Educational Psychology—Limitations and Possibilities

Gloria Ladson-Billings 145
latent memories of these lived experiences are still lingering into the consciousness of many
groups today, including the oppressed and the oppressor. Fears and reprisals of past history are
not easily forgotten and influence the practices, policies, and even governmental climates. These
historical references have been imprinted upon the various cultural identities of our society.
As this country attempts to recover from these horrors of the past upon minority residents,
the political and economic climate, traditionally established to benefit one group of residents,
permeates through our laws, institutions, and society to favor a power base of affluent Caucasian
men. This imbalance resulted in prejudicial ideas and misconceptions about children of color and
their families. The educational institutions have evolved into setting expectations that assume each
child learns in a uniform style. Teachers, specifically, have been trained to use a deficit approach
when teaching African American children and other children of color. This approach came to
the forefront of societal attitude after the Moynihan Report of the 1960s, requested by President
Lyndon Johnson for justifying his War on Poverty Program. This controversial report highlighted
a perceived pathology of African American families such as absent fathers, unstable family
structure, households headed by poorly educated, single females, and joblessness. It emphasized
the achievement of Anglo Middle America and implied that the “Negro” family needed assistance
in the socialization of their children to attain an acceptable level of functional family structure.
In sharp contrast, Ladson-Billings, in her research, found that successful teachers of African
American children used the strengths approach. Teachers using this approach were observed as
truly caring about the children they taught, they were dedicated to their students, they embraced
their students’ diversity positively, and, most important, they expected their students to strive to
achieve at the highest level that their personal capabilities allowed.
A component of culturally relevant pedagogy is that it empowers students to achieve socially,
intellectually, and emotionally by utilizing students’ cultural contexts, or what Ladson-Billings
calls “cultural referents,” to make connections with the world around them. Ladson-Billings
discovered that successful teachers of African American children extended their teaching beyond
the classroom. These teachers designed learning activities that incorporated the community.
Referencing the acquisition of knowledge to preexisting, relevant political and social issues
made learning meaningful, exciting, and attainable. Engaging the students directly with issues
of society, and then looping it back to their own cultural contexts or referents, made the lessons
relevant to the students. Eventually, the students embraced their own knowledge, developed their
own confidence to learn, and with the teacher’s assistance began to understand the inherent power
they possessed to conquer misguided expectations and make a difference in their lives and the
livesofothers.
Ladson-Billings has also been interested in preparing teachers to teach in a diverse society.
Walking into a classroom unprepared to teach in a culturally explosive setting can be potentially
devastating for the educator and potentially incomplete for the student. In her Teach for Diversity
(TFD) project in the mid- to late 1990s, Ladson-Billings and her colleagues realized there was
disparity between the way pre-teacher programs prepared novice teachers and the preconceived
expectations of being placed in an urban setting of students with various racial, ethnic, and
socioeconomic backgrounds blended together. The Teaching for Diversity program addressed
these issues by guiding the pre-service teachers to understand three fundamental principles: (a)
human diversity, (b) equity, and (c) social justice, and then applying these principles in settings
during their field experiences, where the gap between theory and practice could be bridged.
In a subsequent publication based on this 15-month project, Crossing Over to Canaan (2001),
Ladson-Billings reflected on her own teaching experiences in her early years in Philadelphia to
account for the necessity to prepare novice teachers for the challenges of teaching in diverse
settings. She then offers practical models for teaching in these highly diverse environments by
implementing those principles.