Navigating White Space in Education: How Connecting Christ, Critical Conversations, and Cultural Competency Can Reframe Teacher Resiliency

By Maessie Allen Jameson

When more than 80 percent of America’s teachers are White and approximately 50 percent of the students they serve are Black, Indigenous, or people of color (BIPOC), that disparity affects the professional and personal responsibility to equitably service and grow all students, cultivate a climate of professional growth, and attract and retain BIPOC educators. Navigating this educational “white space” requires shifting our perspective on this damaging dynamic, and finding value-building staying power through the denials, difficulties, and discrimination that frame it.

In this experiential devotional, author Maessie Allen Jameson shares strategies born from struggles, familial adages that transcend educational theory, and empowering scriptural lessons that have nurtured her love for teaching and view of what achieving perfection looks like in the American public education system as a Black educator. Her three-pronged approach involves establishing Christian credence, engaging in critical conversations, and developing cultural competency. She provides thematically aligned classroom strategies, scripture readings, and planning pages for reflective application. Teachers of all levels will find approachable tools to help them respond to racism, isolation, burnout, prejudicial practices, and damaging pedagogy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Mar 31, 2024
• ISBN: 9798385014996

Maessie Allen Jameson

Maessie Allen Jameson, a lifelong Maryland native, holds a BS degree in English secondary education and a MA in instructional systems development. She is a National Board–certified veteran English teacher, author, AP reader, and curriculum developer with more than two decades of classroom experience. She aims to inspire educators to thrive spiritually, personally, and professionally as they grow students into reflective critical thinkers who value the cultural differences that magnify their greatness.

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ISBN: 979-8-3850-1498-9 (sc)

ISBN: 979-8-3850-1497-2 (hc)

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WestBow Press rev. date: 01/15/2024

Scripture quotations marked (NIV) are taken from the Holy Bible, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Scripture quotations marked (KJV) are taken from King James version of the Bible, public domain.

Scripture quotations marked (ESV) are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scriptures marked (NLT) are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked (CEV) are from the Contemporary English Version Copyright © 1991, 1992, 1995 by American Bible Society, Used by Permission.

God hath made me fruitful in the land of my affliction (Genesis 41:52 KJV). To my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, who loved me enough to provide a season of heartbreak to propel and mature me into a season of prosperity. Thank You, heavenly Father, for proving that a season of offense, emptiness, and brokenness was necessary recompense for cultivating a season of praise, profusion, and composition that sustains and motivates me in the growing of others.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Preface

Chapter 1   Preparing for the Shoot

Chapter 2   Removing the Lens Cap

References

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

To my grandparents. who planted seeds they never saw mature, who loved me without conditions and believed in me without limits.

To my parents and bonus parents, who provided support on every level—spiritual, financial, motivational, and critical—that helped me to achieve this goal and countless others.

To my sons, who are my reason for living and contributing to the world.

To my siblings and bonus siblings, who have each always uniquely been what I needed, at the time I needed it most.

To my loyal friends and colleagues who have been my therapists, voices of reason, and fountains of bottomless encouragement.

To my Fearsome Four, who were my first readers, editors, revisers, reviewers, and personifiers of grace and truth, for their professional and spiritual leadership.

To my nieces and nephews, who remind me of what it’s like to be a student and why it’s important to laugh every day, who keep me young and culturally competent in heart and mind.

To my dozens of cousins, aunts, and uncles, who always see the best in me; loyalty is love.

PREFACE

As a Black woman, mother, and teacher in the public school system, I have experienced and witnessed the victimization that Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) receive as a result of educational legislation, trends, and jargon. We have been alienated, stifled, and failed. We as teachers, who are also victims ourselves, often fail to see how we are contributors to the collective victimization of our students, not recognizing the damage we are causing because it manifests under a well-meaning guise of what we feel are positive, pious pedagogies and acknowledgments of the need for equality. I say we because I too have victimized my students by supporting scholastic global trends and educational mandates that do not consider the unique experiences of my students and the wealth of knowledge they bring to my classroom that is different from not only my own but also the standardized norms that academia expects and rarely challenges. Though it’s not an excuse, I had to grow into knowing that I needed to.

