Making it relevant: how a black male teacher sustained professional relationships through culturally responsive discourse

Abstract

What we know about the experiences of black teachers is limited, especially considering the vast amount of research conducted on and about black boys and young men. This article describes and analyzes how a black teacher at a suburban high school in the Midwestern United States negotiated professional relationships through culturally relevant discourse. Anthony Bell was the only black male teacher participating in a classroom discourse analysis study group at a diverse suburban high school. Throughout the course of the semester, Anthony’s stated objective for learning discourse analysis was to understand, structure, and facilitate more productive conversations with a struggling student teacher he was mentoring. Yet Anthony also used his discursive inquiry to “trouble the water” in his classroom and in the study group workshops. Participation in the study group provided Anthony with metalinguistic tools to critique his interactions with his students, student teacher, and professional peers. Anthony’s analyses of his own teaching, his student teacher’s work, the study group, and the school index themes in critical and critical race theory in education. As he became a teacher researcher, Anthony reported a greater sense of professional self-efficacy, eventually facilitating a successful workshop at a national teacher conference. Anthony’s case is an exemplar of the unique and critical role of black men who teach, as well as the imperative of practitioner research within the current climate in teacher education.

KEYWORDS:

• English Education
• culturally responsive pedagogy
• African American education
• discourse analysis
• race relations
• teacher education
• practitioner research

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. ‘Anthony Bell’ and ‘Rainfield High School’ are pseudonyms applied to ensure anonymity of participants, and the school/s in which they work. Throughout the balance of the article, the shortened forms of ‘Anthony’ and ‘Rainfield’ are used for brevity and consistency.

2. The analytic process is described in detail in Thomas 2013.

3. Fictive kinship, first described by anthropologists observing black extended family networks and non-relational ties, is further explained by Harris-Perry: ‘The term fictive kinship refers to connections between members of a group who are unrelated by blood or marriage, but who nonetheless share reciprocal social or economic relationships. … This imagined community of familial ties underscores a voluntary sense of shared identity. … Fictive kinship makes the accomplishments of African Americans relevant to unrelated black individuals’ (Harris-Perry 2011).

4. According to Martin and Wolfram, sentence structure Anthony uses is an example of an existential subject, which is found in most English varieties. One example from contemporary colloquial English is the use of the word ‘like’ to indicate an informal register instead of lexical meaning – ‘like, that’s so awesome!’ (Brown 2009). We have marked it as a politeness move on Anthony’s part. It deflected criticism away from Denise so that she would listen to his advice.

5. This is consistent with the literature on politeness. According to Brown and Levinson, ‘There is also evidence from Black English that the black dialect may be switched into for emphasis, or to show speaker involvement (stressing the “we”), while standard English is used to stress detachment (stressing the “they”)’ (1987).