in this book, it’s not that students in urban environments are unready to learn: it that’s the systems in place do not recognize their expressions of readiness or validate their modes of learning. He coins the term neoindigenous so that he can liken these students’ experiences to those of Indigenous populations, which for the past several centuries have been subject to colonial policies designed to exterminate them through a combination of assimilation and outright genocide. Similarly, many of our educational practices extend this colonial mindset to the neoindigenous, rewarding students for “acting white” or for fulfilling our racist idea of what a “good” student behaves like.
This makes sense to me. Moreover, while I do not “teach in the hood”, I do work largely with Indigenous students these days in my capacity as an adult education teacher. So they have been through the traumas of the regular school system and, for whatever reason, didn’t succeed enough to get their diploma. Hence, much of what Emdin discusses resonates with me and reflects what I myself have been seeing in the year and a half I’ve been doing this.
That’s the …and the Rest of Y'all Too part of the title, of course, and it’s why this book is so good and should be mandatory everywhere teachers are trained. While Emdin’s own experience and practices are rooted in urban schools with predominantly Black populations, meaning he draws from hip hop culture, that doesn’t make his pedagogy or his suggestions any less relevant for other types of students. It just means that the specific cultural context will be different. The underlying ideas are the same: listen to the students, work with them, be open to criticism and changing your teaching style, and try to involve the wider community.
I’m looking forward to trying out Emdin’s ideas. Some of them are simple and won’t take too much effort to try; others require a little adaptation for my particular situation. Some will work out; others might not—such is the nature of experimentation. I’m not expecting it to be easy. But I’m convinced it’s worth that effort for me to be a better teacher, and for my students to get more out of their time with me.
My time in the UK was invaluable, and I learned a lot. That system tho! The system ground me down and nearly spat me back out, and I know I’m not alone—it’s no wonder so many teachers leave the profession that entire agencies make their money by recruiting overseas. It’s not education; it’s industrial warehousing of children until they can be press-ganged into the workforce. And I have so much empathy for my UK and US colleagues who are trapped in a hell of standardized tests, school inspections, and administrators who care more about appearances than actual learning.
It’s not all roses here in Ontario, but I think it’s a little better (and I certainly have a fair amount of freedom in adult education that I don’t have even in an Ontario high school classroom). Even so, one of the first and most daunting hurdles to reality pedagogy must be that fear of what happens if you screw up and something “doesn’t work” and suddenly you feel you’re behind on “curriculum” or haven’t prepared your students for that major test. And I really just want to say … so what? Curriculum is important, and it’s there for a reason—but it’s not the reason, if you get me. Tests can be useful, data can be useful, but it shouldn’t be an end unto itself. If you get caught up in that thinking, you’re not focusing on what teaching should be.
In my Philosophy of Education class, we once had a debate about whether education should/could be neutral or political. I maintained, and still maintain, even more fervently today, that education neither cannot nor should not be neutral. Education is inherently political; educating people is a political act. As a teacher, you are engaging in those politics every time you walk into that classroom, whether you work with the system or push back against it. Emdin summarizes it so well in the conclusion: “It essentially boils down to whether one chooses to do damage to the system or to the student.”
The more I look back at my teacher training, the more I think about how it didn’t prepare me for being a teacher. All due respect to my teachers, because they cared and knew their stuff, and I enjoyed my time there. The very structure and assumptions of the program, however, need reworking. The best moments were when we got to engage with teachers who were still connected to the classroom. One Grade 7/8 teacher came in and told us that if we didn’t look back at our first two years of teaching with horror, we shouldn’t keep teaching (and he was totally right). I also had the opportunity to go listen to Christopher Emdin speak when he came to Thunder Bay, which is how he first came on my radar. I still haven’t read his first book, but I will hopefully get to it sooner now. I’m really happy I pre-ordered For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood, even though now I’m giving away this heavily annotated copy to a colleague and buying a few more as gifts … because I think every teacher needs to read this.
