Christopher EmdinReseñas

This book was my first introduction to the critical race theory mindset.  I found the book suspect and illuminating.  Suspect in how it characterized black students as being colonized and white teachers as colonizers.  Illuminating that there are people out there who celebrate being oppressed.  When I first read the book, I didn't realize that in a few years that this mindset would go from cringe and fringe to mainstream.  I recommend reading this book to better understand, while not agreeing, the growing perception of the black student's experience. 

Edmin has written an essential book for any teacher, no matter your race or where you teach. His approach of valuing and learning from the cultural assets of one's students can be applied in any classroom.

Sorry for the delay.

As a "white folk" who formerly taught in the "hood," I can attest to the presence of many of the issues that Emdin addresses. There is much of merit in this book, not the least of which is the idea that differences between teachers and students cannot remain unspoken. Additionally, the "culture" of a teacher cannot and should not subsume the "culture" of a student. The way that I would sum up this book is with an axiom that I used to live by: when a teacher and a student are coming from backgrounds that are mutually exclusive, the teacher has the responsibility to step into (understand) the student's world first before s/he can expect the student to step into his or hers.

While I never received my Early Reviewers copy, I ended up purchasing this text after hearing Dr. Emdin speak. I was not disappointed and it is a book worth owning. For all educators, his strategies for student engagement, investment, and ownership should be immediately practiced and built into your practice if they are not there already. Great read and phenomenal educator from whom I imagine will follow many other powerful and useful texts.

Emdin frames teaching black and brown kids in urban/poor environments as a matter of neoindigeneity; the book is about the encounter between the kids and well-meaning teachers (whether white or otherwise, as he discusses how he—a black man who’d come from the same environment—was socialized into thinking of the kids as deficient and opposed to the “right” way to learn). Many kids are looking for the “socioemotional stability” of a family, and can find it in school—or they can find it in a gang, which they will often think of as their family if it’s the group that values them.

I was struck by his discussion of how the kids often thought of themselves as ready to learn and on time when they were near the classroom and prepared to borrow materials from classmates if they needed to write something down or read. (I did wonder how the classmates ended up with the materials if that counted as ready to learn.)

But the broader point was about, basically, presuming good faith and lack of deficiency—understanding that there’s a culture clash and not assuming that the traditional white school culture is in the right. He responds to scholars who conclude that black kids view doing well in school as acting right by noting that they fail to consider “that teachers may perceive being black as not wanting to do well in school”—that resistance to methods may be misread as resistance to education, to everyone’s detriment but most of all to the kids’. “In a school system that positions black and brown boys as loud, abrasive, and unteachable, and that rewards black and brown girls for being submissive, teachers often give students good grades for being ‘nice and quiet’ at the expense of ensuring that they are learning.”

Emdin argues that students “who receive preferential treatment because of their performance of teacher-defined smartness become targets of ridicule by the students who refuse to perform, not because of any false notion of ‘acting white,’ but for being fake.” Those who can’t or won’t do that perform disruptiveness by exaggerating elements of themselves and their experience that teachers have chosen not to recognize. Students who perform smartness are busy performing rather than learning, while noncompliant students lose the opportunity for academic challenges by focusing on disruption.

Emdin advocates “cogens”—collaborative teaching with students, selected at first by the teacher and then by the students. Students who prepare lessons learn the material better and are empowered to interact with—even interrupt—a teacher who isn’t doing it right. Students should get credit for teaching—tests and classroom behavior shouldn’t be the only things that schools value. Indeed, not compensating students for doing classroom work like this can be more demotivating than ordinary bad grades—when students get bad grades for “not engaging in school in the ways they are expected to, there is some satisfaction that comes with knowing where one stands within the institution,” but if students engage and still fail to get recognition, the alienation may be terminal. Students should also work in pairs with complementary strengths/weaknesses, and the stronger student should get points for how much the weaker student’s scores increase. Emdin also suggests routine use of competitions like Jeopardy-style quizzes (and rap battles), which are fun and motivating and shouldn’t just be used at the end of the year for relaxation.

