Yvette Jackson - The Pedagogy of Confidence: Inspiring High Intellectual Performance in Urban Schools

THIS BOOK BY DR. YVETTE JACKSON is a tour de force that brings the reader into a tapestry rich in colors and forms reflecting the stormy feelings generated by early childhood memories of encounters with educators who openly expressed the generalized and well-accepted lack of belief in the capacities of students of color. This lack of belief was (and too often still is) reflected in the disproportionate numbers of African American and Hispanic/Latino children in special education programs, which often act as custodial care programs rather than learning environments. Nobody could deny the sad reality: The manifest level of functioning of many from these populations was indeed unacceptably low. But did this mean that their potential was as low as the functioning they demonstrated in conventional intelligence test situations? In particular, was the demonstrated poverty of academic communication skills obscuring the true capacities of these children? Yvette would not accept the notion that these levels of achievement were fixed and immutable, as promulgated by ideologies of hereditarily fixed intelligence, such as those represented in Arthur Jensens conception of the innate nature of intelligence. These ideologies propelled Yvette in her ardent search for more optimistic views about human modifiability. Her own experience had made her well aware of the discrepancy between the way she was perceived by too many and the realization that she could and did do better than those perceptions.

I cannot forget my first encounter with Yvette. She had been alerted by Professor Abraham Tannenbaum of Columbia Universitys Teachers College, her dissertation mentor, about a series of presentations I would be holding at the national conference of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. She approached me prior to my presentations and said, Sir, your theory and approach are what I had been looking for for so long. Prior to this first encounter, she had fervently studied both the theory of Structural Cognitive Modifiability (SCM) and its applied systems, finding the scientific support to advance her mission to find tools that would actually modify the structure of the learning process for those African American students subjected to various forms of disadvantage outside and inside of school. Her research was aimed mainly at discovering the hidden capacities of these students and pointing out that many of those who were considered underperforming or retarded could display gifted behaviors when given the appropriate learning conditions.

Her persistence was by far more extreme than anything I had ever dared to exhibit. She was driven to find evidence that low or retarded functioning could be hiding high potential, and she was committed in her belief that the main goal of education should be to reveal these capacities by constructing support for them. This quest was her first step in the development of the Pedagogy of Confidence. Like the miners of the California Gold Rush, she searched for the most efficient equipment that could bring forth the gold of giftedness where too few had been willing to even consider its existence.

After having mastered the theory of Structural Cognitive Modifiability and Mediated Learning Experience, she continued coursework at Teachers College. She made a concerted effort to show the power of the Instrumental Enrichment program through her doctoral dissertation, which was entitled The Identification of Potential Giftedness in Disadvantaged Students. The rigorously performed research done in Atlanta, Georgia, permitted her to employ a highly controlled and ingeniously elaborated statistical analysis to reveal the gold she had been searching for. An intensive and well-structured educational program of Instrumental Enrichment applied over a period of three years had in fact uncovered the deeply buried potential of giftedness in students considered as low functioning. But she was not content to write a dissertation and leave it to languish on a shelf. Instead, she devoted her life to using her findings and the methodology she had applied for identifying giftedness where it had for so long gone unrecognized. The position she assumed as Director of Gifted Programs for the New York City Public Schools provided her with experiences that enabled her to formulate in both conceptual and practical ways the essential conditions that would turn the low functioning of students into manifest levels of high intellectual performance in school and achievement in life. It is these rich, diverse, and emotionally ridden experiences that are crystallized in the Pedagogy of Confidence.