Getting started: Finding the gaps in community college English courses
Overview
The intersections of privilege, equity, and curriculum development are explored in this personal teaching essay about equity gaps in the classroom.
Essay
I have been teaching freshman composition at my community college and various other places for 32 years now. I am a white, 56-year-old male. My students are a mixture of high schoolers taking college classes to get the free credits; refugees and children of refugees from the diaspora, and returning adult students who have lost their jobs and are looking for a second chance. We’re all there together, in the same space.
Yet, what is that space? I have had to adapt over the years. Nothing stays the same. I teach in classrooms. I teach on Zoom. I teach in online course platforms. I teach in area high schools. I teach over my cell phone. I stream videos. I use most of these methods in every course I teach.
My students can’t afford textbooks any more. There was a time when I could force them to buy textbooks. But, ever since the 2008 recession, all they do is work as much as they can and try to get by on Google. I can’t blame them. Textbooks are too expensive. I think about half of my students as well, can’t afford a laptop or tablet either. They are doing all of their school work on their cell phones.
I live in Minnesota. When George Floyd happened, I looked at what I was teaching in my freshman composition class to be racially balanced. In “Battle Royal”, by Ralph Ellison, a black teenager gets beat up and sent off to College. Othello strangles his wife. Ta-Nehisi Coates and Wes Moore show the perils of being young, black, and male. Now, I don’t know if I want to teach that violence or not. They’re all great writers. I just want material that is less brutal.
If I felt like I had the teaching skills, maybe we could engage in race talk together. Derald Wing Sue’s “Race Talk” provides some useful suggestions, such as acknowledging my own biases as a teacher and validating discussions of students’ feelings. Should I try that? Would it even be helpful to have some old white guy–for that’s what I am–up in front of the class trying to offer some mea culpa for all of the privileges he’s received? I just don’t think it would work.
Two years ago, I started using A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota, an essay collection from authors of several different backgrounds about how they live with the overt racism in my state, MInnesota. The book is great. The journal entries are simply not what I expected. I have I had several thoughtful entries, of course. However, students who strongly denied that racism even exists in Minnesota do the closest textual analysis. They scrutinize the text to fight against it. That’s not really what I wanted. I now understand that having authors from a wide range of cultures and backgrounds is not enough. I need to show students how to engage with text instead of simply reacting to it.
Maybe that’s not on my students, though. Maybe that’s on me. Maybe students who deny racism, despite clear evidence to the contrary, might be picking up on those signals from me, the students I pay attention to, the texts I select, or the rather bureaucratic language of my own course syllabus. That is why, I did a deep dive on equity gaps in my own courses. My college provides the necessary statistical tools that I need to parse the student populations in my courses. I looked for equity gaps in all of my courses from the Spring 2019 to Spring 2022 semester. I am a full time community college teacher who has four full classes of 27 students a semester. So, my results are based on a very big sample size.
I found out that I have a statistically significant equity gap, a large equity gap, with BIPOC students. A recent TYCA survey (Griffiths et al.) on community college English teaching during the pandemic discovered that workloads increased exponentially and that resources for curriculum transformation were limited. Some teachers found ways to adapt, like I did with Zoom and cell phone teaching. Other teachers have struggled. Many of the ways we used to teach before the pandemic have been disrupted. Teaching during this in-between phase may be part of the reason why equity gaps have been so high in my courses. Here are a few other, more personal, hypotheses I have about my equity gaps.
First, I have noticed that a certain number of BIPOC students will stay in my class and not do the major assignments. They value their relationship with me more than their overall grade in the class. They procrastinate. Then, they don’t have enough time, and get poor grades. Prioritizing their relationship with me over their assignments was not a successful strategy for them.
Second, I always have hope that students can get their assignments in and get a good grade, at least a C, in my courses. Since I am relaxed with deadlines, I give my BIPOC students a false sense of security that they are doing OK in a class when, in actuality, they are not.
Finally, most of my bad grades happen when students simply do not do the assignments. I might have assignments that BIPOC students feel are irrelevant. Or, since academic English is, by default, white writing, I alienate BIPOC students.
I asked other writing faculty at my community college what culturally responsive pedagogies they use. One teacher says that he tries to get students engaged in “what-if” conversations in class. By modeling these discussions, he hopes that students will use more hedge words and multiple positions in their papers. Another teacher says that he led a rather chaotic young adult life, like many of our students. So, he sees his earlier self in their struggles. His approach is compassion. He tries to motivate them to write about what they care about. Yet another teacher told me she uses Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime because students are fine with talking about racism in South Africa. She then lets them make connections to systemic racism here in the United States rather organically. It’s not so didactic, then, she says.
What do all three of these teachers have in common? They have created an open space in their courses for student reflection. Horn-Gibson and Oshin-Martin, community college teachers themselves, (2022) concur. They encourage inclusive pedagogy and dialogue for change. Similarly, in “Minding the Obligation Gap”, Sims et al. flip the deficit focus. Instead of achievement gaps, which put the responsibility on students, research into “obligation gap” puts the emphasis squarely on institutions, in this case community colleges, to foster equity on their campuses and their classrooms.
The three teachers I mentioned above all intuitively feel that obligation gap, that dialogue for change. I, perhaps, have been too focused on achievement gaps. Even my own personal equity gap research focused on grade disparities, not equivalent learning outcomes. I need to make that shift from student achievement to teacher obligation. It’s not all on the students. It’s not all on me either. We’re in this together. I’ve been teaching college freshman composition for 32 years now. Making that shift feels like a repudiation of the core teaching values I have held for most of my career. I have to, though. It’s time to get started.
References
Azevedo, Lauren. "Race Talk and the Conspiracy of Silence: Understanding and Facilitating Difficult Dialogues on Race: By Derald Wing Sue, Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2015." (2018): 419-422.
Coates, Ta-Nehisi. Between the world and me. Text publishing, 2015.
Ellison, Ralph. Invisible man. Penguin UK, 2016.
Griffiths, Brett, et al. "Community college English faculty pandemic teaching: Adjustments in the time of COVID-19." Community Colleges’ Responses to COVID-19. Routledge, 2022. 58-71.
Moore, Wes. The other Wes Moore: One name, two fates. One World, 2011.
Noah, Trevor. Born a crime: Stories from a South African childhood. Doubleday Canada, 2016.
Shin, Sun Yung. Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota. Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2016.
Sims, Jeremiah J., et al. "Minding the Obligation Gap in Community Colleges and Beyond: Theory and Practice in Achieving Educational Equity. Educational Equity in Community Colleges." Peter Lang Publishing Group (2020).
Van Der Horn-Gibson, Jodi, and Moronke Oshin-Martin. "Toward an Equitable Pedagogy: Invitational Education in the Community College Classroom." Beyond Equity at Community Colleges. Routledge 48-66.