One really interesting point was about style: “the art of teaching the neoindigenous requires a consideration of the power of art, dress, and other dimensions of their aesthetic. Teachers often fail to understand that the bleak realities of urban youth and the drab physical spaces they are often confined to contribute to an insatiable desire to engage in, and with, artistically stimulating objects and environments.” This has implications for how the teacher should dress and decorate a classroom as well as what projects might be appropriate. “Reality pedagogy functions with the general principle that the work of raising rigor or guiding students to think more deeply is achieved through identifying phenomena that emotionally connects or motivates the student, and that the most significant emotional connections we have are to the art we consume and the most powerful and healthy emotional releases we have is through the art we create.” And yet students are expected to learn in environments hardly distinguishable from prisons (which themselves shouldn’t be soul-destroying, by the way).

In order to equip students for the expectations of the dominant culture, Emdin argues for explicitly teaching them to code-switch; uniforms and standard vocabulary/grammar are not required as long as the students can recognize which modes are important in which contexts. “To validate the codes of young people in the classroom and then fail to arm them with the tools they need to be successful across social fields is irresponsible; students must use what emerges from the enactment of their culture in schools to help navigate worlds beyond the classroom that have traditionally excluded them.” Likewise, he advocates integrating social media into the school experience, and tells a really sad story about laptops that were brought in with great fanfare, then crippled so that all they could do was play a dumb math game, then vandalized by the now demoralized and bored students, then removed because the students “couldn’t be trusted” with the equipment.

In the end, Emdin says, teachers must decide whether “to do damage to the system or to the student.”

I received this book from the publisher through a Library Thing early reviewers’ giveaway in exchange for a review. I am a white woman, and I am not a teacher in the hood or elsewhere. But I am a parent who has an interest in education, so this is the review by a layman.

The author posits that a white person coming into an urban area to teach needs to approach the urban youth as a neoindigenous population. Neoindigenous is defined as a marginalized population whose presence in the area doesn’t predate its oppressors. As such, engagement in the classroom requires addressing cultural differences between teacher and student. The book contains eleven chapters each with a separate technique to help teachers connect with their urban students. Unlike many instructional-type non-fiction books, this book never became repetitive. In fact, I thought it got stronger as it progressed.

I am not a teacher, so some of the classroom information was lost on me. However, I found two particular topics to be of interest. First was the idea that urban youth have to surrender their authentic selves, or at least they feel that they have to, to survive in the classroom. White teachers either don’t appreciate or misinterpret the culture of urban youth, and this leads to underperformance in school. The pressure to conform can ruin a child’s true self. This reminded me of Reviving Ophelia by Mary Pipher where the author contends that girls lose their authentic selves with adolescence due to the pressure to conform to the expectations of society.

The other topic I found interesting was the technique of code switching. Code switching is the ability to effectively move between social settings by speaking the language of the setting. What I thought the book did well was not to present code switching as just something a person does to get along. Code switching allows the speaker to be his or her authentic self because the beliefs remain the same; it is just the recognition that difference audiences require different languages.

I'm really not certain how I feel about this. Many of the practices detailed in this book are sound practices that would benefit many students, regardless of race or whether they live in the city, suburbs, or country (the author frequently conflates "black and brown" with "urban" - completely ignoring the minorities can live in the suburbs and the country and that whites can grow up in the city). Here are some things I had particular thoughts on (please bare in mind that I am a white millennial that grew up in the "ghetto", attended schools that were predominantly black or Hispanic, and currently teach at a school where less than 1% of the students identify as white, Asian, Pacific Islander, or Native American):

Chuuuuuuuch (I didn't count the U's, so forgive me if I spelled this incorrectly) - the author appears to be under the impression that not only do all "black and brown" youths attend church, but that A) they all attend Pentecostal church and B) enjoy it. The subject has come up in my classroom frequently and only about half of my students attend religious services with any regularity (more than once every other month), and only about a third of those actually enjoy it. And of those that attend religious service they are pretty evenly divided among Muslim, Jehovah's Witnesses, and some other form of Christianity/Catholicism.

