On a sunny day in April, I drove to Head-Royce School in the hills of Oakland, California, to join circle time in Bret Turner’s first-grade classroom. I had asked Turner if I could sit in on some lessons after reading an article he wrote describing how he teaches about some surprising topics -- like race and class -- in an elementary school classroom. I wanted to see what that looked like and what kind of conversations first-graders at this private school would have around such complicated and fraught topics.
The class had been studying homelessness for weeks and was preparing to present what they learned to parents in an upcoming performance. In this lesson, Turner wanted to talk about a statistic some of the students discovered when doing internet research about homelessness in Alameda County, where their school is located. Students found that a disproportionate number of the county's homeless population is African American. Rather than skipping over this factoid, Turner leaned into it.
“What do we know about what causes homelessness? What causes people to be pushed down rather than lifted up?” Turner asked the class. “Because when I see that half of homeless people in Alameda County are black, that doesn’t make sense to me when I first look at it. It doesn’t seem fair to me. And then I start to think there must be some reasons. What are some of those reasons?”
Turner and his students have been discussing all year long how power and privilege are built into all aspects of society. He often takes opportunities like this one to ask students to connect those prior conversations to whatever topic is at hand. In fact, the structural inequalities that lead to homelessness is one of the least potentially controversial topics they’ve tackled. They’ve also discussed microaggressions, gender inequality, gender identity and structural racism.
Turner sees what he’s doing as planting seeds of inquiry and offering students some tools so they can continue to grapple with issues that are at the core of American society as they grow up. He says that, as a white man, he had the privilege not to think about how his race, class and sexuality smoothed his way through life. He’s doing a lot of that work now, and he says teachers owe it to both their white students and their students of color to initiate these conversations in safe and developmentally appropriate ways.
To read more of Katrina Schwartz' article, please click here.
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