Teaching, for me, is all about critically examining what I do and the assumptions I have, and changing. Nothing stays still in this world, so why should my teaching? This book provides another opportunity to help me do that. While, at times, it reminded me of uncomfortable moments or made me cringe as I remembered less-proud actions, reading this is a largely positive, uplifting experience. It’s inspirational, but it is also not empty: Emdin presents eminently actionable ideas. The result is a balance between theory and practice. And that’s all I got, because it’s time to stop talking about this stuff and start doing it.
January 8, 2017
For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood...and the Rest of Y'all Too: Reality Pedagogy and Urban Eduction, by Christopher Emdin, is a fascinating and exciting work that challenges teachers who work in urban environments "in the hood" as to how they approach their work, adapt their teaching practice to the needs and the strengths of their students, and reflect upon their own biases and willingness to change.
The book brought to the surface assumptions I was unaware that I even had which was, at times, uncomfortable. On the other hand, there were so many concrete suggestions as to how to create classrooms that were more authentic learning spaces that I left my pride behind.
Emdin refers to the urban population of students of colors as neoindigenous and compares much of current educational practice to the way in which Native American students were taught 100 years ago. He talks of the socioemotional violence that demands that students leave their culture and own ways of being outside of the culture and are forced to conform to behavioral/learning norms that have little or nothing to do with them. While he acknowledges the need to help students learn how to function within the dominant culture, he primarily addresses the urgency of celebrating these students' own culture and ways of learning so that their brilliance can be seen as well as experienced by themselves.
The continuing "achievement gaps" indicate that our current paradigms of "interventions" are not working. Emdin presents practical strategies such as co-teaching with the students, connecting context to content, and enlisting student input into classroom practice in authentic ways as some of the means of achieving what he refers to as a "cosmopolitan classroom": one in which a variety of experiences and means of learning are not only permitted but also celebrated.
I strongly recommend this book to anyone teaching in urban environments with students of color as well as to anyone who is interested in education. Emdin's writing is compulsively readable and his concepts are dynamic and challenge preconceptions people may have about "those" children's ability to connect with the educational experience, engage with content and enjoy academic success.
My thanks to LibraryThing which gave me this book in exchange for an honest review.
The book brought to the surface assumptions I was unaware that I even had which was, at times, uncomfortable. On the other hand, there were so many concrete suggestions as to how to create classrooms that were more authentic learning spaces that I left my pride behind.
Emdin refers to the urban population of students of colors as neoindigenous and compares much of current educational practice to the way in which Native American students were taught 100 years ago. He talks of the socioemotional violence that demands that students leave their culture and own ways of being outside of the culture and are forced to conform to behavioral/learning norms that have little or nothing to do with them. While he acknowledges the need to help students learn how to function within the dominant culture, he primarily addresses the urgency of celebrating these students' own culture and ways of learning so that their brilliance can be seen as well as experienced by themselves.
The continuing "achievement gaps" indicate that our current paradigms of "interventions" are not working. Emdin presents practical strategies such as co-teaching with the students, connecting context to content, and enlisting student input into classroom practice in authentic ways as some of the means of achieving what he refers to as a "cosmopolitan classroom": one in which a variety of experiences and means of learning are not only permitted but also celebrated.
I strongly recommend this book to anyone teaching in urban environments with students of color as well as to anyone who is interested in education. Emdin's writing is compulsively readable and his concepts are dynamic and challenge preconceptions people may have about "those" children's ability to connect with the educational experience, engage with content and enjoy academic success.
My thanks to LibraryThing which gave me this book in exchange for an honest review.
June 29, 2017
I'm glad I read this. It has a lot of rich passages and chapters that reminded me of what a highly engaged classroom can look like for kids from "the hood". My overall take on the book, though, is that it would have been a good book for me to read 10 years ago, when I was still new to the profession of teaching--and new to teaching kids from "the hood". The *now* me would have liked to have seen Dr. Emdin use the phrase "cultural appropriation" just once. (Just once!!) So, white teachers, please think twice before you try to rap in class, or before you buy those shoes all the kids are wearing, or before you take a "hood tour" (all things Emdin recommended). Think twice about your positionality so that you might avoid taking any of these recommendations and doing more harm with your whiteness.
