Reviews for The Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers of African American Children

The average rating for The Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers of African American Children based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-04-13 00:00:00 John Hernandez Gloria Ladson-Billings spent two years observing highly effective teachers in an underprivileged, predominantly african-american district. She asked parents and administrators to list teachers they considered highly effective, then chose the names that appeared on both lists. She uses anecdotes from those observations, interwoven with her own memories, to distill several hallmarks of culturally relevant teaching. In brief, they come down to this: 1) Treat your students with respect. 2) Remember that your students are talented, valuable people who bring a unique and valuable perspective into the classroom. 3) Have high expectations for your students. 4) Make sure your literature and history lessons include and respect the african-american experience. 5) Teach your students to think critically about current events and even question the perspective of the textbooks used in your school. 6) You'll almost certainly need to do some of your own curriculum creation, as most textbooks won't meet the criteria stated above. 7) If the district's guidelines don't meet your students' needs, quietly ignore them. Personally, I have mixed feelings about these results, because, to me, they are glaringly obvious. As far as I'm concerned, Ladson-Billings's conclusion amounts to "Be a good teacher, and you will be effective with african-american students." On the other hand, sometimes pointing out the obvious IS groundbreaking scholarship. One thing I really like about the book is that Ladson-Billings doesn't pretend like there's only one way to be an effective teacher of african-american students. I think this grew out of her methodology. The teachers she observed often didn't have much in common in terms of pedagogical theory. She even includes a chapter in which she juxtaposes a whole language reading classroom with a phonics-based classroom. What she found was that both approaches are effective, provided that they are administered by a teacher who subscribes to the principles outlined earlier. To me, this was obvious, but it is also a completely original conclusion. I have never seen anything like it in anything else I've ever read. And, for that reason, it is important that this book exists. The best thing about this book, for me, was that it was a way for me to observe these teachers through Ladson-Billings's eyes. There are a lot of interesting ideas hidden within the discourse on pedagogy. I think my favorite was the teacher who sent a student to another room on an errand, sat down at the student's desk, and then began exclaiming over all of the nifty things she "discovered" inside. The student, of course, along with the rest of the class, immediately began to protest that the items inside belonged to the student. They saw it as a joke in keeping with the teacher's theatrical sense of humor, until she went back to the front of the room and had them read their textbook's perspective on the "Age of Discovery." Episodes like this made the reading absolutely worthwhile. My only real regret is that this book's research is about 25 years old. I'd like to see an updated version, using teachers in the field right now. I'd also like to see a lot more research that uses this methodology. It's disappointingly rare for researchers to study effective teaching simply by finding out who is effective and then watching them with an open mind.

Review # 2 was written on 2014-06-01 00:00:00 Tasse Godinez 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.