Anecdotes - The author included plenty of anecdotal stories about problems he witnessed, but rarely illustrated how this was a problem minorities face exclusively or how to deal with it. In the first chapter, he introduces (and excuses) a student who is routinely unprepared for class and tardy. He "reveals" that the problem stems from the teacher not respecting that the girl has a different definition of tardy (she's standing outside the class, so she's "there") and prepared (she shares her book with another student). The author never explains how this girl came to have these definitions based on her "urban-ness" or her race. It appears that her other urban, minority classmates don't have these confusions, so why should her confusions be excused? Where in her 8+ years of public education was she allowed to believe her definitions were the correct ones? Another anecdote is from the author's own childhood. After being traumatized by a local shooting, a loud sound startled him during class causing him to cower under the desk. After his (supposedly urban and minority) classmates laugh at his display, his teacher offers him the chance to explain himself, but instead the author turns it into a class-clown routine. For some reason, completely unbeknownst to me, the teacher should have magically known that - as an urban minority student - any sudden, dramatic movements made by the author should have - of course - been seen as traumatic shock.

Behaviors - The author treats urban minorities as though they not only a separate culture from anyone not in that clique, but almost as a separate species. Any "negative" behaviors (any not acceptable in "white" society) are simply part of urban minority culture and must be respected as such. Expecting students to obey common decency - raising their hands, waiting patiently to speak, etc. is not only demeaning, but negates their culture.

Wardrobe - An unreasonable amount of time was spent addressing clothing and how clothing choices of urban minorities should be respected in the class regardless of school rules. It attempts to bring down the argument that teachers are preparing students for the real professional world by asserting that billionaires can and do wear whatever they want. And so may our students - once they've worked their way up past fields with uniforms, dress-codes (set rules), and dress expectations (the unwritten rules that society tends to agree with - such as not wearing a see-through blouse to an interview for a corporation).

All in all, I felt much of the book was condescending to white and urban minorities. Whites are treated as doe-eyed, ignorant but well-meaning, totalitarians. Whereas urban minorities are treated as special little snowflakes who will positively melt since they can't be expected tp conform to institutions for 5.5-6.5 hours a day.

*throughout this review, I specified the subject as "urban minorities" even though the author tended to conflate the two terms - as stated earlier in the review. I used the terms as two separate things since many of my white co-workers grew up in living conditions similar to those of our students (abject poverty (school lunch is the only reason I didn't starve to death as a child)) and probably about a third of my students, while living in an American urban setting now, are first generation Americans largely from rural Africa and urban Central/South America. The first and second generation students tend to be positively appalled by the behavior of the long-term citizens. Despite the author's insistence that trying to impose typical school rules on urban minorities is akin to forcing them to comply with "white" culture, my first and second generation minority students (few of whom had seen a white person before immigrating) hold the rules to standards a white, suburban, upper-middle class student wouldn't bare.½

The title is what captured my attention; however, this is the first time reading this author's work.

The book continues to elaborate on "neoindigenous" which "neo" means "new" or "different" as for indigenous is "inhabitants". Christopher Endin claims that neoindigenous are not consistent with traditional school norms. I am not sure what he means by this exactly; but he further speaks on replicate the colonial processes with traditional teaching that promotes the white middle class ideal. This disturbed me to see that urban, black youth are recruited to such schools and then they are labeled as "troublemakers" but yet you want us to fit in with the normal colonial type setting with white middle class kids. He also states that the teachers have a lowbrow and usually exoticizes neo-indigenous language, which I took as urban students are stereotyped because of their different way of speaking such as street, Ebonics, or slang talk is not acceptable to these teachers and viewed as troublemakers altogether.

He further discusses to get familiar with the communities and have to be sensitive to it. But then also states it is not a viable option to teach urban youth of color effectively, unless you get in touch with their communities. Is he only referring to the Blacks or also the Hispanics when stating "urban youth of color"?

Other key points that were not easy for me to ingest:
*PTSD, where young people are experiencing trauma on the regular and goes unnoticed and unrecognized. This also seems to be the case in our prisons, where many were tried as adults and suffered from PTSD symptoms or trauma as well.
*dysfunctional web of urban education
*addressing the issues that plague urban ED requires a true vision by seeing the students like they see themselves. Who would take the time and energy to relate to the students aside from teaching, and creating lesson plans?
*reality pedagogy--looks at a range of emotions that new teachers experience when embarking on new careers
*teach without fear, takes courage, I would agree especially teaching in prisons. Later, he speaks on teaching without fear but to practice a "mantra" to remove all emotions from their teachings, who were once passionate to being automatons. It is the mantra that helped teachers mask their emotions. Does this address the previous question of teaching without fear and taking courage but then being emotionless with those you interact and teach every day? Therefore, the students are invisible to the teachers, if they are behaving like robots without emotion.

