Equity & Excellence in Education

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I’m Here for the Hard Re-Set: Post Pandemic

Pedagogy to Preserve Our Culture

Gloria Ladson-Billings

To cite this article: Gloria Ladson-Billings (2021) I’m Here for the Hard Re-Set: Post Pandemic
Pedagogy to Preserve Our Culture, Equity & Excellence in Education, 54:1, 68-78, DOI:
10.1080/10665684.2020.1863883

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10665684.2020.1863883

Published online: 23 Feb 2021.

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EQUITY & EXCELLENCE IN EDUCATION
2021, VOL. 54, NO. 1, 68–78
https://doi.org/10.1080/10665684.2020.1863883

I’m Here for the Hard Re-Set: Post Pandemic Pedagogy to Preserve
Our Culture
Gloria Ladson-Billings
University of Wisconsin-Madison

ABSTRACT
The challenge of the COVID-19 pandemic exposed many of the nation’s
vulnerabilities—health care, economic, climate, and educational disparities
—and put us all on alert. While many are scrambling for solutions to return
to school in safe ways, this article speaks to the need to fundamentally
rethink education and consider the pandemic as an opportunity to restart,
or more precisely re-set, education using a more robust and culturally
centered pedagogy. This article provides examples of the new ideas that
scholars and practitioners are employing to ensure academic, cultural, and
social success for students who were regularly placed at risk of failure
because of their racial, cultural, and socioeconomic status.

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is
no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. (Arundhati Roy, 2020)

Introduction
Almost everyone in the US possesses a mobile device or electronic tablet. We use them to
communicate, to gain information, and for entertainment. However, as machines, they are sure
to fail at some point. We may try turning off our devices, removing batteries or SIM cards, and
starting them up again. We also may try searching online support groups for others who have
experienced similar problems. However, at some point we realize we have to make a trek to the
mobile device store or authorized dealer for help. There we will meet someone who may try
a few tricks but may eventually confront us with the news that our device needs a “hard re-set”
which is not what most device users want to hear. This means that anything we have not
backed up will be erased from our device. When it is returned to us, none of our photos or
contacts will be there. It will resemble the device we had when it first came from the factory.
This analogy of a “hard re-set” is one I am using to describe what needs to happen to reclaim
and preserve our culture through our school students.
Although many educators and policy makers insist that we have to “get back to normal,”
I want to suggest that “going back” is the wrong thing for children and youth who were
unsuccessful and oppressed in our schools before the pandemic. Normal is where the problems
reside. Roy (2020) asserts, “Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to
‘normality’, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture.
But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink
the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to
normality” (p. 10).

CONTACT Gloria Ladson-Billings gjladson@wisc.edu School of Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Education

Building, 1000 Bascom Mall, Madison, WI 53706.
© 2021 University of Massachusetts Amherst College of Education
 EQUITY & EXCELLENCE IN EDUCATION 69

Normal is a No-No
If we consider what normal has been for Black children, it is easy to see why “getting back to
normal” does not seem like a good idea. Black children have lower achievement performance (as
measured by standardized tests), are more likely to have less experienced or under-prepared
teachers, suffer disproportionately from school discipline policies, have less access to advanced
courses, are less likely to be selected for gifted and talented classes, be assigned to special education,
and experience grade level retention (Shores et al., 2020).
Shores et al. (2020) synthesize the work of the Civil Rights Data Collection (CRDC) and argue
that it is not merely the external factors impacting students’ lives that account for poor academic
outcomes. This assertion is one that rankles conventional wisdom because whenever we point out
the existence of Black-White academic disparities we hear that the fact that Black children are
poorer, from households with single parents, or have parents who were under educated as the
explanations for the students’ poor academic performances. These out-of-school variables are read as
causes for in-school outcomes. This discourse is important because many who are policy makers and
ancillary to the schools (e.g., social workers, psychologists, juvenile justice professionals, etc.)
promote school as the solution to student problems.
Shores et al. (2020) argue that “schools are the principal source of . . . disparities” because schools
“create . . . socially relevant categories, and teachers and school leaders sort students into them”
making these inequalities specific to the purview of the school. The results of these categorical
inequalities indicate that Black students receive at least one suspension 3.4 times more than their
White counterparts. They receive multiple suspensions 5.8 times more than White students. Black
students receive in-school suspensions 3.2 times more than White students and are placed in special
education 1.1 times more often than White students. White students are placed in gifted and talented
education classes or programs 3.2 times more than Black children and in Advanced Placement (AP)
courses 2.3 times more than Black children. Black students are retained a grade 2.2 times more often
than White students.
In school districts serving Black students who are socioeconomically disadvantaged, it is the
school that exacerbates the educational disadvantages. These schools suspend, expel, retain, assign to
special education, and deny entrance into gifted/talented and AP courses for Black students. This
work on categorical inequality indicates that many of these disparities come as a result of teacher
discretion. In instances where schools solely used test scores and grade point averages, student
assignment to special education and gifted/talented and Advanced Placement courses yielded less
disproportionality.
According to the US Department of Education Office for Civil Rights (2014), Black children
represent just 18% of preschool enrollment, but 48% of preschoolers receiving more than one out-of-
school suspension. Black students are suspended and expelled at a rate three times greater than
White students. While boys receive more than two out of three suspensions, Black girls also are
suspended at higher rates (12%) than girls of any other race or ethnicity and most boys. Although
Black boys represent 16% of student enrollment, they represent 27% of students referred to law
enforcement and 31% of students subjected to a school-related arrest.
Poor students of color are more likely to have an unqualified or under-qualified teacher in critical
twenty-first century subject areas such as mathematics and science. A 2014 study issued by the
Center for American Progress (Partee, 2014) reinforced the fact that low income students of color
not only receive less experienced mathematics teachers, but they are more likely to have ineffective
mathematics teachers. This suggests that the problem of school achievement for Black children
resides squarely inside the schools, not merely outside them. Darling-Hammond (2001) argued:

