Education Week - October 28, 2020 - 16

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OPINION

We Need Opportunity-Centered
Teaching Now
'Colorblind' teaching doesn't cut it

he Black Lives Matter movement
strengthened dramatically this
year, as millions of Americans
took to the streets to protest
police violence. Schools have an
opportunity to use this momentum and movement to reimagine
their curriculum and teaching. Rather than returning
to normalcy after the COVID-19 pandemic-to stale,
dated, predetermined, irrelevant, under-responsive,
disconnected, and "racially neutral" curriculum and
instructional practices that maintain a white-centric
status quo-teachers have a renewed chance instead to
address opportunity gaps in education.
During almost 20 years of research in schools and
working with teachers, I have found that teachers'
mindsets can have a profound impact on gaps of
opportunity. When teachers adopt a "colorblind"
mindset to their work-where their curriculum,
instructional, relational, and assessment practices do
not acknowledge, honor, and build on students' racial
identity-they create gaps in opportunity. Moreover,
when "colorblindness" guides educational practice,
teachers do not recognize systemic and institutional
patterns, such as a disproportionate number of Black
students who are suspended and expelled or referred
to special education.
Opportunity gaps also increase when teachers do not
recognize when their own culture and cultural practices
conflict with the cultures of their students, families,
and communities. Teachers who believe that they have
rightfully earned their privileges through merit because
they have worked hard, followed the law, or have skill
and ability often do not recognize how those pathways
to privilege are not available to everyone.
Opportunity gaps also intensify when teachers have
deficit mindsets and low expectations of students
of a particular race or background. These deficit
mindsets show up in conversations teachers have with
colleagues about students and families, their reading
of students' school records, and their generalized,
misinformed stereotypes of particular students,

especially Black and brown students. When teachers
adopt context-neutral mindsets, they have a difficult
time understanding why they need to study the spaces,
places, and overall environments of students and their
families. Opportunity gaps increase when teachers
consider themselves the only-or the main-arbiters
of knowledge and knowing, ignoring the enormous
range of expertise, insights, and brilliance in local and
broader contexts.
I have found that "opportunity-centered teaching"
can address and disrupt aforementioned opportunity
gaps and simultaneously build curriculum and
instructional practices that advance a national push
for racial reckoning. This approach places opportunity
at the core of a classroom where teachers, students,
parents, families, and communities recognize students'
diverse and dynamic assets. This involves designing
instructional practices to hook students into content
that connects with core aspects of their identities, such
as their race, gender, and language.
What do teachers need to know and do to construct
these practices in this race-reckoning movement
in society? I have identified five interconnected
imperatives for this work: Focus on building and
sustaining relationships with students and families.
Use community knowledge to inform practice. Protect
the psychological and mental health of both students
and teachers. Confront how racist, sexist, homophobic,
xenophobic, and other beliefs inform our decisions.
And, finally, prioritize curriculum and instructional
convergence.
For the curriculum to converge with student
experiences, teachers should focus on the "so what?"
of learning opportunities just as they are concerned
with what and how they teach. I have found that
young people, and Black students in particular, spend
too many hours in classrooms disconnected from
anything that meaningfully resonates or connects
with them. Curriculum convergence merges the who
(student identity), the what (community and society
as texts), and the where (inside and outside of school
engagement of young people).

16 | EDUCATION WEEK | October 28, 2020 | www.edweek.org/go/opinion

Teachers must help young people imagine how what
they are learning might be a tool for something greater
than themselves, and a race reckoning to improve
the overall human condition is a fertile opportunity.
When students can apply what they are learning for
the greater good, social action and activism become an
important form of curriculum and instruction.
Teachers should find ways to center questions of
race, racism, and inequality in the curriculum. Discuss,
for instance, the alarming and disproportionate
number of deaths of Black and brown people from
COVID-19. Talk openly about the police shootings
of Black people, including Breonna Taylor, George
Floyd, Rekia Boyd, and Antwon Rose Jr. Study the
ongoing national immigration debates over children
being taken from their families and placed in fenced
cages, hundreds of whom still remain separated from
their parents today. Research the long-running water
crisis in Flint, Mich., as well as the many other crises
of environmental justice across the United States and
beyond.
This sort of curriculum and instructional
convergence allows young people to think about
themselves, their own families, and social injustices.
This ultimately helps them to build their own positions
on the need for and their participation in the racial
reckoning our country is facing-and hopefully
realizing and actualizing.
Curriculum and instruction can converge as
opportunities for students to learn by bridging student
identity, their practices, and engagement inside
school with those outside of school, including their
community experiences, insights, understandings, and
realities. In other words, student identities and society
must be considered curricular resources, centering
students' opportunities to learn. Their practices and
interests become part of the curriculum that can be
used as tools for social change.
There has never been a better time for opportunitycentered teaching that supports young people to
build knowledge to improve racial relations and
concurrently the human condition.

By H. Richard Milner IV
MILNER is the Cornelius
Vanderbilt Chair of Education
at Peabody College, Vanderbilt
University. He is the author of
several books, including Start
Where You Are, But Don't Stay
There (2020), and These Kids
Are Out of Control (2018).

http://www.edweek.org/go/opinion

Education Week - October 28, 2020

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