Solidarity in Community: Culturally Relevant Classrooms for Black Students

Effective teaching of Black students is enhanced by fostering students’ relationships with each other. When they feel themselves to be part of a classroom group, Black students learn together, and learn more. They are better motivated and better able to develop a unity of purpose that helps them achieve group goals. Such “social cohesion” is consistent with the cultural values of many African American communities, values which commonly include learning through cooperation and collaboration.

Classroom practice that helps Black students connect to each other is a form of culturally responsive teaching and creates a learning situation to which many Black student can easily respond. In our experience, Black students develop positive attitudes toward school when they are given meaningful choices, are able to participate in discussions using their own vernacular, and when teachers base curriculum partly on the students’ own interests, experiences, and strengths.? Research and experience have shown us that African American students receive benefit from communal learning experiences.

However, many teachers of Black children often promote individualistic and competitive values in their classrooms, resulting in a mismatch between the classroom values and the value orientation of the students. A study of two successful African American teachers offers insight into important principles and practices that support school success for Black students.

In this study led by Michèle Foster, the author of the influential study, Black Teachers on Teaching, we spent three years with each of the two Californian teachers, one in Oakland and one in Los Angeles, regularly observing their practice and the positive outcomes they achieved with Black students in otherwise low-performing schools.

My role on the study was to gather student perspectives of these classrooms. The result of our observations and the student perspective data was the emergence of a framework that I termed “solidarity in community.” Each teacher, despite differences in setting, background, and experience, created classrooms characterized by students who identified and supported each other, and were able to work independently and in groups without direct supervision of teachers. Student autonomy and agency did not come at the expense of connection and mutual caring. In both sites, student outcomes improved considerably within two years of the project. The five classroom characteristics included:

1.???????? Developing a sense of “we-ness” and shared interests;

2.???????? Providing opportunity for all to participate and develop skills;

3.???????? Supporting positive classroom identities through teacher-student interaction;

4.???????? Incorporating children’s ideas, interests, and experiences in the curriculum;

5.???????? Creating classrooms in which children could feel comfortable and be themselves.

In the coming weeks, I will describe each of these more fully in a series of articles that will include examples to help you understand how each might be cultivated and expressed. I hope you will find them useful and would appreciate any thoughts, comments, or experiences you might like to share.

In what ways might we promote solidarity and communal learning among African American students?