A growing body of research suggests that inequitable distributions of qualified teachers are a major cause of the
achievement gap. Recent studies have found that differential teacher effectiveness is an extremely strong
determinant of differences in students learning, Far outweighing the effects of differences in class size and
heterogeneity. Students who are assigned to several ineffective teachers in a row have significantly lower
70 G. LADSON-BILLINGS

achievement gains—creating differences of as much as 50 percentile points over three years—than those who
are assigned to several highly effective teachers in a row (Sanders & Rivers, 1996). These studies also find
evidence of bias in assignment of students to teachers of different effectiveness levels, including indications that
African American students are nearly twice as likely to be assigned to the most ineffective teachers and about
half as likely to be assigned to the most effective teachers. (p. 212)

In the case of reading achievement, a mere 12% of African American fourth graders reach proficient
or advanced levels, and 61% have not been taught to even the basic level. The same proportion of
Black eighth graders fall below the basic achievement level compared to only 7% who reach the
proficient level or above in reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP).
This means that by the end of high school, African American students have reading (and math) skills
that are about the same as White eighth grade students (Education Trust, 2013).

Islands of hope
Despite these dismal statistics it is important to recognize that there are individual schools and
school districts that have had success in reducing the academic disparities between Black and White
students. The Education Trust identifies schools such as Arcadia Elementary (Arcadia, IL), Baylor-
Woodson Elementary (Inkster, MI), Graham Road Elementary (Fairfax, VA), Jack Britt High School
(Fayetteville, NC), and Pass Christian High School (Pass Christian, MS) as schools that defy the odds
in terms of Black academic performance and the narrowing of achievement disparities between Black
and White students, These schools (along with scores of others) represent existence proofs—a
testament to what can be done.
Ladson-Billings (2009) have argued that teachers who practiced culturally relevant pedagogy
produced Black student outcomes that were greater than their colleagues working in the same
school and at the same grade level. These teachers are also existence proofs. In a district known
for low achievement among Black children, the teachers in the study of culturally relevant pedagogy
were important outliers because they drew their students from the same universe as their less
effective counterparts. The same out-of-school socioeconomic factors of students who performed
poorly in other teachers’ classrooms were present among the culturally relevant teachers. They had
students from single parent households. They had students who were eligible for free and reduced
lunches. They had students whose parents had not completed high school. Yet, students in their
classrooms posted academic gains far beyond those of students in other classes in the same school.
Ladson-Billings (2009) began studying teachers who were successful with African American
students in the early 1990s. In the intervening 30 years culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) has
morphed into a variety of iterations, many exhibiting little fidelity to the original theoretical model.
Versions of culturally inspired teaching and learning typically rely on the use of more diverse
literature selections and images of Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) people displayed
throughout the classroom. In Banks (1993) delineation of the dimensions of multicultural education,
this type of response falls under the category of content integration. This dimension reflects an
inclusion of diverse information without changing the structure of the curriculum. It often takes the
forms of separate “Black History” units or features in the midst of an ongoing hegemonic curricu­
lum. For example, a teacher may be teaching a mainstream approach to the Revolutionary War and
in the midst, decide to feature Crispus Attucks, a Black man who is considered the first person killed
in the war. However, that same teacher will not necessarily have students interrogate the paradox of
a Black man fighting for the freedom of the White colonists who have enslaved Black people.
Posting pictures of BIPOC throughout a classroom without examining the context of a society that
reinforces notions of inferiority and insignificance among those same people fails to meet the true
mission of culturally relevant pedagogy. Culturally relevant pedagogues are those who challenge the
construction of knowledge that rarely gives students access to knowledge and information about how
we make decisions about what counts as valuable. Some years ago, I met a French teacher who couldn’t
figure out why Black students regularly dropped her classes. I asked her if she had representations of
 EQUITY & EXCELLENCE IN EDUCATION 71

Francophone African descent peoples in her class. She said she did, but it turned out the pictures of
Francophone Africans were generally in traditional clothing and were juxtaposed to posters of highly
technological structures like the Eiffel Tower or the Arc d’ Triomphe. It had not occurred to the teacher
that the students might be embarrassed by what seemed to be “primitive” images of Black people versus
more sophisticated images of places where Black people lived. She had no examples Paris Noir or New
Orleans or Martinique or other more modern living Francophone Blacks.