November 10, 2017
Christopher Emdin is no LouAnne Johnson. She’s best known for her book “My Posse Don't Do Homework”, which served as — very loosely — the basis for the movie Dangerous Minds, starring Michelle Pfeiffer. But her tour de force is her primer on teaching in urban schools, Two Parts Textbook, One Part Love: A Recipe for Successful Teaching — the greatest book I’ve ever read on teaching. Period!
It would be unfair to compare For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood... and the Rest of Y’all Too: Reality Pedagogy and Urban Education to Two Parts Textbook, One Part Love, so I won’t. Emdin makes some good points: too often, it’s idealistic, inexperienced white teachers who get sent into “challenging” schools, where the population is 99 percent black or brown. They expect their students to be dangerous, disruptive and defiant — and, through cultural insensitivity and sheer inexperience, often reap exactly that. Unprepared, these teachers flee the schools — if not the profession — as soon as they can, creating a constant cycle of newbie teachers and ineffective teaching for students who need good teachers the most. Emdin has some good advice about checking stereotyped expectations, effective teaching style and getting to know your students — good advice no matter where you teach; however, Emdin takes a while to get to each point. This 220-page text could have been sheared in half and been the better for it. And some of Emdin’s advice would strike any experienced teacher as — well, insane. Co-teach regularly with students? Forget about classroom management? Exhuberance and cultural sensitivity is one thing; chaos is another.
Not bad (except for the classroom management advice), but Beverly Daniel Tatum’s “Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?”: A Psychologist Explains the Development of Racial Identity and, of course, Two Parts Textbook, One Part Love are much, much better.
It would be unfair to compare For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood... and the Rest of Y’all Too: Reality Pedagogy and Urban Education to Two Parts Textbook, One Part Love, so I won’t. Emdin makes some good points: too often, it’s idealistic, inexperienced white teachers who get sent into “challenging” schools, where the population is 99 percent black or brown. They expect their students to be dangerous, disruptive and defiant — and, through cultural insensitivity and sheer inexperience, often reap exactly that. Unprepared, these teachers flee the schools — if not the profession — as soon as they can, creating a constant cycle of newbie teachers and ineffective teaching for students who need good teachers the most. Emdin has some good advice about checking stereotyped expectations, effective teaching style and getting to know your students — good advice no matter where you teach; however, Emdin takes a while to get to each point. This 220-page text could have been sheared in half and been the better for it. And some of Emdin’s advice would strike any experienced teacher as — well, insane. Co-teach regularly with students? Forget about classroom management? Exhuberance and cultural sensitivity is one thing; chaos is another.
Not bad (except for the classroom management advice), but Beverly Daniel Tatum’s “Why Are All The Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?”: A Psychologist Explains the Development of Racial Identity and, of course, Two Parts Textbook, One Part Love are much, much better.
April 4, 2016
Teachers are taught to use evidence-supported pedagogy. Unfortunately, much of teacher education is based on unsupported flashy-idea pedagogy and catchphrases that change rapidly. If you are looking for pedagogy supported by evidence or quantitative or even deep qualitative research, this is simply not the book. For a book with 210 pages, five pages of notes or one piece of research per chapter is simply not enough.
What is unfortunate is that Dr. Emdin scratches the surface of ideas that have potential to be developed into more complete academic work. He starts the book out with a thunderous and enticing entrance with a Carlisle School comparison, but he lets his ideas float away or disappear without evidence or thoughtful development in to an soft thud of a conclusion.
An analysis of the conclusion chapter captures how this work falls short. First, it is not a conclusion of the book as much as it is a completely different set of suggestions. Like the rest of the book, it is unsupported by evidence of any substantial sort while still full of claims. Emdin offers eight generic suggestions to support teachers (pg.207-8):
1. The way a teacher teaches can be traced back to the way a teacher has been taught.
2. The longer teachers teach, the better they are at their practice.
3. The effectiveness of the teacher can be traced directly back to what that teacher thinks of the student.
4. How successful the teacher is in the classroom is directly related to how successful the teacher thinks the students can be.
