Professional Development

Raising Consciousness among the Faculty and Staff

As with the majority of attempts to develop multicultural programs across the country, the Changeton Central
Steering Committee put a great deal of emphasis on professional development. In fact, the group’s first in-service,
“Working with Diversity,” was a concerted effort to begin to “sensitize” the school system’s over nine hundred
teachers and administrators to the concerns of a multicultural world. In order to jump-start their movement,
members of the CSC consulted with two professors of education from area colleges and, with their help, began the
production of a video called Comments on Multicultural Education. The video, which consisted of Changeton
teachers and administrators explaining why they supported the idea of celebrating diversity, was a strategic way of
showing the inservice participants that a number of people within the school system were dedicated to the infusion
of multicultural education. Through the use of familiar faces, the video also served the purpose of personalizing the
district-wide transformation process in a way that would be inviting and less threatening to others. After viewing the
video, the superintendent of schools addressed the large audience. He stated that in Changeton there were “repeated
unwelcome verbalisms across the board from teachers, administrators, and staff to students from different
backgrounds.” He also explained that many educators expressed frustration at not being able to understand the needs
of all of their students. After a speech from a parent about discrimination, Eva introduced another video, The Eye of
the Storm, better known as Brown Eyes, Blue Eyes (in which the teacher separates the class by eye color and
discriminates against one group while glorifying the other). As the film rolled, there was whispering and laughter
throughout the audience. Perhaps the response was incited by the dated clothing and beehive hairdo of the video’s
central figure. Maybe some of the over nine hundred people present were nervously reacting out of their discomfort
with the inservice setting and implications. It may have been the apparent homogeneity of the classroom on the
screen (all young, white, working-class kids), as compared with the demographic reality of Changeton. In a very
different tone from laughter, two white women commented to each other, in response to the obvious implication of
the video: “It doesn’t carry over, we don’t see that. . . . It’s not racial, they like you or they don’t.”

The Call for Sensitivity Training

Gathering their forces after the in-service, the CSC participants met at the Central Administration Building. The
focus of the group’s discussion centered around the attitudes and beliefs of the faculty and staff in the city.
Committee members expressed disgust at the reactions of colleagues, a number of whom left the workshop during
the Brown Eyes Blue Eyes video. Fred exclaimed, “People were reading, others were laughing, it was a waste of
time. disgraceful!” Jake insisted, “Our main goal is to change the attitudes of those people who think that many of
these children don’t belong here—older staff that have never dealt with this in the past lily-white schools.” Carl
shared with the group how, mistakenly, a Thai translator had been brought into his office to act as an interpreter for
a Vietnamese student. Carl was disturbed by what he referred to as the “you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all”
syndrome. Kevin offered the following story: “It was a snowy day and a black woman was stuck in a snow bank.
The custodian helped her and replied: ‘Give those niggers a drivers license, but they’ll never learn how to drive!’”

The committee agreed that the process of “culturally sensitizing” people should be implemented throughout the
school system, “including cafeteria workers, custodians, and office managers.” The participants also realized that in-
service training was essential in that “you can’t just change people’s minds simply by telling them to change.”
Instead, members of the CSC wanted to expose participants to certain issues and actively involve them in raising
awareness. The pressing question for the group was how to transform the faculty and staff ’s attitudes when“they
may not know the depth of the problem.” “Teachers in Changeton have no idea what baggage these kids are
bringing to school,” exclaimed Kevin. Giselle added, “I saw a staff person who said, ‘Now Giselle, how did your
mother bring you up?’ It was obvious that he had no idea about the lives of these students, some who may not have
parents at all. We need to sensitize teachers, which goes together with raising the students’ egos.”
Sara insisted that the CSC find ways to make teachers deal with youths “not as culturally disadvantaged, but as
different.” Jake agreed, telling the story of a teacher who upon hearing the accent of a new student, wanted him out
of the class. The evicted youth was an honors student in math and social studies. Understanding the immediate
implications of and reactions to such abusive treatment, Raul insisted that “crime and economics are all tied to this,
these are the people that drop out, they are the ones in the parking lot. . . .We need to teach these kids to work and
keep the system going.”
The committee understood the fact that teachers’ discriminatory attitudes have an enormous impact on students’
perceptions of schooling and themselves, as well as on their academic outcomes—“Teachers have tremendous
influence on students in the messages that are transferred down.” Jake summed up the situation, “Some don’t know,
some don’t care, and some are truly racist.”

