Engaging Students in Urban Environments

The authors of the brief selections from City Kids, City Schools: More Reports from the Front Row that we have read for this week skillfully foreground the complexity that characterizes the project of educating those young people on whom harmful, delimiting social, cultural, and institutional pressures are most forcefully exerted. The central most theme animating each of this week’s selections—the necessity of humanizing students who are too often conceived of by educators and administrators, and more broadly, society at large, as undesirable products of a broken, pathological culture incapable of shaping successful individuals—is an essential one for future teachers to consider as they progress toward a career in the urban classroom. To internalize the messages communicated by these authors is to further develop an understanding of the unique challenges that await inexperienced educators in Chicago’s public schools.

In “Building Community from Chaos”, Linda Christensen posits mutual respect and shared empathy as the foundations on which successful classroom communities must be built. Christensen, a high school English teacher from Portland, Oregon, has long worked with students whose experiences as learners are defined to a considerable extent by their status as marginalized young people within a system that fails to recognize fully the extent to which the realities of their lives outside of the school context impact their ability to engage as students. In order to foster the student engagement she desires, Christensen seeks to create distinct contact points between the literature under study in her English courses and the lives of her students. These students, many of whom struggle to discern in the material they encounter as learners any relevance to their complicated lives outside of the classroom, must be made to understand that the learning that takes place in the classroom can indeed possess meaning that extends beyond the narrowly-defined process of knowledgeacquisition in the school context. In encouraging her students to both establish connections between class material and their own lives and to forge relationships with their peers through the discussion of those connections, Christensen succeeds in creating an environment capable of supporting the development of empathy and mutual respect. 

Christensen’s argument that the establishment of useful contact points—even those located at the intersection of violent subject matter and the often violent realities that shape the contours of students’ experiences—between class material and real life is likely to prove a critical component in the process of fostering student engagement must, I think, be taken seriously. Christensen does, however, remain silent on several important issues. I cannot help but feel that the study of literature, its aesthetics and organizing principles, are, on their own, worthy of study. Is there no value to be derived from the consideration of literature as cultural achievement? Of what use is an approach to studying literature that emphasizes aesthetic and organizational achievement to teachers responsible for engaging students such as those described by Christensen? Is the approach Christensenoutlines the only one at the disposal of teachers in situations similar to her own? 

Like Christensen, William Ayers seeks to illuminate the complex dynamics that exist in classrooms designed to serve young people driven to the margins of society. Ayers describes the classroom environment created by “Mr. B,” a teacher working within one of Chicagoland’s juvenile detention facilities. Students in Mr. B’s class are afforded opportunities to experience the dignity and consistency many of them had been denied in their outside lives. Secure within this unconventional learning environment, Mr. B’s students are encouraged to make meaning from materials—in the excerpt provided in City Kids, City Schools, students work with a play—that promise to generate meaningful reflection. By allowing us inside of this particular class discussion of The Piano Lesson, Ayers deftly reveals many of the most fundamental dilemmas faced by these students.  For instance, the students’ discussion of the prospects for setting aside one’s history and troubled past—a discussion rooted in their analysis of the text—serves to highlight a question central to their lives as young people in juvenile jail: Is it possible to truly move beyond one’s past, or is the individual doomed to bear for the remainder of his or her life the imprint left by past troubles? Mr. B’s students appear cognizant of the fact that, in our society, erasure of the mark left by their experiences as juvenile offenders will prove difficult, if not impossible. Still, there is hope to be glimpsed in the views articulated by these students. What lessons might we learn from Ayers’ treatment of Mr. B’s class and students? Is it possible for teachers to connect with students whose lives have derailed so dramatically? What messages should educators in Mr. B’s position seek to communicate to their students?