My own primary and secondary school experience was that I wasn't really ready for the classics in primary and secondary school -- and I don't know if I was ready for them in college, because I didn't take any literature courses in college because I frankly hated literature by then. This wasn't because I was anti-reading -- I read a ton of modern novels. But I wasn't emotionally mature enough nor did I have a broad enough life experience to be spoken to by Dickens, Hemingway, or Dostoevsky, and I just found those books boring. (And I'm white, male, straight, and privileged as hell).
I dunno how common this is. But I always felt like we should concentrate on inculcating a love of reading in our children first, and let great literature come gradually. If that means assigning JK Rowling or whatever, then let the kids get literate, let them enjoy their books, and then let them read classics in college or on their own as adults.
I'm pretty anti-woke as well, and I have been on this train for awhile. I saw a lot of my peers in high school lose interest in literature when we started reading greek classics and Shakespeare in freshman English. Not that these works don't have value, but getting through them is a struggle at that age. It would have been great to read modern books earlier on that were more topical, entertaining, and relevant to our lives.
That being said, the wokies aren't going to take your advice. Using the extreme and nutty language about decolonizing and white supremacy is an end in itself as moral grandstanding is key component of the advocacy.
I think this line: "...my advice to proponents of decolonizing language arts curricula [really insert any progressive cause here] would be to remember that in a democracy, they need to communicate these ideas to an electorate that is mostly white, mostly over 50, and mostly did not graduate from college."
is almost a thesis statement for this site. To me, a person who personally holds fairly progressive values, but would rather win and compromise on a half loaf than lose on purity, I find it disheartening how negative a reaction I get from some people (friends, even) when sharing a pretty obvious statement like the above.
Just typing that out, my inner progressive is reminded of how frustrating it must be to be a member of a minority group and be told that your immediate interests need to be dialed back so we can win an election and maybe you get some crumbs. How many election cycles can you deal with that frustration? But at the same time, that's the reality of our system.
Only solution that springs to mind is more along the lines of your "Make Blue States Great Again," and some other work you've done on who should be primaried, arguing blue areas should be bold in their policy and making sure that deep blue areas have no qualms primarying moderate democrats. Federalism can be a beautiful thing.
I've put 9 kids through K-12.... so I guess it makes me more of an expert than most. Also... I know Sara Mead from my old school education blogging days. That was a decade ago.
I didn't really get the idea of the "importance of representation" until I took my then ten-year old daughter to the recent all-female Ghostbusters and she thought it was terrific because the case were all girls doing cool hero stuff. (As somebody who watched the original back in the day, I thought it was a bit "meh" as a remake).
So, I can buy the idea that for Alaska Natives kids, a culturally relevant curriculum makes them more enthused and interested and leads to better overall results . . . as long as the course is actually teaching them the stuff, the actual math. This seems like an idea worth exploring by well-intentioned educators aiming to improve math and reading competence in kids from marginalized backgrounds.
However, terms like "decolonizing" seem like a red flag for the kind of people who are pushing their political ideology rather than actually prioritizing teaching kids stuff, like being able to read, do math, etc. I do not trust that these "culturally relevant" programs are being implemented with the actual concern of better educating kids.
It's amazing how worked up people get about the reading materials assigned to teenagers. I generally skipped the reading and I'm okay. Most kids aren't going to become professional writers and it doesn't matter that much whether they read Catcher in the Rye or Native Son (or neither), as long as they learn to read.
All of the adults fanning this fire (on both sides) seem like bad actors pushing agendas unrelated to education.
There’s a lot of comments here with a lot of words that look interesting but I don’t have time to read them right now. So I just want to weigh in with a simple but highly relevant statement about adolescent psychology:
*Teenagers will not learn anything if they are not interested in the material.*
I’m a high school teacher, so I know what I’m talking about.
Thanks for exposing your largely non-woke audience (me included) to points that push us to think more deeply and less reflexively. This is what I signed up for!
It's also fun to peel back the layers of rhetoric and look at the kind of pedagogy that's going on under the label of, say, #DisruptTexts.
There are three things I notice when I look at approaches like theirs.
