Who Are We Teaching? Are They Naturally Engaged?

At one of my district management meetings, Dr. Joe Johnson, Executive Director of the National Center for Urban Schools Transformation, explained to administrators that our students are not "The Beaver" (from the T.V. show "Leave it to Beaver").  We are not teaching, he suggested, a simple, white, middle class child with in-tact family structures and fluid language access.

It got me thinking:  why is "The Beaver" so easily engaged?  Why is the underprivileged student so disconnected?

The answer, I think, is that "The Beaver" is naturally engaged, while the underprivileged student is naturally disconnected.

Natural engagement, I posit, is that sort of engagement that a student or staff member naturally has within his or her self because of an a priori perception of inherent opportunities in the tasks at hand.  The naturally engaged person believes that what he or she is doing will lead to success and better structures for living in the future.  The student, who lives in a world that is directly linked to the society and institutions that control life outcomes has a special privilege.  The teacher or administrator who is free to innovate and operate in a safe laboratory of learning has a special privilege.  This privilege is inherent from their home environment, carried from birth on, and it is reinforced in the institutional spaces that condition the climate for success.

Now for my purposes, "privilege" does not necessarily mean wealth or an ethnic upper-hand, though such factors are that type of privilege that probably hold the most weight in the public school system.  Privilege, for my purposes, though sometimes a cause of unjust advantage, is itself an innocuous condition, accessible to many, and enjoyed at all spectra of economy, society and culture.

For a privileged subject, school itself is an obvious guarantee of "success" because the perception of the subject is reinforced in his or her environment.  The parents of of the privileged child support success at home with a desk and a computer, with time and space for homework, with books and with an eye on the prize.  The teacher or administrator who grew up with any sort of privilege runs the risk of assuming that the benefits of privilege are at play or natural to most or all students, and thus is not keen to the lack of natural engagement in underprivileged students.  Said teacher or administrator was naturally engaged as a student, and without an understanding of the natural disconnection of the underprivileged student he or she fails to engage the underprivileged subject.

For the underprivileged subject, school and home environments more often than not reinforce ideas of failure, of missed or missing opportunities, and thus the student's natural engagement is minimal or non-existent. It is almost as if the lexicon of the underprivileged does not contain words that refer to any amount of success. The underprivileged life considers itself outside of that fantastic world of success, power and societal cohesion.

The task, then, of the conscious leader, teacher or administrator, is to identify the underprivileged subject, and with care and understanding attempt to create an environment in which the underprivileged is engaged to the point that a certain quantum step toward the access to privilege (power, language, financial stability) seems viable to the subject.  And this must be done with attention to the leader's own value bias.  We are not enlightening others to the value of a tight knit family or the value of wealth and financial independence.  We are creating an environment that allows others access to the intellectual curiosity that can only occur when one feels engaged with the intellect and the system in which the intellect thrives. With intellectual curiosity comes critical thinking, and with critical thinking and engagement comes an access to the choice of paths and future opportunities.  

Whichever school or school system we work in, those factors of privilege are at play. While a language-strong student may be engaged with ease into the dialogue of a strong class, he or she may be on the outside when it comes to emotional capacity.  But language and stability being the breeding ground for a consistent engagement in society and therefore school, we know that the economically disadvantaged and the English learners have serious engagement issues. I will stop their so as to not quantify privilege and thus patronize the reality of the engagement-disconnection discourse. 

These individuals are not disconnected because of a slow wearing down of their morale, rather they were born into and live and breathe and negotiate a world that is naturally disconnected from the expectations of the learning environment created away from them in schools. It may be beyond the scope of this blog post to create an impromptu list of how.  That is the job of our day-to-day. 

Nevertheless, it is urgent that we identify those who are naturally disconnected.  If a student or stakeholder is not privileged, no sort of strategies will overcome the general feeling of disconnectedness.  Engagement must begin with an environment that opens up the system of power and learning, otherwise even our best instruction falls to the wayside, and our work is not accomplished.  Learning only happens to those who are engaged in their core.  Engagement must privilege the underprivileged.  Learning being our truest task, offering access to privilege is our only real tool.