The Color of Teaching

Abstract

The Color of Teaching (Routledge-Falmer, 2000) explored reasons for a lack of interest in the teaching profession among students of color through interviews with more than 200 teachers of color in four urban school districts across America. Previous research and writing on the subject has lacked attention to how both the images of the teaching profession within American society and the conflict of values between schooling and minority communities can undermine the aspirations of students of color who wish to enter teaching as a career. Paradoxically, demands for greater representation and voice in the education of minority youth continue to co-exist with resistance to encouraging youth of these communities to choose teaching as a career. The resulting tension must be understood if we are ever to engage in an honest dialogue about how we can best educate all children. The Color of Teaching brings together the voices of more than 200 veteran teachers of color in Seattle, Washington; Long Beach, California; and Cincinnati, Ohio, along with approximately 50 additional interviews with and by college students of color in the San Francisco area who were considering teaching as a career at the time of the research. The interviews asked informants to reflect on the challenges of recruiting and preparing students of color as teachers for urban classrooms. Their testimonies highlight significant and often unacknowledged concerns that have remained absent from the dialogue on the recruitment and retention of students of color for too long. The following are some of these concerns: * how African American teachers, who know of the high standards that Black youth were held to in the South prior to desegregation, struggle with the sense of hopelessness and irrelevance of education in the lives of many young people today; * how Latino teachers, who see themselves as professionals able to teach a range of subjects to any and all students, deal with the expectation that they will only teach Spanish-speaking youth, often in remedial courses, even if they themselves do not speak Spanish fluently; * how Native American teachers continue to negotiate the contradictions inherent in schooling versus education, based on their experiences with both Bureau of Indian Affairs and reservation schools; * how Asian American teachers from a variety of ethnic and linguistic backgrounds attempt to match their cultures' philosophical traditions with the demands of urban classrooms; and * how many middle-class teachers, regardless of ethnic identity, resent working in low-income urban communities and are at a loss as to how to work with inner-city youth. Coming to terms with the complexity of these concerns, the book addresses immigration, segregation, exclusion, separation, and discrimination as contexts for understanding the contemporary experience of teachers of color; their attitudes toward their profession; and their understanding of why students of color may not be selecting teaching as a career. A short summary of the historical background of schooling and school teaching for African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans and Latinas/ Latinos in the United States enables us to better understand these contexts. Perhaps the most significant and surprising finding from the research was that, regardless of academic or socioeconomic standing, students of color tend not to be encouraged to enter the teaching force by their own families and community members, including classroom teachers of color. This discouragement, ironically, occurs as we simultaneously lament the shortage of teachers of color and the resulting mismatch of identity and experience between teachers and students. As painful as it may be to acknowledge, the very people who are best able not only to influence students to enter the field of teaching but also to see the potential disaster if quality teachers are not found are the ones discouraging students of color from going into teaching. …