The elements of culturally relevant pedagogy

According to the original formulation (Ladson-Billings, 1995), culturally relevant pedagogy rests on
three propositions: academic achievement/student learning, cultural competence, and socio-political
/critical consciousness. Any iteration that does not reflect all three of these propositions cannot be
said to be culturally relevant pedagogy. Academic achievement or more precisely, student learning,
sits at the heart of teaching-learning. Students are supposed to learn something as a result of their
interaction with more knowledgeable adults. Academic achievement is not the same as content
coverage.
What many teachers, administrators, and even the general public seem to conflate are perfor­
mance on a state mandated standardized test and student learning. The culturally relevant pedagogy
approach to student learning is predicated upon student academic growth—the difference between
what students know and are able to do when they arrive in a classroom in the fall and what they
know and are able to do when they leave the following spring. Imagine for example, a child enters
a fifth grade classroom in September reading at a second grade level. After a year of diligent work
with this student, a very skillful teacher has been able to raise the student to a fourth grade reading
level. However, when the student takes the state test the student is still a year below the standard.
According to the school, the district, and the state the student does not measure up. No one
recognizes that the teacher has helped the student advance two years in the span of a year’s time.
The theory of culturally relevant pedagogy would credit the teacher with demonstrating that student
learning is indeed going on in the classroom.
The next element of culturally relevant pedagogy is cultural competence. This is perhaps the most
misunderstood aspect of the theory. Far too many teachers believe if they make some effort to
represent diverse cultures, they are exhibiting cultural competence. Cultural competence means that
students are secure in their knowledge and understanding of their own culture—language, traditions,
histories, culture, and so forth, AND are developing fluency and facility in at least one other culture.
In the case of minoritized students that other culture is typically the mainstream culture. It should be
noted that White students are not exempt from developing cultural competence. All students will be
thrust into a diverse, multicultural world where they will need to understand the culture of those
different from themselves.
Many years ago, I took a faculty trip that allowed relatively new faculty to take a five-day bus trip
around the state to see the relationship of various businesses, industries, social services, arts, and
cultural entities to the university. At each stop we were greeted by a university professor whose
research and scholarship was related to the location. One of our stops was a dairy farm where
a faculty member from the Department of Dairy Science met our group. The farm had been in the
family since the end of the Civil War. In fact, the farm was given to the family by the US government
as payment for the family’s participation in the Union Army. During our group’s visit we were
introduced to three generations of the family who lived on the farm. The first two generations were
all graduates of our university and the third generation was expected to one day attend the
university. More interesting to me was the fact that there was a group of interns from Japan,
Korea, Portugal, the Netherlands, Canada, and Mexico on the farm learning about the latest dairy
farming techniques. The young men who ran the farm had to be able to communicate with interns
from all parts of the world. Their living in a rural community did not isolate them from global
interconnected dairy economy. They had to be culturally competent.
72 G. LADSON-BILLINGS

Unfortunately, what happens in many of our classrooms is that teachers include superficial
aspects of diverse cultures interrupting mainstream, hegemonic norms and practices. For example,
a teacher may have different colored faces represented on a bulletin board or spend a January
lesson on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. or a May lesson on Cinco de Mayo but never question
underlying inequities and injustices. A culturally relevant teacher helps students challenge existing
power structures and begin to use culture to make meaning of the curriculum and their own
experiences.
The third component of culturally relevant pedagogy is the most ignored. This component is
socio-political or critical consciousness. In plain language this is the “so what” factor. Students
regularly ask teachers why they have to learn certain things and teachers provide a weak justification
such as, “You’re going to need this next year.” Students are rarely convinced of that explanation and
grow frustrated when teachers do not attend to the immediacy of their lives. Police brutality, Black
Lives Matter protests, and unequal consequences of the COVID-19 virus are happening right now
and students want the intellectual tools to be able to address these present-day concerns. Culturally
relevant teachers know how to weave the elements of the curriculum into these concerns. They help
students take a problem-centered approach to learning and avoid assigning disconnected busy work.
They teach students how to read both the word and the world (Freire, 2005).

