LEARNING ENVIRONMENT VISION STATEMENT Cowart1

Learning Environment Vision Statement

Camille Cowart

Vanderbilt University, Peabody College

Learning Environment Vision Statement

In contemplating my ideal learning environment, I considered two major components of

the classroom—teaching practices and the academic environment. While the two are certainly

intertwined and dependent upon the other, I believe that it is necessary for me to consider what

classroom environment I want to create and which teaching practices I want to consciously

employ so that my curriculum content can be reflective of my practice.

Teaching Practices and Classroom Environment

First and foremost, I want to create a classroom environment that is intentionally

structured so that students form a community and create authentic connections with one another

and with me. Hammond discusses the concept of “relaxed alertness—that combination of

excitement and anticipation we call engagement,” which in turn leads to “authentic engagement,”

a state of being that requires connections with others in the classroom and school environment

(Hammond, 2015, p. 50). While this core tenet of community and connection will vary

logistically depending on whether I am teaching middle or high school, my core belief that

connection drives opportunities for authentic engagement will remain the same. At the beginning

of the school year, I will demonstrate to students that I want to connect with them and that I want

them to connect with their peers by devoting class time to getting to know each other’s true

selves. An activity like “my cultured self” would be a great opportunity for students to engage

with one another and to create a community in which their individual cultures are valued.

Furthermore, throughout the year I will maintain and foster these connections with and among

students by maintaining a community of trust and taking students seriously. In order to do this, I

hope to institute some form of student-led conferences, even if my school does not follow that

model. As a part of this, I will set goals—academic, behavioral, and aspirational—with students
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and have families to contribute to these goals. Then, in addition to sharing general highlights and

things to work on at conferences, families and students alike have additional buy-in to the goals

they co-created, and connections between students, families, and myself will be strengthened.

Secondly, I want to engage in the processes of cross-cultural communications within my

classroom. While I cannot make assumptions about the way my students will want to interact

with one another and with myself based on their ethnic and cultural backgrounds, I want to

provide opportunities for students to express their thoughts and engage with the subject material

in a way that values their culture and the work they are doing to learn. In providing this space, I

recognize that switching from a mainstream culture of didactic teaching to an active-

participatory environment will be difficult for some students (and for myself) to adjust to

initially. However, crafting class time to include authentic discussions in which “roles of speaker

and listener are ‘fluid and interchangeable’” will allow “space for students to engage and respond

in ways that are respectful to the classroom space” and create “a classroom space that is

respectful to these learners” (Gay, 2001, p. 111). In addition to utilizing the typical Socratic

seminar method for assessment, I will set up class discussions in a seminar manner that reflects

authentic dialogue practices with seats arranged in a circle so students can see one another and

student-created expectations for dialogue. Furthermore, I will infuse my curriculum with

opportunities to have authentic discussion that addresses real-world issues students are

encountering and are knowledgeable about.

Additionally, I see it as my responsibility as a teacher to develop a culturally responsive

knowledge base. I do not believe it is sufficient to put a few texts by diverse authors on my

syllabus (although diverse representation in literature is important, and I will discuss that in the

next section). Rather, I know that I must study the diverse array of contributions that individuals
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and groups have made to literature and related fields in order to appropriately represent them in

my teaching, discussion, and selection of texts (Gay, 2001). For example, it is not enough for me

to teach The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison and congratulate myself for including a Black female

author in my classroom canon. While teaching her novel is important, I also must introduce my

students to typically lesser-known poets like Clint Smith and discuss the value of Zora Neale

Hurston’s choices of dialect in Their Eyes Were Watching God. I have to study the history of

diverse authors’ struggles to be published and make myself aware of the real history of the

contributions of different ethnic groups to the field of literature.

