Dr. K. Shimabukuro

Dr. K. Shimabukuro

Tuesday, December 25, 2018

Failing My Kids Every Day: Questions About Teaching in Albuquerque, New Mexico

I have said again and again on Twitter that this has been my best year teaching, out of 18, in large part because of people of color, educators of color who give so generously of their time. Also groups like #DisruptTexts and #WeNeedDiverseBooks. They carry the lionshare of the water for the rest of us, and I am infinitely grateful for it, my classroom and students are better for it.

As I have done this reading, listened, taken notes, a couple of things have occurred to me, that worry me.

My school is above 1600 students. It may rise to 1700 with the recent redistricting.
85% of my students are Chican@.
7% Indigenous, mostly Navajo, but also Pueblo Indians
2% Black
5% White
The percentage on Asian students is not recorded but we have a fair amount of Thai and Vietnamese students.
95% minority enrollment
7% of our students are proficient in math, below the 21% New Mexico stat.
28 % of our students are proficient in reading, the same as the state state.
We're in the bottom 50% for performance. 
Our graduation rate is 67% (which by the way is what it was back in 1972).
70% of our students qualify for free and reduced lunch.

The number of teachers we have is down 9% in five years. We have a large teacher turnover.
The majority of our teachers are white.

Last year I looked for resources, articles, readings, that would help me better serve my mostly Chican@ and Indigenous, New Mexican students.

I found two articles:

  • "Classroom Management in a Navajo Middle School" from Theory Into Practice by Jane McCarthy and Joe Benally, 2003. It addresses Navajo students in Arizona.
  • "Cultural Implications for Navajo Students' Learning Styles and Effective Teaching Methods" from The Journal of Educational Issues of Minority Students  by Rangasamy Ramasamy, 1996.

That was it. Today I found this 1972 study from the United States Commission on Civil Rights on the education of Mexican American students. It covers California, Arizona, Texas, New Mexico. Reading through the statistics is sobering, considering that none of the numbers have changed. So in 40 years, we've made no improvements in how we serve our students.

I've also read websites and books about the Indian Boarding School system in New Mexico.

Education at the Edge of Empire: Negotiating Pueblo Identity in New Mexico's Indian Boarding Schools (Indigenous Confluences)  is good, as is One House, One Voice, One Heart: Native American Education at the Santa Fe Indian School.


New Mexico has a complicated history, defined by class status due to Spanish land grants, Chican@ identity, Pueblo identity, Navajo reservations, mixing of cultures. As my students and I often discuss, there has always been a lot of movement back and forth across the border, and just because NM became a state in 1912 and an imaginary line was drawn in the air doesn't mean hundreds of years of culture and tradition changed.

In addition to this context, we need to add the fact that New Mexico has the largest amount of employees employed by the federal government, including Sandia Labs and Los Alamos. There's a complicated history with the federal government, from the eviction and erasure of Natives off of the Los Alamos plateau for the Manhattan Project, issues with Indigenous students being adopted off reservations by white people, a current distrust of Indigenous families of Children and Family Services.

The stamp of colonialism, the internalized lessons of this, is deeply stamped onto my students and how they view the world.

In addition to all of these complicated issues is the high poverty and urban setting of my school.

So my New Mexican students are not New York Latinx. They are not Los Angeles Chican@s.

I can find no research that tells me how to best serve my students. What I am missing, lacking, how best to reach them. It's piecemeal of trying to take the lessons I learned from texts aimed at serving the needs of Black and urban students, students in poverty, with the piecemeal, often outdated, tangential works I can find about my type of students.

And PLEASE, if I have somehow missed some crucial book, article, blogger, research, TELL ME.

All of this has brought home just how deeply and how awfully, I am failing my students.
My students come from backgrounds that are deeply different from accepted, typical, Anglo culture. So how can mostly Anglo teachers serve them?
How can we know how they learn best?
How can we privilege their narratives?
Their history?
How can we honor and respect their elders, communities, and bring them into our classrooms?
How do we overcome fear and distrust of Anglo systems and institutions (like public schools) where they feel safe doing this?
How do we need to change how we teach our content AND the content we teach to best serve our students?

I do not have good answers. I can share what I've done, changes I've made to my classroom to try and do better.

