Agents of Change through Dual Credit
Preparing Minoritized Students for Success in Higher Education
I was asked to speak on a panel directed at practicing high school teachers who are being certified to teach dual credit (both high school and college) courses in their subject area. The organizers wanted this panel to emphasize the opportunity and responsibility of these teachers to be agents of change. They ask these teachers to go beyond recognition of opportunity gaps and discrepancies in higher education and use their dual credit courses to positively shift the reality that minoritized students are underserved when it comes to higher education. They asked me to address the following prompt in less than 15 minutes.
What do you want teachers to know and consider, in serving the students that you support?
What I want them to know goes far beyond a short segment in a panel at a professional development workshop. So, I’ll collect my thoughts here and share them with all of you. Hopefully, I can distill what I write here into a teaser that’s good enough to pique their curiosity and drive them to dive in deeper.
Reach Higher
First of all, I want to thank any teacher for taking on the training and certification to offer a dual credit course. It shows that you believe in the importance of your subject area and see the course offering as a pathway to a better future for your students. Having participated in several of these certification programs, they can be intensive. Often they attempt to condense 10 or even 15 weeks of content into a 2 or even one-week training. I just want to remind all the teachers that if your orientation or training is even a little bit of a lift for you, it will definitely be challenging for your students, especially those students who are already put at a disadvantage.
But don’t shy away from that rigor. The challenge is there for a reason. You have your reasons and motivators to take on this challenge. The trick is to find the reasons and motivations for the students. Are your motivators internal or external? Are you doing this for the stipend, the credentials on your resume, or an opportunity to move up the ladder within your district? Or are you here because you want to make a difference and help your students succeed beyond high school? Usually, it’s some of both. But what drives students?
Most students, or their parents who tell them to take the course, will be drawn in by the college credit. Likewise, other students will presume that they cannot take your class because of the college credit. One of the biggest hurdles for me in teaching and promoting my dual credit course has been to downplay that particular external motivator and get the students to place higher value in themselves and their role in leveraging their own education to enhance their contribution to their community.
Why Is This Generation So Hard to Motivate?
We know as teachers that only half of the game involves content knowledge and delivery, the other half of the game is motivation. We each have our own teaching style and employ all manner of hooks, spike of enthusiasm, play, laughter, and yes even rewards to cajole our students into participation. At times, I have been surprised, even shocked, by just how unmotivated students can seem to be. It just doesn’t seem to match anything I remember from being in high school myself. Is that because I’m white and the system worked better for me? Is it a generational thing and kids were more conforming when I was in school? Or is it because these kids know something we didn’t?
As I have observed students and teachers over the years, and as I have studied more deeply the systemic injustices built into our educational institutions, I have gained an understanding and admiration for this rebelliousness in young people today. This is a generation that will not put up with bullshit. They are a generation that faces climate disaster put upon them by the negligence of prior generations. They are confronted with both higher incidents of gun violence and increased prevalence of policing in their schools. They have access to information far beyond what kids their age have been privy to before. They know about white privilege. They know about parts of our history that have been left out of the textbooks. They watch the struggles that are happening around them on a local and global scale.
This is the age of #metoo, of athletes bucking the traditions to stand up for themselves, of masses taking to the streets for racial justice, and of young people like themselves speaking directly to senators, judges, and the media calling for change. In the classroom, when students feel unseen, unheard, and unmet they are beginning to resist. Whereas in past eras, they might have turned their dissonance inward wondering what is wrong with them, now more and more they are asking what is wrong with us.
Problematic Foundations of Education
So, let’s look for a moment at the ways institutions of education are not valuing certain students. I start by recognizing that our schools are rooted in divisions. Divisions by age, divisions by merit, divisions by grades and test scores. No matter how inclusive and encouraging we try to be in our classrooms, we are constantly in the business of separating our students and setting them apart in countless small ways. Children, on the other hand, are always seeking ways to bond. Over years of schooling, those bonds get severed. It begins with mandating children to sit quietly at their own desk. Sadly, it often ends with high school students who feel numb to education, with no remaining joy in learning.
The other inherently problematic part of education’s foundation is competition. Now that we have neatly established these sectioned off divisions, it is the expectation that every student will do their best to get into the best box they can fit into. It doesn’t even really matter if they cheat to get to it, as long as they don’t get caught. Think about it. If a student has a 4.0 GPA, no one really cares if they can’t actually carry on a conversation about the topics they supposedly aced. In fact, it’s perfectly acceptable, and quite common, for people to laugh off their lack of knowledge by saying, “I only retain the information long enough to pass the test, then I forget it all.” Throughout all twelve years of schooling, we emphasize the importance of doing your “own” work. Students are discouraged from helping one another or working collaboratively.
The affects of a system rooted in division and competition is ultimately harmful to all. By design, only a few can truly come out on top. Most students are forever categorized as mediocre and others are destined to fail. But even the few who supposedly win in this system are cheated out of the opportunity to really learn. They are rewarded for their ability to quickly memorize and fluently recite back isolated items that we call learning targets. But they are never actually challenged or given the opportunity to put their knowledge to use.
Conflicting Ideologies
The affects can be more devastating for students whose cultural ideology does not align with those of dominant white culture. Firstly, it compounds their seeming incapacity to succeed because the ways to move up the ladder are in conflict with their own ways of being. For example, many indigenous cultures that value the well-being of the community discourage children from outpacing their peers. These students may feel an unidentified wrongness when their teachers shepherd them away from their friends. Other cultures emphasize respect for elders and they are reluctant to speak out in class, or to question what the teacher has said. But even worse than the disadvantage it places upon them, these students get messages over and over again that what they know to be true and good is not valued at school. The dominant culture is portrayed as the correct way, the better way, the proper way. That message in small doses repeated over days and years is damaging.