Emerging Goals for Professional Development

To help the committee focus in on individual members’ concerns, as revealed I Chapters Four and Five, the group
drafted and distributed amongst its membership a questionnaire, the Multicultural Committee Draft of Goals. As
“Changing,Staff Attitudes” was one of the categories (and central goals), the following issues and insights, were
mentioned in the responses:

 Provide training day(s) for at least two members of each school’s multicultural committee. Focus on dealing with
differences, prejudice reduction, and teaching for confronting issues of prejudice and discrimination.
 Work with school-based committees in order to develop an action plan, for example, school-based workshops that deal
with issues of race and social inequality.
 We need experiential activities and opportunities to recognize and evaluate the ideological influences that shape our
thinking about schooling, society, ourselves, and diverse others.
 Teaching culturally different groups requires more sensitivity, it requires placing equal value on all students. The
committee should be involved in providing training to all staff; that is, sensitivity workshops, in-service training, and
more educational incentives for continued education.
 We need to heighten the importance of staff sensitivity toward the diverse backgrounds of students and their families,
sponsor in-service training that promotes respect and sensitivity, and develop a resource bank of presenters that could
be used by other groups in the system offering in-service training.
 Allow teachers more input in decision-making procedures in individual buildings staff will be more positive and
enthusiastic if it is their school and not the administrators’.
 All else will fall into place once educators’ visions are expanded. Start with sensitivity workshops and cultural
awareness sessions to get teachers to confront their suppressed feelings, especially regarding racism. Then, work with
teachers to help them view everyone as innately equal; that is, the concept of oneness.
 All staff must be involved, not just portions of it.
 Pay for the teachers to take multicultural courses and give them credit for this toward pay increases.
 Have non-bilingual teachers attend bilingual workshops and the bilingual convention.

Looking to the Greater Community for Professional Development

The group brainstormed about programs that could help in their efforts to sensitize colleagues. CSC members would
attend professional development meetings whenever possible in order to gain insights about potential future in-
services. As Eva stated, “If you go out, we need people to bring back to this table as much information as you can.”
Each time that the group would assemble, participants would share news about upcoming, or previously attended,
multicultural workshops in the area. Carl informed the group that an anti-violence organization was holding a
meeting and that the CSC should attend in order to “volunteer our expertise.”

The committee agreed that it would be good to have parents and the public at large see teachers and administrators
showing a deep level of commitment to embracing diversity by involving themselves in activities outside of the
schools. However, a common problem with many of these workshops was the price. For example, one popular
institute’s in-service ranged anywhere from a three hour presentation for $1,100 to a two-and-a-half-day in-service
at a cost of $6,600. By June of 1993, the CSC dedicated itself to developing its own “multicultural training activity
for central, working, and school-based committee members,” with the hopes that it would be ready to go as early as
September. Having received $1,200 from the state desegregation plan to provide for the in-service and some extra
funds needed to pay for substitute teachers, the Central Steering Committee’s plan of attack was to find an
organization that could help shape and mfacilitate the group’s multicultural efforts. September 30, 1993, was the
chosen day, and there was little time to waste.

