Class Talk III

Presenting my workshop, "Talking About Class," at the White Privilege Conference in March (see previous 2 posts), was a powerful learning experience for me. The conference, with 2000 attendees, draws many with deep experience, knowledge and insight on issues of race and class, and the workshop was full of leaders who had significant insights to share.

Here are some highlights of my learnings:

1. There are many entry points for addressing social class and economic status, and the approach should be geared to the particular group of children. For example, one teacher shared that her school's response to the range of parenting situations (dual- and single-parent; working outside the home and at home) was to institute a policy of not allowing any "rescue" of students by delivering forgotten lunches or homework, because not all students had this resource available to them. To a teacher from a different community, this removing of key support did not speak to where his students lived.

These were a few of the themes, resources and frameworks suggested by participants:

• What are basic needs? What is the difference between needs and wants?
• Each social class is a life-giving culture with different experiences, customs and values. (For instance, lower income communities may have less material resource but more connection. Or, in low-income communities, children may be taught to use respectful forms to address adults, such as "Mr./Mrs." or "Uncle/Auntie"; in upper income groups, it may be acceptable for children to address adults by their first names.)
• What does "enough" mean?
• There are different kinds of jobs, all worthy of respect.
• Teaching basic concepts of economics -  Rutgers University Project on Economics and Children: "provides teachers, parents, and volunteers with ideas for using children's literature to introduce economics to children." 

2. Particularly when working with students in affluent communities, reading books and talking about class can become cultural voyeurism. Those with "less" are too often the object to be studied. Too many conversations and activities (private school students taking field trips to soup kitchens) may result in an Us/Them perspective that reinforces images of low-income people as needy victims and upper-income people as the helpers. How can we structure conversations and experiences so that the lens through which students are observing others becomes a mirror in which they view themselves?

3. As significant adults in the lives of children, we have to constantly be alert to ways in which our own judgments are being revealed. My list of "Key Points" (previous post) emphasized the importance of being open and inquiring: "The goal is to find out what children are thinking and to give them permission and language to voice their ideas and impressions." This is much more challenging than I imagined as I wrote it.

An example: In one of the sessions, we were discussing an event in the book, A Chair for My Mother by Vera Williams, in which neighbors share furnishings for an apartment after Rosa's family loses everything in a fire. Someone referred to the offerings as a "gift," and noted that it was a different application of the word, since it often implies buying something new rather than sharing something you have used. I remarked that I liked the way in which that term honored and graced the sharing. An educator who works with young children observed that using the term "gift" was a value judgment.

On later reflection, I realized that my response to the word "gift" came out of my own class privilege. I had an impulse to "honor" and "grace" the offerings of people in a working class community who gave their used goods to help a neighbor in need, over-compensating because I unconsciously identified this group of people as "less than." If I had shared this response with children, I would have been leaking my own unconscious bias.

So that's the ongoing challenge: Find language that is free of value and judgment. And, once again, continue to expand your own awareness. 


To that end, here are resources recommended by participants: 


A Framework for Understanding Poverty by Ruby Payne - This pdf includes an overview of some of the book's concepts and information.

And critiques of the book: 
- http://rubypayneiswrong.blogspot.com/p/scholarship-debunking-payne.html

- "Uncovering Classism in Ruby Payne’s Framework"  by Paul Gorski

Class Talk II

For my White Privilege Conference workshop (see previous post) on using children's books to talk about class, I prepared this handout, an adaptation of the one I've posted previously on talking about race:


Key Points for Talking About Class & Race with Children

1. Be welcoming, open & inquiring
Children's comments, questions and experiences (including the things we wish they wouldn’t say) are opportunities to talk, listen and learn. The goal is to find out what children are thinking and to give them permission and language to voice their ideas and impressions.

2. Be concerns-based
As with all conversations with children, developmental and emotional readiness should determine what we do and don't say - what's appropriate and what's effective. Our responses should be tailored to the particular child/ren and particular situation.

3. Be empowering
 Conversations about economic and racial injustice should always include ideas about how children can respond and that adults are available to help.
The most essential teaching for children to absorb is a sense of hope and possibility. The content can be hard and heavy, but we can address it lightly. Provoking guilt or fear does not empower young people to tackle the challenges of prejudice and injustice.

4. Be inclusive
Class and race should be framed as about “all of us,” not through the majority group lens of “Us/Them.” Though our experiences may be very different based on the groups we belong to, everyone has a class and racial identity and everyone’s life is affected by class and race, whether we are aware of it or not.

5. Address systems, social roles and power
Classism and racism are not the same as "being mean." Prejudice based on economic status, and on skin color and racial features, is a universal human tendency, but classism and racism are not just personal, they are collective and institutional as well. In order to process their own experience and to develop effective skills, young people need age-appropriate information about how U.S. society advantages upper income and white people, and disadvantages lower income people and people of color.

If the adults caring for them do not offer concrete, direct, and bold language, guidance and models for counteracting the dominant culture's messages about class and race, children's attitudes and behaviors will be formed by these influences, and they will act out the class and racial roles that society has assigned them.