This knowing is unearthed in examining our perspective … shifting it from one that is focused on blaming the migration of BIPOC teachers from the profession and the lack of BIPOC students’ success that is stereotypically ascribed to our missing motivation, generational poverty, subsidiary culture, and absent or negatively biased support systems to one that is focused on teachers expanding the how, what, and why we should cleave to our calling despite these tropes, why and how we teach what we teach, and challenging the they, who have told us to teach it that way, even if that they is us. This necessary shift will become evident after reading my experiences on how and why I …

1. Changed my perspective to counter the damaging impact of approaches and beliefs I have maintained over the course of my studies and tenure;

2. Acknowledged the explicit and implicit difficulties of thriving in the current educational system due to the color of my skin;

3. Purposefully studied how to revise, support, and at times abandon curriculum, while maintaining adherence to standards, so that it is culturally responsive and reflective of the students and community I serve; and,

4. Implemented a self-care regimen rooted in scripture to work tirelessly in pursuit of fulfilling the chosen purpose that God assigned to me, for my students are handpicked by my Creator, and part of my divine calling is to serve them for the reason and season appointed by God, through cultivating a classroom culture that fosters academic growth, authentic relationships, and professionalism for all.

My methods are authentic, approachable, and apostolic, each chapter ending with identification of three to four educational strategies, paired scriptures for implementation, and a directed prayer that will give readers the strength, courage, and sometimes necessary condemnation to implement them. The teaching strategies that I provide are proven, easily adaptable, approachable, and memorable. They can be used for multiple levels of planning, from composing annual professional development goals to outlining the components that are must-haves in each daily lesson, K–12. Each chapter is followed with devotional PREP questions to guide readers in that implementation with methods for accountability.

In short, our perspective as educators must change to mitigate the isms that plague our ability to support and promote the students who need us most academically and socially. Our faith must guide this change in order to strengthen our courage and deepen our scope enough to ensure that we honor these changes from a place of humility, conviction, empathy, and wisdom, in order to support our colleagues in doing the same.

This work is hard. This work is exhausting. This work is scary. But this work is also necessary, and we will be victorious in our completion of it, for Christ gives us strength to face anything (Philippians 4:13 CEV).

Committing to this level of systemic and individual change and becoming a voice for culturally competent and responsive teaching that corrects euphemistic units on reducing bullying and increasing acts of kindness, to calling racism, prejudice, and injustice what they are must also be rooted in what Denzel Washington and Liam Neeson, film to film, call proof of life. When portraying retired CIA operatives out for blood, no matter the movie, it is the phrase both actors use to demand evidence that their kidnapped loved one is still alive before a trade or delivery of ransom monies. For teachers, I know that proof of life is evidence that the strategies being shared have been used in real classrooms, by real teachers, with real results, and real, easy steps for implementation. A strategy must be worth the risk for us to even try it. I get it. We are, in fact, sometimes fighting for our lives during some lessons. Try teaching before a pep rally, after an active shooter drill, or on field day. Is that not a fight for your life? It is not for the weak or faint of heart. Seriously, though, there is no better operative for this mission than one who has been a victim of racism as a student and teacher, with over twenty years in the classroom, and a desire, unlike these retired legendary heroes who are pulled back into work, to remain committed to the call, on purpose, and the scripture that comforted and strengthened her through it.

In real life, we are exposed every day to more and more acts of violence, the cavalier utterances of hurtful labels, and legislative attempts to normalize all that negatively affects minoritized groups and their voices. This saturation, in turn, normalizes our pain, normalizes pedagogies built on stereotypical facets of our diverse cultures, and normalizes our deviation from the standardized educational experiences of White Americans as a deficit. We cope with more. We are denied more. We are excluded from more. We do not need another hashtag, march, or protest. We do not need another label to categorize and define our differences. We do not need to be told that the wealth of knowledge we possess that is vital to our culture is unworthy. As the only Black female student in my classes from grades K–6, the only Black classroom teacher on staff for most of my career, and a single mother of two Black men, my life experiences speak directly to the demographic and social circles I aim to help.