In August, a volunteer subcommittee took on the responsibility for organizing the upcoming in-service. In search of
facilitators, the group first approached Facing History, an organization that links the Holocaust, discrimination, and
public schooling. However, the spokesperson for this organization recommended that before the CSC utilize their
services, they should provide some introductory activities to help lay a foundation. He suggested that this include
exposure to “an expert on urban settings.”
Through word of mouth, the subcommittee contacted Sandy Bur (a white man), as well as Lesley Warner (a white
woman) and Mandy Roberts (a black woman), from two area colleges. The subcommittee met with Bur, who was a
professor of Urban Studies (and who had also worked with the Nobel Public Schools), to help prepare for the
upcoming event. Sara suggested that the CSC broadcast the in-service to all the schools. This way, teachers could
call in for questions and create discussions in their classrooms. Sam agreed with the idea, citing George Washington
University, which had done something similar. However, because of the complicated scheduling problems that this
idea presented, let alone the enormous expense, the motion died.

The subcommittee didn’t want to make the same mistakes that the CSC had made at its first all-faculty in-service.
According to the needs assessment results, a great many participants didn’t like the original workshop, claiming that
it was too big and didn’t allow for interpersonal interaction. This time around, the committee also wanted the
facilitators to give people practical information that they couldbring back to their schools. Kevin expressed the need
for people “to meet, look at materials, and learn about what to look for and what to do.” With very little input from
Bur, and virtually none from Warner and Roberts, the in-service was set to take place. Attendance would include all
members of the Central Steering Committee, plus two multicultural representatives from each school. In theory, the
workshop was designed “to give staff a voice through leadership training and skills building” and “to empower them
to help other teachers who may be in the middle and will come over to our side.” Volunteers prepared an
information packet for all of the in-service participants. They solicited the information that they needed from
individual schools (for example, what multicultural ideas each building had already put into practice and lists of site-
based committee members), collected some literature on multicultural education, and prepared an in-service
evaluation form. The group wanted to have ongoing evaluations/questionnaires for gaining insight from the greater
educational community

The In-Service
On September 30, the Central Steering Committee and two representatives from each school met at a local college
(fifty people all together). Eva set up the tables for registration and distributed name tags. There were billboards that
exhibited what schools had done so far to support multiculturalism. Each participant received a red binder (which
CSC volunteers had assembled) that included a list o the Central Steering Committee members, a list of site-based
multicultural committees and their chairs, a letter of welcome from the superintendent, a CSC status report with a
copy of the Mission Statement, a tentative schedule for future in-services, complied needs assessment data from the
March all-faculty in-service, a list of multicultural activities taking place in the schools (by building), and chart
describing the command structure of the school-wide multicultural education committees. It also included journal
articles which presented a variety of perspectives on anti-racist, multicultural education (most notable authors being
Gloria Ladson-Billings, James Banks, and Peggy McIntosh).1
Sandy Bur opened the workshop with an overview of the racial/ethnic history of Changeton. He spent most of his
time describing the exploitation that the majority of working-class immigrants had faced over the years in such
communities. Describing the demographic shifts of Nobel and Changeton from the 1960s through the 1980s, Bur
anticipated a continued shift in a direction in which “whites will eventually be the minority,” and he stressed the
importance of teaching “all kids that they have a lot to offer.

Warner and Roberts then took the floor, echoing the importance of dealing with the changes that the first presenter
had detailed. However, instead of lecturing from center stage, the two facilitators put the people into a large circle
and suggested that during the exercises they were about to undergo, everyone keep track of their feelings.

The two women began to separate the large group with descriptive binarisms: right handed and left handed, height
(over/under six feet tall), age, eye color, field of study, those who have traveled internationally, those who served in
the military those who have participated in the Nobel Marathon, those who live here I Changeton, marital status, and
parental/grandparental status. They continued this process by dividing the group by language abilities,
socioeconomic statu (“middle to upper middle class, blue collar”), private or public education, gender, and finally
by sending “the non-whites” to the other side of the room, asking fo the “WASPs” (perhaps erroneously assuming
that all whites are Anglo-Saxon Protestants) to “stay over here.”
After this extensive process, the facilitators had everyone sit down and discuss what they “saw, said, felt, and
experienced.” Random comments from the group began to surface: “Manipulated!” “We moved around too much!”
“Ibegan to anticipate the exercise!” “Segregated!” “I didn’t like to be white or nonwhite.” Roberts asked if the
participants felt labeled. One white male claimed, “It made everyone feel like a minority.” When asked to identify
with a particular social class, many participants agreed that it made them feel uncomfortable. The general consensus
in the group was that people “felt good about some categories, and bad about others.”

