An integrated curriculum based on broad and universal themes is a vision that will represent, amplify and normalize BIPOC identity, interests and history. In this interview, Gloria Ladson-Billings elaborates on this idea:
Here’s what I mean: If you take an ethnic studies course and one week we’re focusing on Mexican Americans and then one week we’re focusing on American Indians, what you get is that people are engaged and less engaged depending on what group you’re in. A very different approach would be to look across the common experiences of people and pull all those experiences to illustrate a point or an issue. If I were teaching one of these courses, one of the first issues I might take up with students is migration, because everybody has a migration story, not just Mexican-Americans or Central Americans. Everybody’s got one. It’s a fundamental question: How did you get here? That can be answered by everybody, and we can look across the migration stories to raise other kinds of questions. You might have a study about a concept like assimilation and acculturation: What is it that your family has done to assimilate into American society, or how have they acculturated if they haven’t assimilated? How have they made life here work for them? Taking big ideas and then pulling across all of the different cultural groups requires a lot of knowledge, though, and a lot of times we get lazy. It’s much easier to say, “Oh, I’m doing this two weeks on the Irish Americans.” Now, the Irish Americans have a very interesting migration story. If you’ve ever seen the film Gangs of New York, you’re kind of shocked: “Oh my gosh, they went through all of this. I just assumed they were white and they just fit in.” No, they didn’t. There’s a powerful migration story in the same way that the Chinese on the West Coast have a powerful migration story.
What materials could we have available through the libraries to use for teaching with themes across the disciplines and within curriculum areas?
74 Interview: Researcher Gloria Ladson-Billings on Culturally Relevant Teaching, the Role of Teachers in Trump’s America & Lessons From Her Two Decades in Education Research
Here’s what I mean: If you take an ethnic studies course and one week we’re focusing on Mexican Americans and then one week we’re focusing on American Indians, what you get is that people are engaged and less engaged depending on what group you’re in. A very different approach would be to look across the common experiences of people and pull all those experiences to illustrate a point or an issue. If I were teaching one of these courses, one of the first issues I might take up with students is migration, because everybody has a migration story, not just Mexican-Americans or Central Americans. Everybody’s got one. It’s a fundamental question: How did you get here? That can be answered by everybody, and we can look across the migration stories to raise other kinds of questions. You might have a study about a concept like assimilation and acculturation: What is it that your family has done to assimilate into American society, or how have they acculturated if they haven’t assimilated? How have they made life here work for them?
Taking big ideas and then pulling across all of the different cultural groups requires a lot of knowledge, though, and a lot of times we get lazy. It’s much easier to say, “Oh, I’m doing this two weeks on the Irish Americans.” Now, the Irish Americans have a very interesting migration story. If you’ve ever seen the film Gangs of New York, you’re kind of shocked: “Oh my gosh, they went through all of this. I just assumed they were white and they just fit in.” No, they didn’t. There’s a powerful migration story in the same way that the Chinese on the West Coast have a powerful migration story.
What materials could we have available through the libraries to use for teaching with themes across the disciplines and within curriculum areas?