It gets to a point where students feel forced to either resign themselves to believe that they are less worthy, or else they reject school altogether. When I introduce my students to a new course, I go over the content we will cover. But then I immediately follow that up with a re-centering on the students. “It’s not my goal to make you become an engineer,” I might say on the first day of an Engineering Design class. “You don’t need this class to succeed. You are already valuable and each of you has something to give to the class, to your community, and to society. I hope that you will come to this class with your own knowledge, and use the topics that we cover to help you towards your own goals. I hope, too, that you will learn to value each other’s perspectives and contributions and find ways to collaborate and achieve unexpected results.”
That kind of a pep talk is broad and only momentarily uplifting at best. But if it is carried throughout the course and supported by observations of ways that students bring their own knowledge into the class, it can begin to undo years of being diminished. As you practice seeing students for who they are and what they bring, it gets easier to see their strengths, even in actions we might previously have considered unpraiseworthy. A student who once seemed hyper active and distracting might actually have a strong emotional intelligence and be acutely attuned to managing their peers’ levels of engagement. A student who continually brought up “off topic” conversations might actually be very forward thinking in the applications of the content. A student who seemed to not participate may have been thinking about it a lot internally, and might be very expressive once offered a different means of expression than verbally, like artwork or storyboarding or journaling.
Individual Value within the Collective
I cannot overemphasize the importance of continually speaking to each student and affirming their value, not based on their mastery of learning targets, but based on what they brought to the topic or activity that is theirs. But every time I speak to individual worth, I try to pair that with the collective value. “Yolanda, your knack for visual composition,” I might say after a group presentation, “has really helped convey Xavier’s vision in a way that the whole class can better understand.” Yolanda is recognized for her artistic eye, Xavier for his visualization and the goal is the benefit to the whole class. That second part is important because the current system values individual accomplishments without regard to the whole. We want very much to uplift those students who have been undercut for so long, but we don’t want to send them into the trajectory of the divisive, competitive institution that originally diminished them.
Once you are able to establish an expectation that we are all valued in the class, that you value each student and that they are each expected to see the value in one another, then you can begin to build the motivation for rigorous learning. Students who believe in themselves will desire the skills and experiences they need to move forward. If they believe your course has something to offer them, they will make an effort. I have witnessed students who otherwise seemed to be completely checked out of schooling engage in my classes eagerly, almost with a hunger. If you want students to throw themselves into the course but not for external motivators, it requires two basic components— trust and relevance.
Trust and Relevance
Students will trust you only when they feel recognized and valued by you. This is easiest when you and the student can both see something of yourself in the other. For me, being white skinned has meant building trust with Black and brown skinned students through vulnerability and giving them agency. I share some of my story, as a transman with a disability. I also turn to them and call on their knowledge as much as possible. There are several ways to do this. In my classes, we mostly employed open-ended group projects. It can also be through frequent class discussions. Sometimes creative projects like poster sessions or even skits can give students an opportunity to bring some of themselves into the course. Whatever students bring to the table, try to find a way to incorporate it. If students start to feel that their contributions are too conditional or judged, students will quickly recognize this is less about agency and more about participation in your game. But if you can say, “I don’t know about this, I think you all are taking on too much. But if you want to give it a try, I’m going to trust you with it” then students will have more buy-in. Allow them to shape it in ways that they can mold into theirs, their path to their future, their place in the collective. Anything that gives students the agency to put the curriculum in their own context helps them build relevance.
The relevance has to come from them. Some teachers try allowing students to spice up a dry boring activity by dressing it up in their preferred motif: rap, favorite movie characters, anime, etc. This is not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about asking students to go deep into their passions. What drives them? What pisses them off? What do they find most moving? Take a hot button topic and put it in the context of your lesson. Make it as “real” as you can. If it involves writing to congress, do it. If it means a field trip or a hands-on service activity, talk to your administrators and see what is possible. Bring in guest speakers, but be sure to set aside half the time for Q and A. Coach your students beforehand on how to develop questions and how to inquire deeply about a topic. Give them options besides raising their hands and braving a question on the spot. Perhaps pre-teach the day before and have them write down their thoughts and curiosities in a 5-minute exit ticket.
Granting students this level of control is a risk many teachers are reluctant to take. You may feel the need to stick to your traditional lesson plans in order to ensure that all the content areas are adequately covered. It is true that once you embark on a student-driven learning project, there is less influence over where it goes. Some topics or lessons might not get covered. But when you see the heightened engagement and deeper applications from students, I think you will come to love teaching like this.
Agents of Change
When we can foster a student’s inherent self-worth and show them how to leverage their own education to fuel their own purpose, we can give them the means to navigate higher education and the many challenges that might otherwise impede them. Students need to know how to critically analyze when a policy or program is designed in a way to put them at a disadvantage, identify that hurdle, and make a conscious decision about how to address it. They can choose to take a different path, or they can challenge the system, or they can acquiesce knowing full well that they are playing into a dominant modus operandi while holding onto the knowledge that they also own equally valid alternate values. There is a significant difference between feeling forced to conform to a system that does not resonate with you and making a choice to play along in order to meet a broader purpose and always retaining the ability to make a different choice. That difference is agency.
Students with agency can and do bring about change. Isn’t it about time we take up our responsibility to grant them that agency?
