Ways in with African-American Students: An Interview with Linda Christensen (AUDIO)
Linda Christensen is one of my literacy heroes - a wonderful writer and thinker who has spent her entire teaching career working in inner-city high schools, writing about her experiences with honesty, humor, and grit. She is unflinching in presenting the realities of public schools, and the gaps between policies and needs. Her work with the Rethinking Schools organization (www.rethinkingschools.org) has given voice to teachers, students, and policy-makers who are positive activists for better schools.
We spoke on a winter afternoon just before Linda was rushing out the door to deliver two grant applications. A typical day for Linda - always with her ear to the ground to capture new resources and provide new opportunities for her colleagues in literacy education.
Brenda Power
Editor, Choice Literacy
Brenda: Linda, what advice would you have for a white teacher who is working with African-American students, who might be new to that population?
Linda: You know that was actually my story. I grew up in far northern California in a very white rural community and had very little contact with African Americans. One of the few African Americans who lived in our town, (Eureka, California) had to apply to all of the neighbors and get signatures in order to buy a house in our neighborhood. It was a very segregated, (well not segregated but racially isolated) community and obviously not very welcoming.
So when I went to Jefferson High School in Portland, Oregon, which was predominently African American, it was a bit of a culture shock for me. This is the advice that I would have for teachers, what happened to me fortuitously, was that I got mentored by some really wonderful African-American women in the community who took me under their wings and helped me learn about their community. Just by being there and talking to me, and setting me right when I did things that were wrong.
So I would say to find a mentor in the community. The teaching community as well as the larger community. I think it's really important to study the history and the strengths of the community that you're in - to find out who the local heroes are and what the local history is.
For example, in Portland, the African-American community was forced to move a number of times and so knowing some of that history also helped me to find out who some people were in our local African American history and to connect with those people and to bring them in as resources to be oral history presenters with my students.
Brenda: You know that makes me think of Shirley Brice Heath, and her seminal work looking at African Americans in rural white, poor, and middle-class communities. The African Americans were always boxed up and ready to leave at all times. Many of us aren't aware of their history of being forced to move so many times in so many communities, and how engrained that must be in their culture.
Linda: I think that the other part of that is really learning that there are a lot of strengths, for example, in our local community. Finding thoselocal heroes and people who worked to change racial politics in Portland and so I think really tapping into those kinds of resources and finding the strengths of the community.
Brenda: You use that term "local hero" a lot. That's obviously an important concept in terms of mentoring or understanding African-American history, or does it all go together?
Linda: It all goes together, and I think part of it is that often history is written from the prospective of who won and (for lack of a better term) their community heroes. For example, in Portland, there was a group of African American leaders who demanded of the school board that they stop busing black children and build a middle school in the African-American community. To me, they were really local heroes and they went on meeting for years and continued to be the educational watchdogs in our community. I think of those kinds of grassroots people as the local heroes who really have continued to fight for equal access for their children.
Brenda: Did you get a sense of that history from those first contacts that you mentioned, the local resources, through families? It seems like for teachers that would be important to them to find a way in to some of those historical documents. Are some of them only oral?
Linda: That's true, some of it is actually finding the old folks that are around and getting them to tell stories about what was going on. That was one of the things I did. There was a long history of community involvement by African-American parents and community members at Jefferson High School.
Being able to tap into them as a resource to find out these stories and to use them as actual historians in our classrooms- to come in and talk about the racial segration in Portland and those kinds of stories as well as the stories of triumph and grace. And also other kinds of what I would call local grassroots heroes - the doctors, the nurses, especially the ministers who are nurturing the students that we work with in our schools.
Going to the churches and being part of that community of going in as a guest and seeing what's going on in the church community. Shopping in the stores in the community. Finding out more about their kind of community. That wasn't hard but I think that it's really important to know the landmarks, the places, the history when you're going in.
Brenda: Can you talk about the best books or web resources for teachers who are trying to understand African-American communities and cultures beyond their local schools?
Linda: I have a few that are my favorites so I'll tell you some of those. For elementary schools I really love a lot of Patricia McKissack's books. Amazing Grace is a wonderful book that really show triumph and trying to overcome struggles and also the community involvement in that.
For fifth grade through high school, I love Warriors Don't Cry by Melba Pattillo Beals. It's about the fact that she was one of the Little Rock Nine and her story about coming of age at Central High in Little Rock. It is a phenomenal book and I use it in every grade I teach.
And then there's certain books that I like to use in high school. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston is a phenomenal book. Zora Neale Hurston's language is just incredible. Her use of mentaphor, but also because she was writing it during the time of the Harlem Renaissance. She was writing about an African-American community and so it was totally situated in a whole community that was African American. It wasn't just African American seen in response to white people. It's really a love story as well as a story of a community.
Beloved by Toni Morrison was just recently voted one of the best books of the century or something like that, but it really is, I think, one of the best books I've ever read. Although it is a difficult text, even getting students to struggle through part of it is worth it. Because there's nothing that I've read, including slave narratives, that gives the kind of horrific sense of what slavery was like. Any of August Wilson's plays, but I particularly like Fences, his use of wit and language is really tremendous. And also the way that he choreographed his plays to look at several decades in African-American history and lives. Students respond quite positively to his work.
Brenda: Can you talk a little bit about Rethinking Schools as an organization? I know you're very active in that organization and we're going to include a link with our article to the Rethinking Schools website and the resources there.
[Editor's Note: You can access Rethinking Schools here: http://www.rethinkingschools.org/]
Linda: Rethinking Schools has been around for about twenty years now. It was started by a group of teachers who wanted to write about classroom practice, and particularly about social justice issues in classroom practice. Part of the journal is certainly about classroom practice, but the other part is about looking critically at local and national policies around education issues. For example, the local impact of NCLB on testing and some of those kinds of issues.
Rethinking Schools has also published a number of books that came out of some of the articles that teachers wrote. We are really trying to get more teacher voices involved, and so we hired Bill Bigelow as an editor to actually coach teachers on their writing, particularly writing about social justice issues in the classroom. Then out of that came a number of books that collected some of those articles. We did Rethinking Columbus which is really looking at the 500th year anniversary of Columbus' arrival in the occupied world. And Rethinking Globalization, and our most recent book was The Line Between Us which looks at immigration policies.
We are really trying to continue to look at education as not just being what Paulo Friere called "a banking method," but really as a dialogue with students about what's happening in the world and a critical view of history rather than a consumption of facts.
So I think there are two parts to Rethinking Schools, one is totally our publishing which is the main thing that we do. There are also offshoots of groups around the country that are linked to Rethinking Schools. Contact us, but there are a number of sites around the country of social justice teachers who gather together and talk about their practice, they have local conferences so it depends on the area what they do.
For example, we have a local site in the Portland, Oregon region where teachers, teacher educators, parents, come and talk about issues, but there are also sites in San Fransisco, in Seattle, in New York, in Los Angeles, and in Madison, Wisconsin. There are a number of different sites around the country. If people contact us through the website we could let them know and give them some information of websites and where to go to find local folks. Or if they were interested in starting a local group, contact us and we can send newspapers and ideas about getting started.
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