The Civil Rights Movement was rooted in the need for immediate action in the dismantling of all that impeded the road to equality in jobs, education, housing, and politics. And though many believe this prompt push for justice ended with federal legislation passed in the late sixties, we are still waiting … and we have waited long enough. Teachers must recognize that it is we, not the students, not their caregivers, not the political powers, who write policy, who must address issues of injustice in our classrooms. We are on the front line with direct access to the society we love to complain about as we age out, promote out, or run out of the classroom. We must shift our perspective to meet the ever-changing needs of our students. Education is not static. Nor is the road to educational achievement, equity, and mastery for all students. Here, I offer educators a book of anecdotes, spiritual activism, and an opportunity to reflect personally and professionally on how to pen, promote, and produce the change we hope, and our children deserve, to see.

CHAPTER 1

Preparing for the Shoot

F rench American photographer Elliott Erwitt once said, Photography is an art of observation. It has little to do with the things you see and everything to do with the way you see them. My experience as an educator has taught me that teaching is the same type of art. Its success is rooted in observation: the practice of sitting in on another teacher’s class to examine, learn, and evaluate. Through this practice, we are assessed on a variety of skills, including the preparation and implementation of the lesson, classroom community, communication skills, content knowledge, and questioning techniques from every onlooker—students, parents, and administration, to name a few. Yet it is not until we discuss and weigh the way in which they see our execution of these skills that a true critique of our teaching and mastery of this art can be made. Growing students works in the same way. Their success has little to do with what I can see as I prepare to teach them: curriculum guides, standardized expectations, administrative checklists and checkpoints, and a variety of students with a variety of interests, abilities, and, the way I see them, tools and guidelines that are springboards to assist me in becoming a change agent who propagates change agents—lifelong students with an intrinsic, learned responsibility to use their voices to positively influence the world, no matter their interests, privileges, abilities, or needs.

Culture Matters

Again, I posit that teaching is an art, conceptual and intellectual, abstract and concrete, creative, and sequential. It’s about people but framed through ideas. It’s about content, hearts, minds, the past, the future—whatever we can imagine, teaching and learning are both causes and effects (Teach Thought Staff). And the goal of this art in public schools, according to education historian David Labaree, can be defined as fostering social mobility (schools should prepare students to compete for higher social positions), social efficiency (schools should focus on training workers), and democratic equality (schools should mold citizens) (Hedges). Recent, highly publicized, and globally debated acts of terrorism, racism, and sexism have instituted a conflicted need for a fourth neglected goal: social justice (Hedges). Thus, an expansion in how civic education and civil responsibility are taught and discussed is needed. Teachers must be the vehicles of that growth, and students are the people who are going to carry out the impact of that inclusion for future generations. To accomplish these goals ethically and responsibly, teachers must become culturally responsive.

Culturally responsive teachers are grounded in pedagogical practices, teaching conceptions, and social relationships that enhance social justice because these teachers relate the curriculum to students’ backgrounds, establish connections with families, understand students’ cultural experiences, establish connections with local communities, create shared learning experiences, and recognize cultural differences as strengths on which to build programs (Bassey).

In short, culturally responsive teachers are change agents who inspire change agents, and their pedagogy must be rooted in five core affirmations:

1. A change agent is a lifelong learner. We should be on a perpetual quest to understand the world around us, improving what we know about it and ourselves as we go. The world constantly changes, and we must learn how to change with it to positively influence the lives of others. The beauty of learning is that it occurs not only in the confines of classroom walls but also in the hallways of life. As a result, expertise gained formally and informally, by force or by choice, caught or taught, has equal weight if we are willing to see each course and all that we encounter, from work to card games, as an opportunity to build mastery and deepen our relationship with others through what we learn. Regardless of whether we are students changing teachers in the middle of the school year or teachers making a midlife career change, we must adapt according to what we have learned from the experience or seek knowledge in order to navigate that change. Mark Twain, an abolitionist and antiracist author, said, I was never one to let my schooling get in the way of my education. This view on the value of life lesson, street smarts, and experiential learning influenced his work as an activist who supported racial equality, the suffrage movement, and foreign policy and extends far beyond the pages of his classics that are still heavily debated over one hundred years after his death. He was a change agent, and change agents pursue new knowledge and make continued efforts to feed their curiosity in order to deepen their understanding of the relationships they have with themselves and others.