1. One of the main tactics I see used is pairing a traditional text with a modern and diverse text or even some nonfiction. They use these texts in conversation with one another to ask interesting questions about the author, historical context, content and style of the texts, etc. These are great approaches that urge kids to think critically. The Great Gatsby paired with The Warmth of Other Suns seems like a really interesting set of texts for a unit that spans English class and History class.
2. Overall it's a view of reading that doesn't come across in official curriculum often enough. Usually you see reading (in high school, elementary is a whole other thing) as broken down into discrete skills - skills very similar to those you might want kids to learn for acing mandatory state exams. You might spend a week with a short story in your textbook and you'd spend day 1 looking at the plot diagram and day two looking at the way the author uses characterization, and day three looking at how setting and the environment are used to create mood, and so on. This is so common I'd almost call it ubiquitous. It's also boring as hell. It makes reading less about enjoyment or learning or seeking some kind of universal values and more like a meaningless job. The material is uninteresting but equally uninteresting are the activities they are asked to do with that material. When I look at the kind of teaching that goes along with culturally relevant pedagogy, I also see an attempt to teach in a way that helps students makes sense of things as a whole and in the context of the world they actually live in.
3. (Not exactly pedagogy, more about teacher training) Teachers seem hungry for resources and techniques that support their use of diverse texts in their classrooms. This tells me schools of education aren't doing a great job of teaching teachers how to do this. Which makes me wonder if schools of education are really po-mo-woke-anti-racist-marxist-intersectional breeding grounds? I mean, if they can't teach teachers to "decolonize" a bookshelf how are they going to decolonize schools or society? Point is, there's a disconnect between the perception of universities as a leftist force indoctrinating generations of educators and the educators who say they don't know how to do any of that leftist stuff.
College English and creative-writhing teacher/ student here.
Agree with this entirely.
It’s important to help students to build a passion for the subject itself if you want to see them excel in it. Research on cognitive fluency theory shows that we love things that we can process easily and efficiently. We will process things more easily and more efficiently if they trigger memories in us. And we are like to have those memories triggered if we are studying something that we “identify” with or from someone we “identify” with. So yeah, our instruction and our content need to be culturally relevant.
At the same time, we need to discuss these ideas in ways that are not off-putting to the average person. Some of the woke grandstanding is making some really good ideas—which is just frustrating.
Likewise, I REALLY appreciate the point you made about boys and books. That topic is complicated though—sociologists have shown that when men and women are educated equally, women tend to read more than men. From what I’ve seen, this trend seems to have been recorded in more than twenty countries, suggesting that it’s not just a matter of how women are enculturated. (See the work of Wendy Griswold.)
So it’s probably no mistake that the last creative writing class I taught was made up of 15 women and 3 men. And it’s probably no mistake that women make up 75% of the publishing industry. (And make up 60% of publishing executives.)
On the other hand, I think there is A LOT more that we can be doing to get boys and men interested in reading. Black and Latino men read for pleasure even less than white men, statistically speaking. So getting men to read is actually kind of a matter of race as well. Feminism in literary spaces is VERY common but from my perspective, it’s somewhat racist since I never hear feminists calling to make literary spaces more friendly to Black and Latino MEN, in particular.
In any case, as a boy who likes books, I wish there was more discussion of this topic. Men aren’t reading as much as they used to. To some extent that is to be expected due to the equality of education, but to some extent, that trend is probably being exacerbated by some well-intentioned ideologies being indiscriminately applied.
This is slightly off topic, but I just finished watching Bob Wright and Mickey Kaus's New Year's Rockin' Eve youtube video. Kaus brought up a point about woke backlash that I hadn't considered.
The recent woke infiltration of public health discourse (eg vaccination priorities) has given opponents of expanded government a powerful weapon they can leverage across any democratic policy initiative that increases the role of government.
Forget health care and death panels, the new rallying cry for republicans will be "if dems get into power they'll reallocate resources by race, let Nicole Hannah Jones rewrite your kids' history books, and mandate puberty blockers in kids' milk. See all these examples as proof..."
My off the cuff guess is that woke culture war talking points will gain republicans several percentage points of support against any democratic initiative that requires an expansion of government.