5. You cannot teach someone you do not believe in.
6. Planning for your lesson is valuable, but being willing to let go of the plan is even more so.
7. Continued effort in teaching more effectively inevitably results in more effective teaching.
8. The kind of teacher you will become is directly related to the kind of teacher you associate with.
I will let you draw your own conclusions on his advice but for me it is just as empty as an after school professional development run by the department of education. Emdin's book has interesting ideas, he has some compelling thoughts, he starts some interesting conversations, but the book finishes a confused mess of jargon and unsupported claims that left me more confused and frustrated than supported.
What is unfortunate is that Dr. Emdin scratches the surface of ideas that have potential to be developed into more complete academic work. He starts the book out with a thunderous and enticing entrance with a Carlisle School comparison, but he lets his ideas float away or disappear without evidence or thoughtful development in to an soft thud of a conclusion.
An analysis of the conclusion chapter captures how this work falls short. First, it is not a conclusion of the book as much as it is a completely different set of suggestions. Like the rest of the book, it is unsupported by evidence of any substantial sort while still full of claims. Emdin offers eight generic suggestions to support teachers (pg.207-8):
1. The way a teacher teaches can be traced back to the way a teacher has been taught.
2. The longer teachers teach, the better they are at their practice.
3. The effectiveness of the teacher can be traced directly back to what that teacher thinks of the student.
4. How successful the teacher is in the classroom is directly related to how successful the teacher thinks the students can be.
5. You cannot teach someone you do not believe in.
6. Planning for your lesson is valuable, but being willing to let go of the plan is even more so.
7. Continued effort in teaching more effectively inevitably results in more effective teaching.
8. The kind of teacher you will become is directly related to the kind of teacher you associate with.
I will let you draw your own conclusions on his advice but for me it is just as empty as an after school professional development run by the department of education. Emdin's book has interesting ideas, he has some compelling thoughts, he starts some interesting conversations, but the book finishes a confused mess of jargon and unsupported claims that left me more confused and frustrated than supported.
April 3, 2016
Should be required reading in teacher education programs. I wish I had read a book like this when I was an undergrad education major. Twenty four years in the classroom later, all of this book rings true to me.
April 27, 2016
This book was hard to read as a "white folk who taught in the hood" because it made me very aware of the hundreds of things I did wrong and the privilege I did not check nearly enough during my time in the classroom. I think it's definitely, 100% worth reading if you plan to teach in a school that serves students of color.
That being said, this book focuses primarily on teaching black students, which made it less personally relevant to my own teaching experience; almost 100% of my students were Latino and recent immigrants. This book didn't reference the nuances of teaching this demographic. I also wish that the book had addressed the aspects of the education climate that make implementing a lot of the author's suggestions extremely difficult. For example, the author cites an example from his "cosmopolitan" classroom where the class's assigned "blackboard eraser" skipped class one day, so the board didn't get erased and students weren't able to take notes. I agree that this is a valuable teaching moment, but it would be nearly impossible to get away with in a school climate that has a death-grip on every second of instructional time.
I also felt uncomfortable by some of the author's suggestions for reality pedagogy, which include things like wearing articles of clothing that are popular with students to show them that you respect their culture. While I loved what he said about how teachers should value and appreciate their students' style and culture, I think that me showing up to school in a pair of Jordans would have been construed as cultural appropriation or mockery.
I'm being negative, but again, this book is totally worth reading. I enjoyed it and learned a lot.
That being said, this book focuses primarily on teaching black students, which made it less personally relevant to my own teaching experience; almost 100% of my students were Latino and recent immigrants. This book didn't reference the nuances of teaching this demographic. I also wish that the book had addressed the aspects of the education climate that make implementing a lot of the author's suggestions extremely difficult. For example, the author cites an example from his "cosmopolitan" classroom where the class's assigned "blackboard eraser" skipped class one day, so the board didn't get erased and students weren't able to take notes. I agree that this is a valuable teaching moment, but it would be nearly impossible to get away with in a school climate that has a death-grip on every second of instructional time.