2. A change agent engages in critical conversations to listen, learn, and leverage. Critical conversations are those that candidly reveal the difficulties in eliminating, or at least mitigating, the difficulties that plague our relationships with and ability to understand others, societal institutions, and the rules that govern our engagement. Critical conversations must routinely occur, both introspectively, with ourselves, and through acts of purposeful extrospection with others whom we share space to ensure that teachers are working to defend students against their own personal influence and make much-needed change in an ever-evolving society. Many times, we avoid critical conversations because opportunities for them do not exist in the curriculum or we don’t have the time; other times, we are prone to avoid them due to our personal and professional discomfort, trauma, or fear of future ramifications. However, critical conversations build connectedness and foster empowerment. And for students, the safest place to have critical conversations is in the classroom. It provides an opportunity to find out what students think, incorporate issues of justice, and verbalize values that build community and agency. Change agents engage in and facilitate critical conversations in ways that build interpersonal skills, social responsibility, collaboration, and empathy and inspire the creative thinking needed to foster leadership competency. Change agents flexibly engage in these conversations and listen with empathy in order to learn without bias, rigidity, and fragility; they embrace the idea that it is only from this point of candid vulnerability that we can learn to leverage our failures, inexperience, and privilege as opportunities to cultivate relationships rooted in honesty, accountability, and cooperation.

3. A change agent seeks to understand themselves and others. The most important relationship we will ever be in is with ourselves. To improve that relationship, it is vital to engage in daily reflection. Consistently evaluating ourselves and our actions through a professional and personal lens helps us to make room for growth. For students, reflection is vital to developing them as whole learners who are self-sufficient, conscientious, goal oriented, and considerate. For teachers, reflection garnered from students, peers, autobiographical analysis, and scholarly feedback must be habitual and utilized to create action plans for success. Evaluating ourselves from these lenses will not only improve our teaching practice but also provide opportunities to develop strategic self-care plans rooted in celebrating our highs and crafting action steps to improve on our lows. This, in turn, will help in cultivating a regenerative attitude of gratitude for the small victories and big wins that will keep us all, students and teachers, engaged and present in our work. Change agents habitually use reflection metacognitively to bridge their current selves to their future selves and apply what they learn from that self-critical assessment to their treatment and understanding of others.

4. A change agent embraces failure as pivots for purpose. My grandmother lived by the mantra nothing beats a failure but a try. Go back. Read that again. Let it marinate. She is right. I didn’t know while growing up that she probably came up with it because it is the inverse of James Brown’s song Nothing Beats a Try but a Fail. No matter its origin, it is true, though extremely difficult to embrace when in the throes of suffering a loss, calculating what led to a misstep, or figuring out how to recover a deficit. Failure hurts. Failure debilitates. Failure discourages. But it is necessary. It can only be defeated by trying again. And every corny, clichéd adage naming failure as the magic ingredient for creating success is as accurate as my grandmother and James Brown said. It is human to feel the hurt of failure, but agency is to temporarily rest there in the hurt, perhaps debilitated and discouraged, then spring forward to a continued pursuit of one’s true purpose, the reason for which something or someone exists, or a goal for which one aims. Learning to see failure as a pivot for purpose that reveals our weaknesses in order to help us grow, or as annotations in the book of life that pivot us toward personal growth, is a life hack that increases productivity and efficiency. Change agents view failure as painful pit stops of exigence that spark a shift from their unrecognized distractions to unescapable purpose.

5. A change agent navigates space. Navigation is loosely defined as travel on a desired course after planning a route or determining a path or course. Therefore, whenever and wherever we take up space, we must move strategically to achieve our desired plan or goal. School and the workplace should ideally be safe spaces that do not require strategic navigation, but no space is exempt from difficulty or failures that pivot us toward our purpose. Navigating space requires discernment and discipline that can only be taught through experience. On the ever-changing landscape of education, successful navigation rests in building, cultivating, and expanding cultural knowledge to better understand relationships and how to maintain them in different settings and circumstances: student to student, student to adult, adult to adult, school to community, student to content/curriculum, and adult to content/curriculum. However, just as space is infinite, so are the elements that can invade, crowd, and diminish it. Being aware of these elements, from unreliability to uncongeniality, prejudice to pitilessness, and selfishness to stringency, can help us to navigate space without damaging, disrespecting, or drowning others. Change agents are goal oriented and strategically and consciously move toward those goals by reducing harm, risking isolation, and anticipating both interferences and impasses that are sure to impede every space they encounter.