Some participants challenged the membership of certain groups. For example, it was argued that Jamaicans and
Haitians do not necessarily fall under the descriptor black. To this, Roberts responded, “What do you call a nigger
with a Ph.D.?” “A nigger!,” she answered laughingly to a silent room—implicitly asserting,that all racially
subordinated people are discriminated against regardless of their national origin or accomplishments.

There were also people who didn’t know where they racially/ethnically stood. One woman sat down in the middle of
the floor, later explaining to the larger group, “I was born in the U.S. My family is from Cape Verde. They
originated in Europe (Italy). Where am I? When I changed my descriptor, they changed my minority status.” One
white man, addressing the two facilitators, inquired, What would happen if you asked who is racist and who isn’t?”
He added, “We need to talk openly and honestly about racism.” With this, the group began discussing the
differences between “racist” and “prejudice.” Most people seemed to be participating enthusiastically, though no
clear definitions emanated from the brief interaction.

Jake encouraged everyone to get back into a big circle to get people as close together as possible. Alluding to the
previous exercise, he stated, “We all mixed the differences and belonged with each other at one point, we all have
differences and commonalities.”

Roberts made reference to the Peggy McIntosh article (on white privilege) in the red binder that was handed out.
She then read the article aloud and talked of her experiences of being followed and harassed by sales people in
stores. On a tight schedule, the group, without much engagement with the literature, viewe three video clips of
stereotyping in the classroom. The idea of presenting these scenarios was to have people begin to talk about how
they would handle such situations However, just as the discussion was getting warmed up, time ran out. In the
remaining few moments, the facilitators handed out the CSC’s in-service evaluation.
Debriefing the September In-Service
At the next Central Steering Committee meeting, the members present immediately focused on what had taken place
at the previous workshop. Carl stated: “Bur was atrocious—he was only going to speak for ten minutes. He talked
more about the blue collar stuff, and not about different populations—total irrelevance!” The committee agreed that
the first speaker “was a bomb.” Kevin noted, “They [some participants] spoke positively in the staff meeting and are
developing ideas.” The quantitative results of the in-service evaluations also indicated a positive response: the
overwhelming majority rated the workshop as “good” to “excellent.”

Some members found the experience to be “thought provoking,” but were left with the feeling of “now where do we
go?” Sara was disappointed; “I wanted to go to the back of the room and call a time-out—my agenda was not
fulfilled!” Melissa was completely dissatisfied: “We raced back and forth for no reason!” Jake expressed the
sentiment that too much had been crammed in: “There was no time to interact with others.” June felt, “It was a good
start for newcomers, but for people mwho had already dealt deeply with these issues, it was a letdown.” Raul and
Juan supported this point. Sam insisted that the meeting wasn’t for members of the CSC, that “it was intended for
the inexperienced.” In general, the committee members were in agreement that they wanted a lot more dialogue. As
Fred concluded, “The speakers were too long.”

Inspired by the in-service’s first exercise, the CSC discussed the realities of categorical separation. Jake insisted,
“Until we say that these children are ours, we will not begin to solve the problem, but we shouldn’t pigeonhole them
as black or brown.” The group talked about how students are registered in the schools by race.Jake added, “Right
away, you are asking people to separate themselves.” Arguing that Cape Verdean is a mixed race, Raul stated,
“America wants you to come here and fit into categories that are already established and millions of people are
marked ‘other.’” Some of the CSC in-service participants admitted that they felt uncomfortable when the facilitators
asked the group to separate by race. Withoutm exploring these potentially edifying issues, the CSC mulled over
what to do for its next in-service.