I also felt uncomfortable by some of the author's suggestions for reality pedagogy, which include things like wearing articles of clothing that are popular with students to show them that you respect their culture. While I loved what he said about how teachers should value and appreciate their students' style and culture, I think that me showing up to school in a pair of Jordans would have been construed as cultural appropriation or mockery.
I'm being negative, but again, this book is totally worth reading. I enjoyed it and learned a lot.
January 14, 2020
I really enjoyed this book! I’ve just recently accepted an offer with Teach For America in Tennessee and have been doing a lot of thinking about what it means to be a white woman from the Northeast entering a community that’s not my own, is majority POC, and declaring authority over knowledge and education.
After reading this, I’m not excited to teach- I’m excited to learn. I am feeling privileged to have the opportunity to enter this community and learn from students themselves about how the education system has failed them, and what I can do to support, excite, and encourage them despite the tragedy of this system.
While I haven’t begun teaching yet, I anticipate that I will use a lot of the explicit lessons/class structures the author offers. I appreciate how clearly and thoroughly he outlines and explains his strategies and their goal impact.
After reading this, I’m not excited to teach- I’m excited to learn. I am feeling privileged to have the opportunity to enter this community and learn from students themselves about how the education system has failed them, and what I can do to support, excite, and encourage them despite the tragedy of this system.
While I haven’t begun teaching yet, I anticipate that I will use a lot of the explicit lessons/class structures the author offers. I appreciate how clearly and thoroughly he outlines and explains his strategies and their goal impact.
April 3, 2017
A great topic to talk about but he repeats himself and rambles and takes too long to get his tips across. Maybe it's good for total newbies?? I feel like it could have been tightened up. Also, some of his tips aren't helpful for the average teachers. Who has time to play b-ball after work with kids(much less enough skill to be allowed to play with them?) or the flexibility to form rap sessions in class in a regular basis?
February 11, 2017
Emdin discusses the importance of engaging neoindigenous context as a pedagogical tool, particularly by teachers who don't share the cultural background of their students. Truly an average rating: I either loved a chapter or I hated it. There's a lot of anthro/soc, which I love, and the book certainly challenges what's comfortable/necessary/possible in the classroom. The thing that bothered me most was the arrogance in how one-sided the discussion of context was, which strikes me as unsustainable and rigid in prescription. For a book so predicated on considering individual and group context, there seemed to be one type of kid from the hood, one type of majority culture teacher, and one solution. On a minor note, I also couldn't handle any of the stilted classroom scenarios and I cringed through all of the example dialogue. Recommended for educators who are ready to hear they're not doing it right.
February 5, 2021
There are some really valuable pieces of knowledge in this book. However, I felt, at times, the author’s writings of his students, whom he classifies as “neoindigenous,” could lead readers to believe the students to be a monolith. I also think more attention to the ideas of cultural appreciation vs. appropriation would have been nice. Finally, the last thing I felt needed more attention was the author‘s ideas on code switching. I prefer the ideas posited by Dr. April Baker-Bell in Linguistic Justice that represents Black language as something white people should acknowledge instead of asking students of color to abandon the language of their culture to fit into a prescribed mold.
August 21, 2016
Great stuff. Scholarly, but also conscientious of real-world circumstances; very successful in reframing what it means to teach, what it means to be schooled. I'm teaching a course called Language & Learning this year, and I'm adding this title to the list of group book talks. I anticipate some great, mind-widening discussions.