He debates that white teachers are held for an unmistakable element of racism, but if they uncover the mask, how do they really feel or think working with black students in the urban areas? Furthermore, there are biases which also impacts the teaching styles because teachers seem to believe that the urban youth are academically under-performing. He speaks on reclaiming their humanity on page 40, which makes me wonder as if Blacks or Hispanics are not human beings...if so, I strongly disagree with reclaiming humanity statement.

Yes, academic achievements solely are based on:
1. test scores
2. GPAs
3. graduation rates
These all measures effectiveness for both students and teachers.

He also mentioned about churches, especially the Pentecostal practice in relation to pedgogy, and two practices that he feels relate to each other: (1) call and response exchanges, (2) solemn call to the altar. He further uses "barber shop" experiences as well as the "hip hop cultures" as tools for teaching students in the hood or urban areas.

Other techniques or methods Chris has used are:
*Seven C's to teach in the hood that also improves teachers' instruction
*Co-teaching in the classroom, where the student is the expert, and the teacher provides the needs and shows what good teaching looks like to the students
*Science Genius BATTLE, an initiative combined with hip hop and science
*DEAR=Drop Everything and Read
These are only a few mentioned in the book, which I would see the co-teaching and/or DEAR to be effective in some areas of teaching students as a whole.

Overall, there were quite a few things I did not agree with throughout the book. However, there were some techniques could be helpful understanding or relating to the urban culture to try these methods in the classroom. Yet I did not know statistically or research-wise how effective these techniques were when teaching our urban youth.

*LibraryThing review (I received from LibraryThing to provide an honest review).

I also plan to donate a copy to the library I work for once I have completed the read and review.

As an employee of an inner city urban school district with a high poverty student population this book was a great resource. I have a great relationship with my students but there are definitely colleagues that would benefit from reading this book. My administrator calls first dibs on borrowing it! Love the name! I highly recommend it to anybody working with inner city youth!

As an aspiring social studies teacher, I had a vested interest in this book about education. While I presently do not teach “in the hood” and may never have such an opportunity, I did find many useful insights in this book that pertain to students everywhere. There are some wonderful ides on how to make lessons in the classroom more real and more relevant to the students in those rooms. I am keeping this book as a resource as I move forward in my career – possibly the highest endorsement I can give!

For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood...and the Rest of Y'all Too: Reality Pedagogy and Urban Eduction, by Christopher Emdin, is a fascinating and exciting work that challenges teachers who work in urban environments "in the hood" as to how they approach their work, adapt their teaching practice to the needs and the strengths of their students, and reflect upon their own biases and willingness to change.

The book brought to the surface assumptions I was unaware that I even had which was, at times, uncomfortable. On the other hand, there were so many concrete suggestions as to how to create classrooms that were more authentic learning spaces that I left my pride behind.

Emdin refers to the urban population of students of colors as neoindigenous and compares much of current educational practice to the way in which Native American students were taught 100 years ago. He talks of the socioemotional violence that demands that students leave their culture and own ways of being outside of the culture and are forced to conform to behavioral/learning norms that have little or nothing to do with them. While he acknowledges the need to help students learn how to function within the dominant culture, he primarily addresses the urgency of celebrating these students' own culture and ways of learning so that their brilliance can be seen as well as experienced by themselves.

The continuing "achievement gaps" indicate that our current paradigms of "interventions" are not working. Emdin presents practical strategies such as co-teaching with the students, connecting context to content, and enlisting student input into classroom practice in authentic ways as some of the means of achieving what he refers to as a "cosmopolitan classroom": one in which a variety of experiences and means of learning are not only permitted but also celebrated.

I strongly recommend this book to anyone teaching in urban environments with students of color as well as to anyone who is interested in education. Emdin's writing is compulsively readable and his concepts are dynamic and challenge preconceptions people may have about "those" children's ability to connect with the educational experience, engage with content and enjoy academic success.

My thanks to LibraryThing which gave me this book in exchange for an honest review.

I received this book through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program.
As a teacher far from the "hood" I wasn't sure what this book had to offer me, what I found was theory based in reality and practical application of the information the author shared. This book will give you lots to think about and process and help you make decisions about what you can and should try incorporating into classrooms that need to be more reflective of the times and their students.