Christ Matters

Committing to becoming and inspiring change agents is not an easy task. But it is necessary if we are to master the art of teaching in the twenty-first century. Content mastery and reserving smiles for after Christmas are no longer enough. We must be resourceful, tech literate, relevant, forward thinking, student centered, self-regulated, and socially aware, all while fighting, explaining, and blocking a culture rooted in expressing, filming, and accepting hatred, prejudice, riots, and chaos as present-day norms. We are expected to put our students’ growing needs first, in addition to these twenty-first-century skills and evils, when the lack of respect and support, crippling anxiety and workload, isolating bias and exclusivity, and exploitive work and outside work hour expectations are increasing exponentially faster than our paychecks and our patience. It is for these reasons that many of us just leave the classroom and with good, justifiable reason. Mark Twain tells us, The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why. This knowledge is a gift. And though the forces of burgeoning skill sets, societal evils, and rising responsibilities are increasing, they are not worth us missing out on that gift. Surviving and thriving while we pursue our passion to teach is possible if we ground ourselves in learning from the ultimate change agent, who expertly modeled the art of teaching, despite the odds that were stacked against Him, Jesus Christ. No matter if your personal beliefs about Jesus match mine, that He is the only begotten Son of God, the Way, the Truth, and the Life, or if you believe that He was simply a good teacher, supernatural healer, social reformer, or rabbi who was at the wrong place at the wrong time, we can agree that for more than two millennia we have been affected by, or formed an opinion on, His life. And His life experiences as a teacher modeled the five principles that must be embraced by change agents who aim to inspire change agents:

1. Jesus modeled lifelong learning so we would become lifelong learners. To believers, Jesus is infallible. He sees all and knows all. He is fully God and fully man. Yet, in knowing, creating, and orchestrating all, He took the time to demonstrate that we must continually seek to learn. Luke 2:52 tells us, Jesus grew in wisdom and in stature and in favor with God and all people (NLT), which reveals the impact growing in knowledge has not only on our level of achievement but also our relationships with others. This need for perpetual learning and its impact on how we relate with others is further modeled in Hebrews 5:7–9, which reads as follows:

While Jesus was here on earth, he offered prayer and pleading, with a loud cry and tears, to the one who could rescue Him from death. And God heard His prayers because of His deep reverence for God. Even though Jesus was God’s Son, he learned obedience from the things He suffered. In this way, God qualified Him as a perfect High Priest, and He became the source of eternal salvation for all those who obey Him. (NLT)

This shows that Jesus learned from what He endured and was rewarded for it in a way that rewards others who obey Him. This passage also highlights how this learning affected His relationship with those who obey Him becoming their source of eternal salvation.

2. Jesus engaged in critical conversations. He spoke to the Pharisees who hated Him. He spoke to the tax collectors, the Samaritan woman, and lepers who were hated. He is no respecter of person and consistently engaged in critical conversations that focused on both God’s love and mercy and confrontation of those who willfully obstructed the equality and justice of God. Among my favorite biblical critical conversations are those Jesus held with religious leaders. They knew the law and were intolerant of all He did that they felt was against it, especially working on the Sabbath. No matter their criticisms and the fact that He knew He would lose His life for it, He responded to most disagreements over law with questions whose answers valued love over statues. This is concisely shown in Matthew 12:11: And He answered, ‘If you had a sheep that fell into a well on the Sabbath, wouldn’t you work to pull it out? Of course, you would. And how much more valuable is a person than a sheep! Yes, the law permits a person to do good on the Sabbath’ (NLT). This form of discussion continues throughout the New Testament, as Jesus made continued efforts to engage the religious leaders in critical conversations that revealed their hypocrisy and expressed judgment over their acts of injustice in order to reveal the inhumanity of certain religious rules and His value of love over law.

3. Jesus understood Himself and others. Jesus demonstrates that from an early age He understood that He was here to be about [His] father’s business (Luke 2:49 KJV). He also instructs us to know ourselves and to reflect on that knowledge. This is first expressed in 1 Corinthians 11:28, "But let a man examine himself, and