July 5, 2022
In so far as I'm one of the "white folk who teaches in the 'hood", I'm the target audience, so the problem probably lies with me, but I've tried reading this book twice and I can't get past the first few chapters. The problems he outlines are basic to all youth, regardless of race or school setting: boring lessons, rules that don't make sense, teachers that just don't "get" where their students are coming from, and district policies that emphasize testing. And as for understanding neoindigenous culture (his terminology), some of his examples are just bad behavior. For instance, letting kids hang about the door instead of being in their seat when the bell rings is NOT being in class on time, unless that's the teacher's expectation, anymore than being in the doorway at your first after school part-time job is, regardless of your race. I'm 53 and teaching is a second career for me and I've just finished my sixth year in an urban district. I didn't choose to teach there to save anyone, I took what was available in our area in my field (Social Studies sans Coaching). Most days I feel like I fail so I buy books like this to try to get better. I'm self aware enough to know that I have cultural biases, so I specifically seek out books and conversations to better understand myself and others. I'm doubtful that I'm anywhere close to where I need to be. I bought this book early in my brief career and tried to read it then. I got a little farther this time, but after reading other reviewers from varying cultural backgrounds, I realized my criticism was not unique and that further reading was going to continue to frustrate. Here's my advice for what it's worth: Be yourself, be consistent, enforce your rules with reasonable consequences, do the best you can, say your sorry when you mess up, ask your students when you don't understand something or you wonder if you're being culturally insensitive, be creative but understand that your school District policies will often dictate how and what you teach so don't beat yourself up about it, and go ahead and buy a pair of cool sneakers if you like, but you don't have to. Just realize that's somebody's baby your teaching and they are loved and treat them how you would want your own kids to be treated. And the advice to not smile until November that authors like this are so quick to discount? There's a reason old-timers give it. You don't have to take it literally but there is a reason they are still in the profession at their age. Your students need you to be their teacher, not their friend. You are going to burn out or get burned. You can be friendly, but there's a difference. I've had plenty of students who thought I was "mean" at the first of the year, later tell me my class was their favorite. For my part, I'm going to keep being curious, letting my students teach me while I teach them.
June 24, 2016
I feel incredibly grateful to be working with educators who assigned this reading to our staff. This book is meant to be discussed, and I cannot wait to do so with my team and family. I would argue that this is not just a book about great teaching "in the hood", but a book about straight up great teaching -- which is educating in a way that validates and celebrates kids, people and communities (not standardized tests). I'm excited to implement many of the steps outlined right away, and am particularly thrilled by the chapter on using social media in the classroom -- a goal I already had for our students this coming school year, and one which Emdin gives detailed steps for making happen.
4.5 stars instead of five because I got an impression as I was reading that several of the strategies for engaging black and brown kids engaged primarily black and brown boys. Certainly important, but troublesome for me as I found myself visualizing these super classrooms that I couldn't see girls' experiences validated in. This might be a failure of my white lady perspective, however, and I welcome being pushed on that this year.
4.5 stars instead of five because I got an impression as I was reading that several of the strategies for engaging black and brown kids engaged primarily black and brown boys. Certainly important, but troublesome for me as I found myself visualizing these super classrooms that I couldn't see girls' experiences validated in. This might be a failure of my white lady perspective, however, and I welcome being pushed on that this year.
May 19, 2021
I really wanted to like this book but it felt incredibly reductive and dated. The creation of the term "neoindigenous" at the beginning set the tone by feeling like the author was erasing Indigenous folks to be a relic of history. Most of the ideas were along the lines of use popular music or learn different handshakes. These felt like overly simplistic ways of boiling down students' and families' identities. Maybe I wasn't the target audience because reflecting my students lived experience in my classroom isn't a novel idea. I'm sure there are people who would get more out of this book and I really respect the work of the author so it was disappointing to be let down in his writing.
August 28, 2016
Compelling, thought-provoking, and insightful. Disrespectful, condescending, and judgmental. All wrapped up in one book.
September 22, 2023
In my review, I'm going to focus on the useable ideas and strategies that I gained, not the feelings of frustration and disagreement that I sometimes had while reading. It was a three-star read, you can fill in the gaps.
"When students are keyed in to the instruction and have a personal investment in learning, the teacher will 'lose control' of the class... Therefore, the very notion of controlling the class has to be dismissed" (147).
A recurring idea in this book is that you should be asking students directly how they would like to be taught, and then implementing it. Perhaps this feedback comes from a secret committee of students that you meet with on a regular basis. I wondered if it could come from some type of survey, like for the memoir story we are doing right now, I could ask, "What makes a good story?" and then add their ideas to the rubric???
Emdin talks mad shit about "overly rigid lesson plans." In the class I am struggling with right now, could I give students a set of tasks/outcomes, and allow them to choose their own adventure, as long as they are completing their work?
This is the second pedagogy book I've read in a row that promotes providing snacks as a way to build community in the classroom, or to make class discussions feel more inviting and authentic.
