Each year with my eleventh-grade English students, I would preview our reading of Henry David Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” and the beginning of our course’s “Justice” domain with a dialogue that we later on referred to as “The Big Machine Talk.”
“This big machine” I would announce, while guiding the students’ attention towards the projected image, “despite what you may expect, bakes cake for children across the whole country! Please feel free to ooo and aah.”
“Ooo, aah,” the class would reply, adorably obliging.
“This machine has been baking children cake for centuries, having been deliberately designed and perfectly calibrated to produce specifically vanilla cake. How many of you like vanilla cake?”
On average, a bit less than half of my students would raise their hands, while the slight majority of the class would frown, grimace, or even audibly “yuck” at the mere thought of vanilla cake.
“Okay then, how many of you would want to eat a chocolate cake instead?” Hands would fly up with youthful excitement, in line with high schoolers’ usual reaction to any mention of chocolate.
“And which of you don’t even care for cake that mAuch?” I would press, navigating the class to explore their unique and individual preferences further. “Do you prefer brownies? Cookies? Pie?”
Most students would have their hands raised by then, thoroughly tickled by the possibility of enjoying not vanilla cake but instead their favorite sweet or baked good.
“Well folks, I’m sorry, but even though you all understandably have unique preferences, I have to clarify that this machine was originally built for one thing only: baking vanilla cake.” Despite the conversation being about a completely imaginary machine, a palpable cheerlessness would fall over the room.
“If vanilla cake is not what you need, does that mean this machine is broken?”
I would clarify that, for that day’s class, the machine’s metaphorical tenor was the public school system, deemed “broken” by critics so often that doing so nowadays can seem cliché. My students and I would reflect on the all-too-many episodes of when our schooling had fed us unhelpful and even toxic “vanilla cake”: destructively competitive academic culture, unhonored 504 and IEP plans, punitive point systems, high-stakes exams without proper and prior assessment and scaffolding, reading lists that underrepresented BIPOC, queer folk, and the differently abled.
But from our course’s “Identity” domain, we remembered who comprised the original creators and students of public education—what Horace Mann called “the great equalizer of the conditions of [white, straight, upper-class, neurotypical] men.” Describing this big machine as “broken” no longer seemed so immediately apt.
The intended conclusion for the “Big Machine Talk” was not only an essential takeaway for my students but is the core of my philosophy as an educator: by acknowledging where and how systems are not “broken” but instead working as originally envisioned, we can more strategically revise those components to serve the people they were not intended to serve.
The motivation behind my curriculum design and instruction is to deliver such service: recognizing when identities are marginalized not by accident but by design, and subsequently addressing students’ inherently diverse needs in ways those needs have not historically been met.
Since I began developing my teaching practice as an undergraduate, I have committed to reflecting on and refining my approaches so that today, they intimately align with my values and content. Originally, as a preservice and first-year teacher, I perpetuated status quo teaching for status quo’s sake, subscribed to the harmful patterns of education I experienced when I was a student and continued to observe my colleagues normalize.
My values and content prioritized equity and centered students, but my traditional, hegemonic grading systems and academic culture did not. Now, by more thoughtfully choosing when and when not to inherit long-established strategies—by more genuinely committing myself to challenging systems that have perpetuated students’ underachievement—I have made the following approaches integral to my teaching:
backwards design/understanding by design frameworks that establish essential outcomes from which I create differentiated learning pathways;
pre-assessment data to determine students’ proximity to what I intend for them to achieve, as well as “get-to-know-you” student survey data to understand what they want to achieve;
scaffolding strategies such as frequent formative assessments with thorough and personalized feedback, live modeling of essential skills, and graphically designed organizers;
re-teaching days/periods preemptively scheduled into into the course to accommodate students’ inherently different zones of proximal development and areas for growth;
A multi-tiered system of support (MTSS) used to swiftly identify, monitor, and address students’ levels of need (tier 1 for universal instruction; tier 3 for intensive assistance);
student-driven discourse (as opposed to initiate-respond-evaluate (IRE) talk) centered around the complex topics demanded by explorations of justice, the focus of my master’s portfolio;
comments-only feedback that prioritizes uplifting self-reflection and self-awareness over tallying points, largely as conceived by Sarah M. Zerwin in her book Point-less;
integrations of social-emotional learning competencies into student conferences and self-reflections, as defined by the Collaborative for Academic, Social, & Emotional Learning;
one-on-one conferences with all students designed to identify academic next steps, collaboratively identify and approach goals, check in social-emotionally, and build trust;
frequent application of reader-response theory and Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren’s Understanding Poetry so that we explore texts as much as we explore ourselves.
Although ostensibly atypical and admittedly time-intensive when compared to traditional, lecture-based, teacher-focused strategies, these approaches have regularly equipped me with the insight and relationships necessary to serve students according to their unique intersectionalities and individual needs, preventing them from falling through the cracks of my class.
When approaching the teaching of English literature specifically, I synthesize English content standards with Learning for Justice’s social justice standards, arguably the most foundational and thematic element of my practice.
The standards are divided into four deliberately sequenced domains: “Identity,” “Diversity,” “Justice,” and “Action,” which guide my design and sequence of reading selections, essential questions, prompts, and dialogues.
How is one to, say, take action and challenge inequities in their workplace or greater community if they do not have a concrete, personal sense of justice? How can they have a fuller sense of justice without senses of or care towards other people's diverse identities and subsequently different experiences? How can they have a fuller sense of people's different identities and experiences without a reliable understanding of their own?
In order to teach and support our students not just to survive systems but reshape them, our approaches to texts need to center their diverse experiences, what they want to change, and how they can make that change—even when the texts themselves eurocentrically may not.
I have shaped the sum of my teaching approaches to compel the “big machine” that is public education to serve and empower all our students, despite its original and subsequently normalized designs that privilege a select few. What Thoreau could loosely deem “necessary friction,” my strategies and principles deliberately diverge from those that would otherwise universally produce “vanilla cake” yet again.
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