A Call for Specificity

Each essay in Everyday Antiracism strives to give educators easy actions to use in their classrooms to combat racial inequality. Many of these essays push you to not only develop your classroom, but also develop yourself as a person in a world where we are daily bombarded with racists messages. I will be discussing my thoughts on a few spefcific essays in my next few posts.

A Call for Specificity

Equal opportunity for ALL children should be our goal in education, and is definitely mine. This goal can feel too big to know exactly how to go about achieving it. In comes Mica Pollock and her essay “Talking Precisely about Equal Opportunity” to help us address this problem. She argues to actually achieve this goal that we need to speak with much greater specificity on the matter, and luckily she offers three suggestions to guide us.

Suggestion #1:

Pollock begins by proposing a very simple question: Is my action leading my students CLOSER or FARTHER from educational opportunity? I plan to ask myself this question when planning units, lessons, and even activities in my classroom. This questions is great post lesson, as well. Teachers can examine if their delivery is moving students towards or away from educational opportunity. Particular interactions with students, such as delivering rewards and consequences for behavior or asking students questions about their lives can be examined using this simple test. This question should be used as a check at all times for teachers in making sure that our actions are moving our students to more equal opportunities.

Less educational opportunity ßà more educational opportunity

(Pollock’s spectrum)

Suggestion #2:

Because our students vary greatly from each other on multiple levels, Pollock calls teachers to identify exactly which students need which opportunities. It is our charge to figure out, for our schools and ourselves, the needs of all students on every level, in every group. This can be hard because we want to avoid stereotyping, which is not what is being advocated. It is being said that the particular needs facing my female, Spanish speaking students need to be addressed, just as those of my male, black students need addressing. It should also be noted that to most effectively identify the needs of our students and put them into any kind of group, we do need to know our students as individuals inside and outside of school first.

Individual students ß à subgroups ß à larger groups ßà all students

(Pollock’s spectrum)

Suggestion #3:

Pollock lastly pushes educators to talk about precise causes of racial, gender, and income inequities in order to actually create successful solutions. It is important to look at education policy, administrative actions, and specific interactions between groups inside and outside of schools. It is equally important to look at how OUR actions might be leading to certain inequalities. For example: Are we holding all students to the same expectations? Are we addressing all students’ interests? I would further challenge us to avoid blaming certain groups of students, their families, or their cultures for the disparities because doing so often ignores the actual causes of the problem.  

Pollock reminds us that, “When we talk imprecisely about this goal, we pursue it imprecisely as well”.

So now that she has provided us with some tools, we have no excuse to be imprecise. Let’s start moving the conversation away from generality and towards specificity!

For more on Mica Pollock: http://eds.ucsd.edu/people/faculty/mpollock.shtml