One anecdote that was included in the book spoke of an instance where Emdin was teaching in front of the class, marker to whiteboard, when a student stood up, grabbed a marker, and took over the lesson, as the teacher was not teaching the concept adequately. Theoretically, this culture of agency is created when students are invited to teach and plan lessons for the class, and to take on the role of a co-teacher. I wonder if, during our upcoming poetry unit, I could model components of the lessons for a few days, then take volunteers to teach in the following classes.
Note: If a student takes on extra responsibility/work for the benefit of the classroom, Emdin argues that they must be rewarded for their efforts in the currency of school (good grades / extra credit).
One idea I liked, maybe for STAAR prep because I'm not sure how else to implement it for an English class, was pairing students up, one high one low, and making the pairings responsible for helping the low student perform better in the class, through tutoring, support, and other means. If the low student's grade increases as a result of this pairing, then the high performing student's grade should be increased by the same measure.
The idea of having students choose team names for the class; this could be helpful if I do another competition for the fiction writing unit.
Advocates for having a dedicated space in the classroom for students to write questions related to the content that will "stump the teacher." It is students' responsibility to answer the questions posed, for extra credit.
"When students are keyed in to the instruction and have a personal investment in learning, the teacher will 'lose control' of the class... Therefore, the very notion of controlling the class has to be dismissed" (147).
A recurring idea in this book is that you should be asking students directly how they would like to be taught, and then implementing it. Perhaps this feedback comes from a secret committee of students that you meet with on a regular basis. I wondered if it could come from some type of survey, like for the memoir story we are doing right now, I could ask, "What makes a good story?" and then add their ideas to the rubric???
Emdin talks mad shit about "overly rigid lesson plans." In the class I am struggling with right now, could I give students a set of tasks/outcomes, and allow them to choose their own adventure, as long as they are completing their work?
This is the second pedagogy book I've read in a row that promotes providing snacks as a way to build community in the classroom, or to make class discussions feel more inviting and authentic.
One anecdote that was included in the book spoke of an instance where Emdin was teaching in front of the class, marker to whiteboard, when a student stood up, grabbed a marker, and took over the lesson, as the teacher was not teaching the concept adequately. Theoretically, this culture of agency is created when students are invited to teach and plan lessons for the class, and to take on the role of a co-teacher. I wonder if, during our upcoming poetry unit, I could model components of the lessons for a few days, then take volunteers to teach in the following classes.
Note: If a student takes on extra responsibility/work for the benefit of the classroom, Emdin argues that they must be rewarded for their efforts in the currency of school (good grades / extra credit).
One idea I liked, maybe for STAAR prep because I'm not sure how else to implement it for an English class, was pairing students up, one high one low, and making the pairings responsible for helping the low student perform better in the class, through tutoring, support, and other means. If the low student's grade increases as a result of this pairing, then the high performing student's grade should be increased by the same measure.
The idea of having students choose team names for the class; this could be helpful if I do another competition for the fiction writing unit.
Advocates for having a dedicated space in the classroom for students to write questions related to the content that will "stump the teacher." It is students' responsibility to answer the questions posed, for extra credit.
August 11, 2024
As a Caucasian who grew up in an urban setting, went to completely diverse public schools, attended and received advanced degrees from an urban university, and taught 28 years in a district that was 95% African American, I thought this might be an interesting read. I walked away from this questioning Dr. Emdin's reality. I get the feeling he wrote this based on his own life and his perception of his life as a student. Whereas his truths permeate this work, his truths are not THE truths and should not be set forth as reality. He generalizes the educational narrative of children of color and left me feeling that I should have white guilt. I do not, nor have I ever viewed my students, all 2000 of them, in the manner Dr. Emdin sets forth. I cannot find any public school district he has taught in and surmise he has based his "knowledge" of this subject on a racist view of Caucasians. I invite him to meet my students who are lawyers, doctors, PHd candidates, state representatives, teachers, nurses, auto workers, insurance salesmen and more. Not all my students made successes of their lives but this is true of any school. Do yourself a favor and skip this book. You might even choose to have a bonfire and use it as kindling.