6. Offer ourselves as role models.
In order to lead these conversations, we adults must be willing to challenge and shift our own attitudes and behaviors, and offer our process of examining class and race in our own lives as a model that children can look to and learn from.



 Resources:

• Teaching for Change - Building Justice Starting in the Classroom: Teaching for Change  encourages teachers and students to question and re-think the world inside and outside their classrooms, build a more equitable, multicultural society, and become active global citizens.
• "A World Full of Color" - resource library of books featuring people of color
• “An Updated Guide for Selecting Anti-Bias Children's Books” by Louise Derman-Sparks

Class Talk I

For the White Privilege Conference earlier this month, I was asked to redesign my workshop, "Using Children's Books to Talk about Race," to focus on talking about class, in line with the conference's focus, "The Color of Money." Here's the description of the new workshop I presented:

Talk About Class: Using Children's Books to Spark Conversations

Socioeconomic class in the U.S. can be even harder to talk about than race, and the silences leave children absorbing unchallenged messages from the dominant culture. Depictions of economic realities in children's books offer the opportunity to engage children in discussion, to find out what they are thinking and to give them permission and language to voice their ideas and impressions.

I developed this list of selected, recommended titles (In a later post, I'll suggest a few titles for older readers):

"Talk About Class"
A Selected, Annotated List of Recommended Picture Books  

compiled by Anne Sibley O’Brien

"Children’s literature, an artifact of cultural, social and economic values, provides a window into the ways in which children are socialized to think about social class. And, yet, there is often a silenced dialogue around matters of social class and poverty in society and schools." 

Rebecca Rogers,

"Using Children’s Literature to Explore Social Class and Poverty in Times of Economic Crisis"

Angel City by Tony Johnston; illustrated by Carole Byard

An older African-American man finds an abandoned Mexican baby in a dumpster in a Los Angeles barrio and determines to raise the child as his own.

Excerpt: “Old man Joseph’s handy. Sees to most needs in his apartment building. Like plumbing. While the old man fits pipes and snakes out drains, Juan swashes toilets with a long-armed brush, for fun.” 



A Chair for My Mother written and illustrated by Vera B. Williams

A young girl, her grandmother, and her mother, who works as a waitress, save money for a comfortable chair in their new apartment after a fire destroys their home.

Excerpt: “That was last year, but we still have no sofa and no big chairs. When Mama comes home, her feet hurt. ‘There’s no good place for me to take a load off my feet,’ she says.



Fly Away Home by Eve Bunting; illustrated by Ronald Himler

A homeless white father and son live in an airport. (Also features their friends, the Medinas, a homeless Latino family who care for the boy while the father works.)

Excerpt: “‘Will we ever have our own apartment again?’I ask Dad. I’d like it to be the way it was, before Mom died.
‘Maybe we will,’ he says. ‘If I can find more work. If we can save some money.’”




Sam and the Lucky Money by Karen Chinn; illustrated by Cornelius Van Wright & Ying-Hwan Hu

A Chinese American boy receives money from his grandparents for New Year’s and decides to give it to a homeless Chinese man, instead of spending it on himself.

Excerpt: “The stranger was rubbing his foot. Bare feet in winter! Sam thought. Where are his shoes? Sam stared at the man’s dirty clothes as he backed away.” 


Something Beautiful by Sharon Dennis Wyeth; illustrated by Chris K. Soentpiet

An African-American girl living in the inner city is distressed by the lack of beauty in her neighborhood until she goes looking for “something beautiful.”

Excerpt: “I pick up the trash. I sweep up the glass. I scrub the door very hard. When Die disappears, I feel very powerful.
Someday I’ll plant flowers in my courtyard. I’ll invite all my friends to see.”

 

Tight Times by Barbara Shook Hazen; illustrated by Trina Schart Hyman

A young white boy living in a city apartment begs his parents for a dog, but they refuse because of “tight times.”

Excerpt: “Then Daddy fixed us both special drinks. He said he wasn’t mad at me. He said he was mad because he’d lost something.
I said look behind the radiator because that’s where I found my lost puzzle piece.
Daddy said it wasn’t that simple. What he’d lost was his job.”


Those Shoes by Maribeth Boelts; illustrated by Noah Z. Jones

An African American boy wants a pair of the trendy black high-tops that almost all his classmates are wearing.

Excerpt: “‘There’s no room for ‘want’ around here - just ‘need,’’ Grandma says. ‘And what you need are new boots for winter.”
____

 

Here are a few of the themes from these books: resourcefulness, creativity, family connection, community support and interdependence, cross-racial friendships, dreams, financial challenge and stress, hard work, empathy, generosity, hope

Here's what I found missing from my research into picture book depictions of socioeconomic conditions: rural settings; any content about financial situations or social class in middle- or upper-income settings (economic conditions are only referenced when conditions are stressful).

Next post: Key Points for talking about class & race with children, thoughts about language and stereotypes, and a list of resources.

Please join in  with any titles or ideas about this conversation.