The Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers of African American Children Book

I'll begin by saying that Gloria Ladson-Billings is a colleague whose work has had a major and constructive impact on the field of urban and multicultural education. Her notion of culturally relevant pedagogy works better than any other approach I've encountered in approaching the real life needs of diverse classrooms. Although the title emphasizes the relevance to African American children, culturally relevant pedagogy can be extended to all different sorts of classroom situations. Without minimizing the importance of the specifics, I'd venture that on some level what she's writing about is simply good teaching. The "Dreamkeepers" referred to in her title are eight teachers, five black, three white, who were recognized as highly successful by both parents and administrators in the northern California district where Ladson-Billings conducted her research. The book is a mix of critical reflection, autobiographical narrative concerning Ladson-Billings' own experience as a student in the Philadelphia system, and vignettes taken from the classrooms she observed. It's a nice mix, one that recognizes the multiple levels of awareness needed for educational success. Any teacher will learn from the book and one of the great things is that there's absolutely no shared set of techniques that unites the teachers. What does unite them is a deeply held belief that all of their students can succeed and a respect for the communities in which they teach and the culture of their students.

The limitations of the book for contemporary readers and teachers are all tied to the fact that it was based on research carried out in the late 1980s. Times have changed in the American school system. Ladson-Billings' Dreamkeepers make a point of dismissing the authority of simplistic standardized tests, but they were working in schools where the impact of testing, charter schools, and the other poorly conceived initiatives connected with Bush's No Child Left Behind and Obama's Race to the Top (pretty much two peas in an unappetizing pod) had had their impact. The afterward of the revised edition of the Dreamkeepers provides brief thumbnails of teachers who have carried on the vision of the original cohort, but they're very brief and there simply wasn't space to grapple with some of the complications (which Ladson-Billings has done in other writings). Even in the original studies, I frequently wanted more detail. One instance concerned her description of a culturally relevant approach to teaching algebra. I have no doubt it worked and Ladson-Billings did a good job describing the teacher's attitudes. But there's not much about exactly how she moved away from the standard approaches to problem solving.

Experienced teachers will certainly benefit from reading the book, but the most important audience for The Dreamkeepers is young teachers who will be teaching in diverse classrooms but haven't received training in the specifics of what that means.