“Learning about one another’s personal histories and exploring social issues in their lives validates students’ experiences, counters negative stigmas and stereotypes and deficit views of them and their community, Continue reading Creating safe spaces and opportunities to share within the class →

“Specifically, strategic video game play may predict higher problem solving skills because video games possess good learning principles (Gee 2005; Green and Bavelier 2008). For instance, the level of difficulty in almost all video games increases throughout the games in small incremental steps, Continue reading An Unexpected Connection →

I must say, Goodman (2018) writes a pretty enthralling introduction. The part that stayed with me the most is when we writes “It is healing for students to know that it’s not their fault that they live in inequitable and impoverished conditions in their community or attend underresourced schools, and that these conditions do not define them. It is empowering for them to learn that there is a history of economic forces and racialized public policies that have created these conditions, as well as movements of people who have long struggled to change them” (p.7).

It is commonly believed in the education world that students must understand what they’re learning and why. As teachers we have to tell them, and show them, and model for them what they’re learning today, why it’s important, how does it connect to their previous knowledge and how will it relate to upcoming activities/projects. We have to help them build connections from the content of the classroom to their own experiences and realities to make it relevant to them on a personal level and gain their interest and motivation. A good teacher plans all of this into his/her lesson plan just to conduct some activities, so I loved that Goodman made the same point in regard to students learning the history of their disadvantages — they must be explicitly taught, just like everything else in the classroom. I can image that without access to this kind of information, disadvantaged students potentially walk through life blaming themselves or their parents or their ancestry for these prejudices and the conditions they bring. They may know in their hearts that the system is against them, but not have the knowledge to explain how they know. Using historical facts to be able to support the truth of their experiences has to be liberating. While they learn that their experiences aren’t singular, they also get to learn that there have been passionate and ambitious groups of people before them that have fought to hopefully eliminate similar struggles for future generations. With this empowerment, students of this nature can begin to heal.

Teaching students to critically analyze unjust and inequitable conditions in their lives means having hard but necessary conversations about poverty, race, trauma, and oppression in their lives and the actions needed to change them. However, talking about poverty as a structural problem of policy and discrimination goes against stereotypes about poor people held by those more privileged, as well as by working-class and poor people themselves, that blame the poor for their condition and stigmatize them as lazy and undeserving of our help. Poor people are particularly stigmatized when the source of disadvantage is perceived as controllable, as compared with an uncontrollable cause of poverty such as natural disasters (Williams, 2009). As educators, we too carry our own assumptions and implicit biases about race and poverty that impact our teaching. As Paul Gorski (2013) writes, “What we believe about poverty and why it exists even affects our expectations of and attitudes toward low-income students…. [W]e need to challenge common myths about poverty and develop robust understandings of the experiences of poor and working-class families both in and out of school” (p. 27). 

-S. Goodman, It’s Not About Grit 

I took an intro to sociology class in undergrad and one of the topics that we spoke about that most stuck with me was the idea of the “deserving poor”, that there are a group of people that someone wants to help because they feel like they can’t help the fact that they’re poor and therefore have merited the chance to be helped. Comments like “Don’t waste food, there are starving children in Africa” show ideas of a deserving poor because it neither actually helps the starving children elsewhere but also fails to recognize that there may be starving children in their county or city. But, the difference here lies in that the children in Africa deserve our help (see also the Savior Complex) but the children in urban areas don’t because if only those people would work harder, get a higher paying job, or go to college, they wouldn’t be poor. 

The idea of controllable or uncontrollable poverty, as this passage states, is the deciding factor behind who we as a society deem is deserving or undeserving of being in that socioeconomic situation.

Leaving behind those categorizations is essential to our work as educators because how can we give all of our students an equal chance at excelling in our classes if we, from the beginning, push the finish line further away from certain students. By recognizing and understanding our students better, we can even out the playing field in our classroom and inspire students that will even it out in the “real world”.