A White Teacher Talks about Race, Classroom Edition - Softcover

Landsman, Julie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1607090643 ISBN 13: 9781607090649

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Education, 2009

Synopsis

Veteran teacher Julie Landsman leads the reader through a day of teaching and reflection about her work with high school students who are from a variety of cultures. She speaks honestly about issues of race, poverty, institutional responsibility, and white privilege by engaging the reader in the experiences of a day in the classroom with some of her remarkable students. Throughout the day, we meet bigotry head-on, struggle with questions of racial identity, and find cultural conflict in the corridors of the school building. Along the way, we come face to face with Tyrone, a young African-American student grappling with the realities of discrimination in suburbia. We encounter Sheila, a teenage mother struggling to raise her baby in poverty, and we get to know Sarah, a white girl living on the streets of Minneapolis. Through the author's eyes, we begin to understand the complexities of teaching in today's society and we learn within the pages of this book, if only just for a moment, what it feels like to be the other.

About this title

About the Author:

Julie Landsman is Benedict Distinguished Visiting Professor at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. Until her recent retirement, she had spent many years working with both troubled and gifted students in middle and high schools in the Minneapolis Public School System. She continues to teach in Minneapolis as a Writer in the Schools. Ms. Landsman presently has a monthly column in the Skyway News.

From Publishers Weekly:

In this account of her years teaching in a multi-ethnic Midwestern high school, Landsman (Basic Needs) discusses the life lessons she learned from her street-smart, determined students: people of color often have to struggle with being the only representative of their race at a social gathering or in class; white people can never understand how it feels to be shadowed by suspicious store managers or prejudiced cops; simply showing up to class can be a monumental task when one is struggling to feed the baby or find a place to sleep at night. Given her self-confessed privileged background, Landsman's intellectual and personal rapport with her students is impressive; they seem wonderfully comfortable telling her about their relationships, aspirations, fears and failings. The reader craves more nuanced revelations from Landsman herself, however. While she gamely tells us that white teachers "cannot reach certain students the way someone of their own skin color or culture can reach them," readers may want to know if she ever catches herself feeling ambivalent about her students, doubting their abilities for a moment or questioning her own capacity for unbiased teaching. Readers drawn to this title may be disappointed that Landsman's observations about racism in education generally reiterate arguments already established by other writers, such as Beverly Tatum in Why Do All the Black Kids Sit Together in the Cafeteria? Still, this balanced, quietly impassioned account affords insight into race relations in the classroom and will appeal to parents and educators who are struggling with these issues.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Education
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1607090643
• ISBN 13: 9781607090649
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208