A tangential point in response to "it’s dangerous to discuss K-12 policy with normies because everyone went to school and has an opinion about it, even if they haven’t done any research or given it serious thought": I do wish, though, that the K-12 policy discussion I see would pay a lot more attention to what people say they wish their K-12 education had *felt* like, rather than exclusively focusing on the measured *outcomes* of that education. K-12 takes up thirteen years of a sentient human's life. We owe it to children to make it a positive experience, not merely a crucible for The Future.
For example, I hate arguments that boil down to "high academic achievers turn out fine no matter what you do to them, so we don't have to think about them at all". Being bored out of your skull for thirteen years waiting for any teacher to challenge you with anything *sucks*, even if hypothetically the opportunity cost of all that wasted time made absolutely no difference to your future productivity (which I doubt, but that's not the point).
I guess this is also an argument for kids reading things they like.
I’d like to share some thoughts from the perspective of an educator.
(I work in secondary education teaching history and economics and also working as a sort of curricular and pedagogical coach for faculty across all departments. While I try and stay current on research and read widely as part of my administrative job, I am a practitioner and not a researcher.)
I agree with the general thrust of this piece, especially as captured in the title. I wish it were not framed around the issue of being "woke" since that's just red meat that really doesn't speak to questions of effectiveness in teaching and learning. More importantly, the argument of this newsletter suffers greatly from a terrible lack of precision. A “culturally relevant pedagogy” is different than an “ethnic studies” program (and both are different from the entire movement for “culturally responsive teaching,” not referenced here). More importantly, to argue that something “works” you have to specify for what purpose it works. How does doing X improve Y? Matt doesn’t define X precisely (but instead uses terms with really different meanings interchangeably) and you doesn’t define Y precisely either. And this is all intended by way of constructive criticism, since fundamentally I do agree with the overall point Matt is making.
Is the goal to improve student’s reading abilities? To increase the graduation rates of underrepresented minorities? To create a more inclusive school community that fosters higher degrees of relational trust? In other words, to determine what works you first have to look at what you are trying to accomplish and then work backwards to the research on that particular goal. And most importantly, to compare the relative effectiveness of various interventions.
I’m going to guess that the reason why research on the effectiveness of “culturally relevant pedagogy” is so think is because of the difficulty of defining what that means and because of the difficulty of sorting out first order and second order effects. (That, and I don’t know that ed schools are necessarily known for their rigorous research methodologies). There might not be a lot of research on how diversifying the literature curriculum affects student outcomes, but there is a lot research on how fostering growth mindsets or strong teacher-student bonds does. I’d argue that a literature curriculum that feels engaging and relevant to students is an important toolkit in achieving both of those goals.
I do think it’s possible to make arguments about educational practices that don’t rely on any specific research findings. In a pluralistic society having pluralistic reading lists are probably a good in and of themselves in promoting greater cross-cultural understanding.
FYI, if you like reading about education here is a very incomplete list of authors you may want to check out (links below):
-On this particular topic, see Lisa D. Delpit
-More generally, John Hattie’s work is probably the most comprehensive summary of what research indicates are the most effective teaching strategies.
-Daniel Willingham is also a great source of research-based insights for teaching effectiveness. -For curriculum design, Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe are great; and for pedagogy, check out
Ron Ritchhart and the work of Project Zero at Harvard.
-On student engagement see Denise Pope and the work of Challenge Success as well as the work of Carol Dweck.
-The Marshall Memo is a good newsletter for teachers who want to stay up to date on the field of education but don’t have a lot of time.
Total non sequitur, any other Californians wish we weren’t always so late to these conversations!
I love this. People who are reflexively "anti-woke" are often engaging in the narrowing epistemology that they claim they hate.
We shouldn't try to be "woke" or "anti-woke" as much as we should strive being pro-evidence.
My own primary and secondary school experience was that I wasn't really ready for the classics in primary and secondary school -- and I don't know if I was ready for them in college, because I didn't take any literature courses in college because I frankly hated literature by then. This wasn't because I was anti-reading -- I read a ton of modern novels. But I wasn't emotionally mature enough nor did I have a broad enough life experience to be spoken to by Dickens, Hemingway, or Dostoevsky, and I just found those books boring. (And I'm white, male, straight, and privileged as hell).
I dunno how common this is. But I always felt like we should concentrate on inculcating a love of reading in our children first, and let great literature come gradually. If that means assigning JK Rowling or whatever, then let the kids get literate, let them enjoy their books, and then let them read classics in college or on their own as adults.