Finally, I want to create a classroom environment that avoids single stories and provides

a space for multiple perspectives to be shared. Single stories emerge from a lack of a culturally

diverse knowledge base, and they can manifest themselves in microaggressions, among other

effects. Sue et al. describe the power of microaggressions to tear down students’ concepts of

themselves and negatively impact their feelings of belongingness in the classroom and academic

achievement (Sue et al., 2009). By creating an environment that prioritizes connection, multiple

styles of communication, and a diverse knowledge base, I will seek to avoid single stories and

intentionally craft my curriculum around the diverse cultures my students bring to the classroom.

Curriculum Content and Academic Environment

At the core of my curricular decisions, I will make “issues of diversity central rather than

peripheral” (Villegas et al., 2002, p. 21). Gay additionally discusses the many facets of crafting a

diverse curriculum, citing the different aspects of formal, symbolic, and societal curricula. While

I can play a role in crafting formal and symbolic curricula through my including diverse authors

and narratives, opening discussions to critically address the literary canon, and crafting a class

environment that is culturally responsive as outlined above, I cannot control the societal
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curriculum that students encounter at every turn. However, I will create spaces for conversations

surrounding the societal curriculum by ensuring that discussions about the novels and topics we

are studying question the Eurocentric norm. In order to do this, I will establish a pedagogy of

questioning that encourages and normalizes students’ questioning my biases about certain topics

and perspectives I have on material we are studying (Gutstein, 2006, p. 350).

In this next semester and perhaps in the future, I will be teaching AP Literature, a class

whose syllabus reads like an ode to the canon of the dead white man, with a few smatterings of

Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, and Sandra Cisneros for good measure. I plan to follow the

thinking of Tatum et al. and craft my curriculum around essential questions and necessary skills

for the AP exam rather than around canonical “essential” texts (Tatum et al., 2009, p. 89). Many

people claim that there are texts necessary for students to read in literature classes, but I contend

that instead, there are essential questions (such as “How is one’s identity formed?” and “How

and why are power dynamics enacted?”) and skills students must engage with and master when

studying literature. Students respond much better to texts that engage them, and being exposed to

a diverse array of authors, topics, and writing modalities will create opportunities for my students

to question the structures that have placed certain texts into the canon. Furthermore, having

multiple text options only increases student interest; as Worthy et al. states, the “right book in the

right hands at the right time won’t go left behind” (Worthy et al., 2004, p. 184). While I will not

be able to completely eliminate the presence of the canon at this point in time, pairing “classic”

texts with culturally relevant songs, poems, and novels from multiple genres is a way to

transform the formal curriculum of the classroom to respond to student diversity. Furthermore,

incorporating these multiple forms of mentor texts can serve as a form of code switching in

writing. Students can explore the concepts of voice and audience in ways that privilege their
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“neoindigeneity” while also developing “hybridized identities” in writing so that they learn to

convey their thoughts and knowledge through multiple modalities (Emdin, 2016, p. 177).

As a part of the pedagogy of questioning that I will implement alongside my text

selections, I want to ensure that I am raising a critical consciousness in my students that pushes

them to “develop a broader sociopolitical consciousness that allows them to critique the cultural

norms, values, mores, and institutions that produce and maintain social inequities” (Ladson-

Billings, 1995, p. 162). By rooting my curriculum in essential questions, I will build in spaces

that encourage students to question the themes discussed in the text and the commonalities they

see between the text and their worlds. It is not my goal through this to impose my views on

students, but rather to create an academically rigorous environment that “invites students to

question, challenge, and critique” the contents of their texts and of the curriculum we are

working both within and against (Young, 2010, p. 255). Since I will be working with text sets,

we will read some canonical literature. However, we will discuss the text pairings, and why

society views the canonical text as more valuable than the paired text, discussing the layers of

the “isms” that influence this.

When developing these essential questions, I will also include critical race objectives as

outlined by Matias et al. It is my goal to create a classroom that “incorporates a critically raced

curriculum that transformationally resists the false silencing of race” as I have outlined above in

my goals for creating text sets (Matias et al., 2014, p. 3). These critical race objectives will help

me “explicitly challenge the dominant White ideology that often goes unchecked in curriculum”

(Matias et al., 2014, p. 13). While Matias and Liou describe in their work that writing these

objectives provided a sense of validation for themselves, I recognize that I do not need to seek

validation through writing these objectives. Rather, I will write them to ensure I am providing a
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space to critically consider the structures that impact my students every day so they can start to

consider the work they can undertake to challenge these structures.

