Ignacio Lopez - Keeping It Real and Relevant: Building Authentic Relationships in Your Diverse Classroom

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This book is the result of my journey as a classroom teacher, school leader, instructional coach, and researcher. When I first began teaching, I assumed that because I looked and sounded like many of my students, we would be able to build strong relationships with one another. I was wrong: my students saw me as more foreign than I could have imagined. I remember needing to step back from curriculum planning for a bit to consider how I might build their trust and confidence in me as their teacher. I set out to read up on, discover, and try new approaches intended to hook my students, many of whom were new to this country, on learning.

I remember attending several professional development workshops on "teaching writing" and "reading fluency" for middle and high school students. I thought to myself, "This is all great stuff, but if I can't get my students to trust me or each other, none of it will work." After reading more about culturally responsive teaching, I realized that one of our essential jobs as teachers is to bring out our students' authentic selves in the classroom.

As an English teacher, I wanted nothing more than to teach Shakespeare, the creation stories, Greek mythology, and existential poetrythe subjects that excited me so much in college. Unfortunately, these subjects were of little interest or relevance to most of my students, who were much more concerned with acclimating to a new environment. Some of my students were so disinterested with school that they actively sought detention, which they hoped would lead to suspension and, eventually, expulsion. How, I wondered, could teachers best create dynamic learning environments that speak to all our students? How might we build relationships in the classroom with and among students of different ethnic, cultural, and life experiences? This book is my attempt to answer these vital questions.

Today's teachers are under extreme pressure to prove that they can grow children to new levels of knowledge, but teaching is a relational profession. There are elements of dignity and humanity to education that we can't forget about. We must do everything in our power to make connectionsto show that we careif our students are to succeed. I hope that this book will inspire and provide direction for teachers whose students may not look or sound like them.

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According to the Center for Public Education, U.S. classrooms consist more and more of black and Latino students (2007). By contrast, teacher demographics have remained overwhelmingly white (84 percent) and female (76 percent; the National Center for Education Statistics, 2016). These figures have hardly changed in the last 15 years. Educators must challenge themselves and their students to share personal and cultural information with one another, and must work to address learning gaps and resource inequities among different subgroups.

I once asked students in my 9th grade English class to reflect on and write about some memories from elementary school. Expecting them to write about academic or extracurricular achievements, I was taken aback to read the following response from one student:

When I was in the 4th grade, my family was kicked out of the apartment we were living in after moving here from Mexico. I remember my mom leaving us. I remember needing to go live with abuela [grandma]. I remember my older brother would always stay out late. He'd then come home and beat me up for no reason. I was afraid of my brother. The 4th grade is when I started to sleep in the attic so my brother would no longer beat me up. I'd also hide up there from all my family drama. We were supposed to move to this country for a better life.

This story reminds us that every single day children go to school struggling from family, economic, or social conditions that profoundly affect their ability to learn. Educators who focus solely on students' academic development without taking into account their lived reality outside of school are guilty of perpetuating a dehumanizing system with unwanted repercussions. The greatest threat to future generationsindeed, to the very foundations of democracyis found in our too-often callous disregard for educational inequities. When schools don't treat students from different backgrounds fairly, neither does society at large.

Equity exists when teachers provide students with the tools they need to be successful not just academically, but also culturally and psychologically. If all students were alike, equity would simply be a matter of distributing resources equally to all students. Of course, every teacher knows that this is not the case. Individual students have vastly disparate needs that can radically affect the quality of their learning.

To facilitate learning in multicultural classrooms, teachers must relate the content they teach to their students' cultural backgrounds. Before they can do this, however, they must first understand who their students really are. Geneva Gay (2000) teaches us that culturally responsive teaching connects students' cultural knowledge, prior experiences, and performance styles to academic knowledge and intellectual tools in ways that legitimize what students already know. And to address students' sociocultural realities through curriculum content, culturally responsive teachers must transcend their own inherent biases first.

Culturally responsive classrooms require careful planning and explicit teaching around social interactions so that students learn to assume responsibility for their learning, feel comfortable exploring differences of opinion, and accept that they may need help from their classmates to be successful. Teachers in these classrooms help to bridge different ways of knowing and engage students from nondominant cultures as they develop proficiency with unfamiliar skills. Along the way, students learn to see the world from different perspectives and identify the risks of assuming privilege or power (or lack of either) in othersvital skills for success in the world beyond school.

To properly understand human development, we must consider it in a much broader context than that which can be immediately observed (Bronfenbrenner, 1977). Very often, the experiences our students have had at home or in their communities will indirectly manifest themselves in the classroom. Consider the following real-life example. One morning, I was visiting a 2nd grade classroom as children began to file in for the day. The teacher was counting heads, saying hello, and moving about the room. As she approached the coatroom, she noticed a group of girls giggling and squirming. Brandon, a skinny little boy in the class, had caught their attention by lifting his shirt to expose his belly. When the teacher noticed what Brandon was doing, she immediately reprimanded him.

"Excuse me! What do you think you're doing?" she yelled.

At that moment, every little head in the room turned to look at Brandon, who, without missing a beat, lifted his shirt and announced, "Check out my tight abs! No bullet could ever make its way through me!" The girls by the coatroom giggled again before scattering back to their seats.

Where does a 2nd grader learn to show off his body and discuss surviving a gunshot? Clearly, what Brandon has learned at home or in the community has made its way into the classroom space.