Switching Places: Why College Teachers Should Teach High School Students

Abstract

In this article, I argue that if college teachers are to teach well the diverse young people who will enroll in our classes in the coming years, we must stop blaming the students and their high schools for the academic difficulties that students who are “underprepared” present us with. I reflect on the experience of learning to teach again, after many years of successful college teaching, in the context of a collaborative project that brought high school students from Central Part East Secondary School (CPESS) to my classroom at Lang College.

One critical outcome of “switching places” has been my realization that university teachers virtually never face an untracked group of students. This is a significant hidden privilege. CPESS, like others of the small new high schools that are pioneers in the school reform in New York City, is an educational community built on the absence of tracking. This article unpacks the complex dimensions of class and race that embed the lives of underprepared students, as well as the pedagogical challenges of teaching a genuinely “diverse” group of young people for the first time.

The argument engages Lisa Delpit about what it means to be a progressive White teacher with students of color, and Mike Rose about the exclusive, class-based university culture that marginalizes so many students. Switching places has led me to believe that we must imagine and construct conversations and projects that connect high school and college teaching (and teachers) much more closely, if we are not to lose many wonderful students.