I'm pretty anti-woke as well, and I have been on this train for awhile. I saw a lot of my peers in high school lose interest in literature when we started reading greek classics and Shakespeare in freshman English. Not that these works don't have value, but getting through them is a struggle at that age. It would have been great to read modern books earlier on that were more topical, entertaining, and relevant to our lives.
That being said, the wokies aren't going to take your advice. Using the extreme and nutty language about decolonizing and white supremacy is an end in itself as moral grandstanding is key component of the advocacy.
I think this line: "...my advice to proponents of decolonizing language arts curricula [really insert any progressive cause here] would be to remember that in a democracy, they need to communicate these ideas to an electorate that is mostly white, mostly over 50, and mostly did not graduate from college."
is almost a thesis statement for this site. To me, a person who personally holds fairly progressive values, but would rather win and compromise on a half loaf than lose on purity, I find it disheartening how negative a reaction I get from some people (friends, even) when sharing a pretty obvious statement like the above.
Just typing that out, my inner progressive is reminded of how frustrating it must be to be a member of a minority group and be told that your immediate interests need to be dialed back so we can win an election and maybe you get some crumbs. How many election cycles can you deal with that frustration? But at the same time, that's the reality of our system.
Only solution that springs to mind is more along the lines of your "Make Blue States Great Again," and some other work you've done on who should be primaried, arguing blue areas should be bold in their policy and making sure that deep blue areas have no qualms primarying moderate democrats. Federalism can be a beautiful thing.
I've put 9 kids through K-12.... so I guess it makes me more of an expert than most. Also... I know Sara Mead from my old school education blogging days. That was a decade ago.
Good school systems
1. teach phonics
2. drill multiplication tables
3. encourage reading anything... comics, youth novels, doest matter, just read.
Bad School Systems
1. site reading
2. fuzzy math
3. assign classics that even adults dont read
4. Project based learning. My smart kids would do everything. My lazy kids would coast.
5. Send home coloring assignments for math or history class. Diaramas are always bad.
Also... homework is bad and unnecessary. It causes stress at home.
I have spoken.
I didn't really get the idea of the "importance of representation" until I took my then ten-year old daughter to the recent all-female Ghostbusters and she thought it was terrific because the case were all girls doing cool hero stuff. (As somebody who watched the original back in the day, I thought it was a bit "meh" as a remake).
So, I can buy the idea that for Alaska Natives kids, a culturally relevant curriculum makes them more enthused and interested and leads to better overall results . . . as long as the course is actually teaching them the stuff, the actual math. This seems like an idea worth exploring by well-intentioned educators aiming to improve math and reading competence in kids from marginalized backgrounds.
However, terms like "decolonizing" seem like a red flag for the kind of people who are pushing their political ideology rather than actually prioritizing teaching kids stuff, like being able to read, do math, etc. I do not trust that these "culturally relevant" programs are being implemented with the actual concern of better educating kids.
It's amazing how worked up people get about the reading materials assigned to teenagers. I generally skipped the reading and I'm okay. Most kids aren't going to become professional writers and it doesn't matter that much whether they read Catcher in the Rye or Native Son (or neither), as long as they learn to read.
All of the adults fanning this fire (on both sides) seem like bad actors pushing agendas unrelated to education.
There’s a lot of comments here with a lot of words that look interesting but I don’t have time to read them right now. So I just want to weigh in with a simple but highly relevant statement about adolescent psychology:
*Teenagers will not learn anything if they are not interested in the material.*
I’m a high school teacher, so I know what I’m talking about.
Thanks for exposing your largely non-woke audience (me included) to points that push us to think more deeply and less reflexively. This is what I signed up for!
It's high-test racecraft to assume that Homer is more relevant or relatable to white kids than to non-white.
Just teach Dune. Everyone can relate to Dune.
It's also fun to peel back the layers of rhetoric and look at the kind of pedagogy that's going on under the label of, say, #DisruptTexts.
There are three things I notice when I look at approaches like theirs.