September 15, 2020
Christopher Emdin shares lessons he has learned through his experiences over the years of teaching in urban neighborhoods. These lessons have formed the basis for many strategies and theories he has formed about how to connect with his students, help them engage in school, and thus help them make progress. While I don't think some of his specific suggestions and strategies would necessarily apply in all circumstances (for example, I think some of his suggestions would come off as inauthentic or trying too hard if I were to try to implement them), I think the underlying message is valuable. When teachers and students form a rapport, engage in conversation, and make learning relevant, it can transform a classroom. I think this is becoming more widely recognized all the time, but this is a good starting point for those still learning to embrace that, and a good reminder for the rest of us.
July 10, 2020
Dr. Emdin's book is a mix of Paulo Friere's "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" and Ladson-Billings' "Dream Keepers: Successful teachers of African American children" contextualized to urban Hip Hop culture.
His strategies for including students in meaningful, power-sharing ways are helpful and I hope to use some form of his "Cogen groups" with my older elementary students. This book is definitely geared towards middle to high school students, but many strategies could be adapted to the elementary level. He compares the ways education silences and oppresses Black youth to the ways Indigenous peoples are stripped of their culture through education, however Emdin misses meaningful interaction with other cultures often found in the hood, such as immigrants and Latinx.
His strategies for including students in meaningful, power-sharing ways are helpful and I hope to use some form of his "Cogen groups" with my older elementary students. This book is definitely geared towards middle to high school students, but many strategies could be adapted to the elementary level. He compares the ways education silences and oppresses Black youth to the ways Indigenous peoples are stripped of their culture through education, however Emdin misses meaningful interaction with other cultures often found in the hood, such as immigrants and Latinx.
May 2, 2018
This is a very valuable book for anyone who is a teacher in urban areas, or is an educator looking for new ideas of what authentic teaching and learning can look like. The "reality pedogogy" that this author suggests reminds me a lot of Paulo Freire's advice in Pedogogy of the Oppressed.
One thing I wish the author would have addressed is the fact that he tried out all of the teaching techniques in the book as a black man teaching in the "hood," but he is writing for a mainly white audience of teachers. He says that all of the techniques were successful in one way or another, and I believe him, but I wonder if some of it would come off as inauthentic or even offensive coming from a white person. (For example, he suggests dapping up students and wearing clothes that are similar to their style in order to make them feel like their culture is appreciated. I feel like this is something white folks should practice with care and consideration.)
One thing I wish the author would have addressed is the fact that he tried out all of the teaching techniques in the book as a black man teaching in the "hood," but he is writing for a mainly white audience of teachers. He says that all of the techniques were successful in one way or another, and I believe him, but I wonder if some of it would come off as inauthentic or even offensive coming from a white person. (For example, he suggests dapping up students and wearing clothes that are similar to their style in order to make them feel like their culture is appreciated. I feel like this is something white folks should practice with care and consideration.)
March 25, 2018
Well...all this boils down to love your students, your neighbor as yourself. Lots of new speak for explaining the golden rule simple. Education rolls about and introduces new terms with a few reinventions hoping it will make for systemic change. And it’s just love. It’s always love.
January 17, 2025
(3.5 maybe?) Some parts of this were a little dated (I felt) but would probably depend on the reading teacher's experience teaching in these contexts and talking about issues related to the 'neoindigenous'. Some little strategies/reminders here and there that could still be helpful...
My personal summary (without being reductive): Get to know your students as people. Build relationships. Care to understand your students/their families/their community. Give them space to show/celebrate parts of their identity. Help them connect to and demonstrate their learning in personally meaningful ways.
My personal summary (without being reductive): Get to know your students as people. Build relationships. Care to understand your students/their families/their community. Give them space to show/celebrate parts of their identity. Help them connect to and demonstrate their learning in personally meaningful ways.
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January 29, 2022There are a lot of great points and suggestions in this book. I'll be thinking about it for a long time.
May 16, 2020
A must-read for all educators.
April 24, 2024
an interesting read! I may use some of Emdin's pedagogies in the future
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