For anyone who is ready to learn: pick this up. Especially white people. Firstly, it was always my assumption that the way my schooling worked - from the mid 50s to 1970 - was THE WAY IT SHOULD BE FOR EVERYONE. And if there were kids who had a hard time with it, well, that was their fault. Or their parents. Or the neighborhood. Or that they didn't value education. Well - I WAS WRONG. This is a primer for those who hold that same errant belief. The author is an African American educator who started his teaching career in the same place. He came to realize that the virtues of the hoods - cohesiveness, energy, excitement - were being left at the (metal detected) door by kids who had different learning styles. The author's primary premise is that if teachers employ strategies that encourage students to take leadership in determining how they learn, there will be a great deal more engagement and accomplishment. Some of his recommendations are: create "cogens" - small groups of four students of different ability levels within the larger group; teach "code switching" by alternating hood and non-hood languages so that both teachers and students are fluent in both; "chuuuuuch" - observation of ministers in pulpits and how they hold their congregations spellbound; and many other strategies. The result will hopefully be "transformative teaching". This is an inspirational book. It has completed turned my head around.

This book was very good. It provided very practical advice that could be implemented in classrooms and the theories behind the advice. The author does a great job of challenging teachers to think outside of their culture and consider their students' culture by providing examples. The one downfall is that while it does a great job of providing examples and advice, I wish it provided more evidence from studies or other teachers. There is some, but I would like to hear more.

I received this book through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program.

This book is full of straightforward, practical teaching techniques. Too often teachers are prepared for students like themselves, yet statistics show that there are not a large number of teachers coming from the types of settings that Dr. Emdin focuses on.

He doesn't just give strategies; he gives the theory and reasoning behind specific strategies and why they work.

This isn't a one-size-fits-all theory book. A teacher can't just grab a listed strategy and use it without thinking through how it might work and what to do if it doesn't. Dr. Emdin explains what worked and what didn't for him and how he arrived at the rationale behind his writing.

This is a good book, and I will enjoy incorporating some of it within my classroom.

I cannot fully explain how much I enjoyed reading this book. As a pre-service teacher, reading For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood gave me so many ideas about how to interact with cultures that are different from mine. For someone who claims to be interested in social justice theory and is interested in reaching my students so that they can find joy in learning, this book has been a game changer.

Dr. Emdin walks his readers through a variety of techniques to try in the classroom to engage urban youth and value the parts of their personalities that are often silenced in formal educational settings. He shows the mistakes he made himself, which kept me from becoming defensive as a reader (how would you know how to deal with the struggles of being one of the "white folks" teaching in the hood if you grew up in the hood and then subsequently taught there?). I appreciated his frank appraisal of how the institutional conventions of teaching can prevent teachers from interacting with their students in a way that will actually allow learning to take place in the classroom. The way that Dr. Emdin broke down the hows and the whys of his strategies helped me understand the rationale and realize that what he is talking about could actually work.

I would recommend this book without hesitation to any and all teachers - pre-service or otherwise - who are having a difficult time reaching the students in their classes. While this book deals specifically with urban youth, the techniques could easily improve any classroom and are worth considering so that students can make the most of their education.

I received this book through the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program.

I am one of the White Folks Who Teach, but I do so about as far from the Hood as can be imagined in the U.S. I read Dr. Emdin's work with a mixture of pleasure and pain -- it is a serious contribution to the national conversation on education.

The major strength of this book, unlike so many I've read, is that it contains specific, practical suggestions that are based in reality and are ready to be implemented in classrooms -- though maybe not without a struggle. Emdin calls teachers to prioritize student success over their own comfort with "the way it's always been done." He acknowledges the need for genuineness on the part of teachers, which invites the suspicion that he has had success in the classroom not because his teaching methods are categorically good, but because they grow authentically out of his persona, his experience, and his relationship with his students.

We who teach must grapple with Prof. Emdin's challenge to our preconceptions and our biases about what good students look like. For me, it takes work to imagine how Emdin's "reality pedagogy" might be applied to my white rural college, but there is enough substance to his arguments that the attempt is worthwhile, and his brief conclusion is quite generally applicable. I encourage teachers to give this book a receptive reading.