1. One of the main tactics I see used is pairing a traditional text with a modern and diverse text or even some nonfiction. They use these texts in conversation with one another to ask interesting questions about the author, historical context, content and style of the texts, etc. These are great approaches that urge kids to think critically. The Great Gatsby paired with The Warmth of Other Suns seems like a really interesting set of texts for a unit that spans English class and History class.
2. Overall it's a view of reading that doesn't come across in official curriculum often enough. Usually you see reading (in high school, elementary is a whole other thing) as broken down into discrete skills - skills very similar to those you might want kids to learn for acing mandatory state exams. You might spend a week with a short story in your textbook and you'd spend day 1 looking at the plot diagram and day two looking at the way the author uses characterization, and day three looking at how setting and the environment are used to create mood, and so on. This is so common I'd almost call it ubiquitous. It's also boring as hell. It makes reading less about enjoyment or learning or seeking some kind of universal values and more like a meaningless job. The material is uninteresting but equally uninteresting are the activities they are asked to do with that material. When I look at the kind of teaching that goes along with culturally relevant pedagogy, I also see an attempt to teach in a way that helps students makes sense of things as a whole and in the context of the world they actually live in.
3. (Not exactly pedagogy, more about teacher training) Teachers seem hungry for resources and techniques that support their use of diverse texts in their classrooms. This tells me schools of education aren't doing a great job of teaching teachers how to do this. Which makes me wonder if schools of education are really po-mo-woke-anti-racist-marxist-intersectional breeding grounds? I mean, if they can't teach teachers to "decolonize" a bookshelf how are they going to decolonize schools or society? Point is, there's a disconnect between the perception of universities as a leftist force indoctrinating generations of educators and the educators who say they don't know how to do any of that leftist stuff.
College English and creative-writhing teacher/ student here.
Agree with this entirely.
It’s important to help students to build a passion for the subject itself if you want to see them excel in it. Research on cognitive fluency theory shows that we love things that we can process easily and efficiently. We will process things more easily and more efficiently if they trigger memories in us. And we are like to have those memories triggered if we are studying something that we “identify” with or from someone we “identify” with. So yeah, our instruction and our content need to be culturally relevant.
At the same time, we need to discuss these ideas in ways that are not off-putting to the average person. Some of the woke grandstanding is making some really good ideas—which is just frustrating.
Likewise, I REALLY appreciate the point you made about boys and books. That topic is complicated though—sociologists have shown that when men and women are educated equally, women tend to read more than men. From what I’ve seen, this trend seems to have been recorded in more than twenty countries, suggesting that it’s not just a matter of how women are enculturated. (See the work of Wendy Griswold.)
So it’s probably no mistake that the last creative writing class I taught was made up of 15 women and 3 men. And it’s probably no mistake that women make up 75% of the publishing industry. (And make up 60% of publishing executives.)
On the other hand, I think there is A LOT more that we can be doing to get boys and men interested in reading. Black and Latino men read for pleasure even less than white men, statistically speaking. So getting men to read is actually kind of a matter of race as well. Feminism in literary spaces is VERY common but from my perspective, it’s somewhat racist since I never hear feminists calling to make literary spaces more friendly to Black and Latino MEN, in particular.
In any case, as a boy who likes books, I wish there was more discussion of this topic. Men aren’t reading as much as they used to. To some extent that is to be expected due to the equality of education, but to some extent, that trend is probably being exacerbated by some well-intentioned ideologies being indiscriminately applied.
This is slightly off topic, but I just finished watching Bob Wright and Mickey Kaus's New Year's Rockin' Eve youtube video. Kaus brought up a point about woke backlash that I hadn't considered.
The recent woke infiltration of public health discourse (eg vaccination priorities) has given opponents of expanded government a powerful weapon they can leverage across any democratic policy initiative that increases the role of government.
Forget health care and death panels, the new rallying cry for republicans will be "if dems get into power they'll reallocate resources by race, let Nicole Hannah Jones rewrite your kids' history books, and mandate puberty blockers in kids' milk. See all these examples as proof..."
My off the cuff guess is that woke culture war talking points will gain republicans several percentage points of support against any democratic initiative that requires an expansion of government.
