Schooling Race Talk

Abstract

S oon after colleagues in my department began an American Indian Teacher Training Program, I met the director of a program with a history of preparing both Native and non-Native teachers to work in indigenous communities. Interested in hearing what the director saw as distinctive in their curriculum, I asked her what the student teachers were taught in their methods classes. We teach them to she told me. The most important thing is for teachers in indigenous communities to talk to the people in the communities and to How do teachers, especially teachers from outside a community, learn to listen? What does it mean to teach teachers to listen? Teachers often tell students to listen, but we seldom teach students to listen. Listening is supposed to be intuitive. On the rare occasions that listening is theorized in educational research, it tends to be treated not as profoundly relational, cultural, and political but as a generic virtue. In the pedagogical and philosophical scholarship on dialogue, for example, listening usually is understood in idealized, universal terms. In sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and feminist research, where the gender, cultural, and political dimensions of listening have received more attention, what counts as listening across difference may be explored, but learning to listen across difference usually is not. Some teachers have had long practice at code-switching across race, nation, or other divides. For many educators, though, listening across differences may require learning new moral, intellectual, and visceral habits. Although we can communicate in multiple cultural registers (with family, friends, a boss, customers, strangers on the bus, acquaintances at the laundromat), we cannot expect our fluency in accustomed communicative contexts to transfer to all