Finally, I hope to create a program of community-based problem solving sometime in the

near future. While this is a loftier goal than some of my curricular objectives, I have seen the

power of student-led community initiatives in the past, and I want to find a way to incorporate

that thinking and action in my classroom. These projects require the use of multiple higher-order

thinking skills, and they allow students to engage their findings and questions as a result of a

classroom environment centered in critical consciousness into actionable steps. I would use a

YPAR model, which Raygoza describes “as a cyclical process: those in oppressed conditions are

engaged in research to understand a critical issue that they themselves identify as key to their

freedom; they develop a plan for social action to challenge the inequity presented in that issue;

and finally, they implement a plan for social change that they themselves developed” (Raygoza,

2016, p. 126). This concept additionally follows the ideas presented in Esteban-Guitart and

Moll’s studies that discuss the importance of “[placing] the identity of the learner at the centre of

school activity, an identity that can expand and extend to contexts beyond the school” (Esteban-

Guitart et al., 2014, p. 78). While I do not know precisely how these projects would materialize,

my idea is for students to draw from the essential questions they discuss in their text sets and

identify the reality of those questions in their own communities. Then, they would engage in

research to find data, anecdotal evidence, and existing resources and structures in place for the

topic. Finally, they would enact a plan to engage with this issue and create change in their

communities. This would additionally present a space for families to serve in roles of expertise

and would make my classroom a place of true community—one that extends beyond the school

walls and into the everyday lives of my students, their families, and their neighbors.
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References

Emdin, C. (2016). For White folks who teach in the hood and the rest of y’all too. Beacon Press.

Esteban-Guitart, M. & Moll, L. (2014). Lived experience, funds of identity and education.

Culture & Psychology , 20(1), 70-81.

Gay, G. (2001). Preparing for culturally responsive teaching. Journal of Teacher Education,

53(2), 106-116.

Gustein, E. (2006). The real world as we have seen it": Latino/a parents' voices on teaching

mathematics for social justice, mathematical thinking and learning, 8(3), 331-358.

Hammond, G. (2015). Culturally responsive teaching and the brain.  Thousand Oaks: Sage Press.

(Ch. 2 & 3).

Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). But that’s just good teaching! The case for culturally relevant

pedagogy. Theory Into Practice, 34(3), 159-165.

Matias, C. & Liou, D. (2014). Tending to the heart of communities of color: Toward critical race

teacher activism. Urban Education.

Raygoza, M. (2016). Striving toward transformational resistance: youth participatory action

research in the mathematics classroom. Journal of Urban Mathematics Education, 9(2),

122-152.

Sue, D., Lin, A., Torino, G., Capodilupo, C., & Rivera, D. (2009). Racial microagressions and

difficult dialouges on race in the classroom. Cultural Diversity and Ethnic Minority

Psychology, 15(2), 183-190.

Tatum, A., Wold, L., & Elish-Piper, L. (2009). Adolescents and Texts: Scaffolding the English

Canon with Linked Text Sets. The English Journal, 98(6), 88-91. Retrieved from

http://www.jstor.org/stable/40503466.
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Villegas, A. & Lucas, T. (2002). Preparing culturally responsive teachers: rethinking the

curriculum. Journal of Teacher Education, 53(1), 20-32.

Worthy, J., and N. Roser, “Flood Ensurance: When Children Have Books They Can and Want to

Read.”In Teaching All the Children: Strategies for Developing Literacy in an Urban

Setting, edited by D. Lapp, C. C. Block, E. J. Cooper, J. Flood, N. Roser, and J. V.

Tinajero (179-192). New York: Guilford Press, 2004.

Young, E. (2010). Challenges to conceptualizing and actualizing culturally relevant pedagogy:

How viable is this theory in classroom practice? Journal of Teacher Education , 61(3),

248-260.