A tangential point in response to "it’s dangerous to discuss K-12 policy with normies because everyone went to school and has an opinion about it, even if they haven’t done any research or given it serious thought": I do wish, though, that the K-12 policy discussion I see would pay a lot more attention to what people say they wish their K-12 education had *felt* like, rather than exclusively focusing on the measured *outcomes* of that education. K-12 takes up thirteen years of a sentient human's life. We owe it to children to make it a positive experience, not merely a crucible for The Future.
For example, I hate arguments that boil down to "high academic achievers turn out fine no matter what you do to them, so we don't have to think about them at all". Being bored out of your skull for thirteen years waiting for any teacher to challenge you with anything *sucks*, even if hypothetically the opportunity cost of all that wasted time made absolutely no difference to your future productivity (which I doubt, but that's not the point).
I guess this is also an argument for kids reading things they like.
I’d like to share some thoughts from the perspective of an educator.
(I work in secondary education teaching history and economics and also working as a sort of curricular and pedagogical coach for faculty across all departments. While I try and stay current on research and read widely as part of my administrative job, I am a practitioner and not a researcher.)
I agree with the general thrust of this piece, especially as captured in the title. I wish it were not framed around the issue of being "woke" since that's just red meat that really doesn't speak to questions of effectiveness in teaching and learning. More importantly, the argument of this newsletter suffers greatly from a terrible lack of precision. A “culturally relevant pedagogy” is different than an “ethnic studies” program (and both are different from the entire movement for “culturally responsive teaching,” not referenced here). More importantly, to argue that something “works” you have to specify for what purpose it works. How does doing X improve Y? Matt doesn’t define X precisely (but instead uses terms with really different meanings interchangeably) and you doesn’t define Y precisely either. And this is all intended by way of constructive criticism, since fundamentally I do agree with the overall point Matt is making.
Is the goal to improve student’s reading abilities? To increase the graduation rates of underrepresented minorities? To create a more inclusive school community that fosters higher degrees of relational trust? In other words, to determine what works you first have to look at what you are trying to accomplish and then work backwards to the research on that particular goal. And most importantly, to compare the relative effectiveness of various interventions.
I’m going to guess that the reason why research on the effectiveness of “culturally relevant pedagogy” is so think is because of the difficulty of defining what that means and because of the difficulty of sorting out first order and second order effects. (That, and I don’t know that ed schools are necessarily known for their rigorous research methodologies). There might not be a lot of research on how diversifying the literature curriculum affects student outcomes, but there is a lot research on how fostering growth mindsets or strong teacher-student bonds does. I’d argue that a literature curriculum that feels engaging and relevant to students is an important toolkit in achieving both of those goals.
I do think it’s possible to make arguments about educational practices that don’t rely on any specific research findings. In a pluralistic society having pluralistic reading lists are probably a good in and of themselves in promoting greater cross-cultural understanding.
FYI, if you like reading about education here is a very incomplete list of authors you may want to check out (links below):
-On this particular topic, see Lisa D. Delpit
-More generally, John Hattie’s work is probably the most comprehensive summary of what research indicates are the most effective teaching strategies.
-Daniel Willingham is also a great source of research-based insights for teaching effectiveness. -For curriculum design, Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe are great; and for pedagogy, check out
Ron Ritchhart and the work of Project Zero at Harvard.
-On student engagement see Denise Pope and the work of Challenge Success as well as the work of Carol Dweck.
-The Marshall Memo is a good newsletter for teachers who want to stay up to date on the field of education but don’t have a lot of time.
Total non sequitur, any other Californians wish we weren’t always so late to these conversations!
Links to references above:
https://www.amazon.com/Lisa-D.-Delpit/e/B001JP0VH2%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share
https://www.amazon.com/John-Hattie/e/B001JSFFRK/ref=dp_byline_cont_pop_book_1
https://www.amazon.com/Daniel-T-Willingham/e/B001IO9SZ0/ref=dp_byline_cont_pop_book_1
https://www.amazon.com/Jay-McTighe/e/B001IO9LWA?ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1&qid=1609433045&sr=1-1
https://www.amazon.com/Ron-Ritchhart/e/B001H9RL0U%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share
http://www.pz.harvard.edu/
https://ed.stanford.edu/faculty/dpope
https://www.challengesuccess.org/
https://www.amazon.com/Carol-Dweck/s?k=Carol+Dweck
https://marshallmemo.com/