  • I no longer teach folklore. First, folklore is often racist, in its approach and scholarship. Second, while folklore and folk tales is often used to check a diversity box, as Debbie Reese points out, these are not abstract stories, they are the personal, sacred beliefs of people. They are not tropes to "study" in the abstract.
  • I made a concerted effort to buy books and comics by Native/Indigenous authors, although it is hard to find Indigenous authors from HERE. I was really excited when Rebecca Roanhorse's Trail of Lightning was released, but as Indigenous folx have noted, it's very problematic.
  • I also teach The Milagro Beanfield War, Underdogs, Y No Se Lo Trago La Tierra. Not all of these are by Chican@ authors, or set in New Mexico, but Milagro is about New Mexican land grants, and the students "see" themselves in the story. Underdogs privileges narratives they don't often see, and history they aren't taught.  Y No Se Lo Trago La Tierra is set in Texas but students "get" the life is hell metaphor. I teach the Spanish-English edition which also lets a lot of my students show off their skills.
  • I also bought a lot of books like The Hate You Give, Ghost Boys, Kwame Alexander's series, Miles Morales, Boondocks, All American Boys, because while my school does not have a lot of Black students, they are still under-served, and not seen. And I want my students to see themselves in what they read as much as possible.
  • In the spring, when I teach Romeo and Juliet, I'm going to steal a page out of my friend Thomas Lecaque. When he teaches history, he starts with what that area that their school is on was like- 10,000, 5,000, 1,000 years ago. So when I teach Shakespeare, I'm going to teach it through the context of what New Mexico was like in 1595, both Pueblo and Spanish culture.
  • On days like Columbus Day, before Thanksgiving, I teach lessons that ask students to research true history, dismantle myths, and do land acknowledgements, asking them to explicitly think about these things. When I teach American Literature in 11th grade, I start with Native stories, and focus on the tale of the Taino, not Columbus. We talk a lot about institutional racism, colonialism, and how people and their narratives are erased.
  • I do not teach the canon anymore. And in our next unit which is novels, the students are researching who is left out of narratives in To Kill a Mockingbird, Lord of the Flies, Of Mice and Men. Whose story isn't told, or is erased. The issues with privileging white narratives.
  • I speak out loudly, and often, in department meetings about decolonizing our texts, not teaching the canon, and how we're harming out students by continuing these practices. These mostly devolve into screaming matches, and nothing changes, but...
  • Silly as it sounds, I make sure I wear my #DisruptText, We Need Diverse Books, Decolonize Your Syllabus, Decolonizer, 19 Pueblos of NM, Black Lives Matter, Cite Black Women, I Stand With Standing Rock t-shirts on a regular basis. Not as a replacement for actual action, but a signal to my students.

I know I am still not doing what is best for my students. I do not speak Spanish. I get someone to make my calls to Spanish families, so they get contact just like my English speaking families do. But it's not the same.
I've tried in the past to reach out to the reservation school to open dialogue, and maybe do some shadowing, but I've not tried as hard as I could. We lose a lot of our reservation kids, they come freshmen year, and the almost hour commute, the culture shock, is often too much and they drop out. I know I am failing these kids.
I feel like I don't know enough about Navajo, Pueblo culture, and how to best serve those kids.

So, I don't have answers. I have questions. Lots and lots of questions. And a soul sadness that we fail these kids again and again. Systematically and individually.

I wish we had more Indigenous, Native, Chican@ and Black teachers for my students to see. I wish they would do this work, and share it. But I also get that white people need to stop asking marginalized groups to do all the work. On the flip side, I also don't think white teachers need to be studying these communities under a microscope divorcing the customs, literature, stories, and beliefs from the actual people and communities. I strongly believe that this type of work needs to be done by native New Mexicans, Chican@, Indigenous teacher scholars.

While my focus here is on my students who aren't being served, I know too that similar posts could be written about communities and schools that serve predominantly Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, other Native populations. How many students are we failing? How many Anglo teachers aren't even self-aware enough to know or care they're actively harming and failing their students, families, communities.

Here are books, recommendations, people, that I have learned from, and I believe contain valuable lessons that can be applied in some ways if not all to the communities we serve:

Certainly not an exhaustive list by any means. By they have deeply informed my teaching, and let me better serve my students.

Addendum: I thought as I encountered them, I'd add articles, resources

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