Culturally relevant pedagogy and the hard re-set

If we are serious about promoting a hard re-set we must re-deploy the elements of culturally relevant
pedagogy—student learning, cultural competence, and socio-political consciousness—to better
reflect students’ lives and cultures and we must re-think the purposes of education in a society
that is straining from the problems of anti-Black racism, police brutality, mass incarceration, and
economic inequality. The point of the hard re-set is to reconsider what kind of human beings/
citizens we are seeking to produce.
Other nations have had to undergo hard re-sets in their educational systems after major
catastrophes. For example, after World War II both Japan and Italy had to redo their educational
systems. They knew they did not want to raise another generation of fascists or rabidly nationalist
citizens that would lead them into dangerous wars and possible destruction. For the Japanese this
meant opening up their education system to become more gender equitable. For the Italians it meant
developing the famed Regio Emilia pre-chools that allowed children to explore and discover rather
than be driven by authoritarian directives. According to Hewitt (2001) the country of Italy was
overcome with a desire to bring change and create anew after the devastation of WWII.
While the US has not experienced war on its soils since the Civil War in the nineteenth century, it
has had severe disruptions in daily life as a result of weather occurrences. In August 2005 the Gulf
Coast of Louisiana and Mississippi were ravished by Hurricane Katrina. This Category 5 storm with
its winds, 20-foot storm surges, and levee breaches left 80% of the city of New Orleans underwater
and killed 1,836 people (1,577 of them in Louisiana). The storm affected about 15 million people.
This level of destruction meant that New Orleans had to re-start. All of its systems and its entire
infrastructure were destroyed. Many of the established school leaders were eager to get back to
business as usual. However, neo-liberal forces saw this situation as a perfect opportunity to re-set the
schools, but not in ways that honored or supported the culture of the students.
The New Orleans re-set was designed to impose a system that would shift the entire concept of
public education toward a market-based charter school model administered by educational charter
management organizations (CMOs). Perhaps more disturbing was the decision to fire a largely Black
teaching force in exchange for young, White, alternatively certified teachers from out of state. Recent
reports (Harris & Larsen, 2018) suggest that school reforms in New Orleans have greatly improved
achievement, graduation rates, and college outcomes. However, more community based, grassroots
organizations have another interpretation of what education reform in New Orleans actually looks
like (https://blackedunola.org/).
 EQUITY & EXCELLENCE IN EDUCATION 73

Henry and Dixson (2016) examined the charter authorization process and demonstrated that com­
munity-based groups had almost no chance of having their charter applications approved. Thus, there
was little opportunity for so-called education reforms to reflect the culture of the students they planned to
enroll in their schools. Indeed, the wholesale firing of Black teachers sent a powerful and chilling message
throughout New Orleans indicating what the reformers thought of Black people and their culture.
The hard re-set demanded by the COVID-19 and anti-Black pandemics of 2020 require us to
engage in culturally relevant pedagogy that takes into account the conditions of students’ lives these
occurrences set in motion. Specifically, we must re-set around technology, curriculum, pedagogy,
assessment, and parent/community engagement that will support and promote students’ culture.

Technology
At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, schools began to close in the US in mid-March of 2020.
Some districts treated the closure as the end of the school year and did little to try to complete the
final quarter of the school year. Other districts decided to treat the remote schooling as an extension
of the 2019–2020 academic year and converted to electronic transmission of instruction. Again, this
rolled out unevenly. In some districts, schools distributed electronic devices—laptops, Chrome
books, or tablets—to ensure that students had devices through which teachers could transmit
information. Unfortunately, having the devices did not ensure that students had access to Internet
connectivity. In other instances, school districts had not considered that sporadic offerings of online
instruction might mean that high school students would use the time away from school to find
employment. High schoolers who were able to find jobs missed a lot of “seat time” and often did not
check in with teachers.
The hard re-set will require schools to make both technology and Internet accessibility available
to all students, even when schools return to face to face instruction. This is not an untoward request.
Often colleges and universities provide remote instruction to student-athletes who are in the midst
of competition to ensure they do not miss class materials or scheduled assessments. In a newly
envisioned school, technology will play an increasing role and students will have an opportunity to
access asynchronous lessons so they can learn at their own pace and under conditions they find more
favorable (e.g., watching in shorter segments, watching multiple times).

Curriculum
In addition to technology access, the hard re-set requires us to rethink and redesign the school
curriculum. It is important for schools to move beyond content integration that celebrates “first
Blacks” and “Black firsts” Instead, the curriculum will need to be deconstructed and re-constructed
to more accurately reflect the culture of our students. The story of Black people cannot continue to
be told as if it started in slavery. Instead, Black people will have to be situated in history where their
African stories can be told—the kingdoms of Ghana, Mali, and Songhay explain ancient traditions,
literatures, customs, languages, arts, science, and fully formed cultures—and interrogated.
The curriculum will need to include African and African American history, culture, music, and
art forms that reflect these cultures. It also will need to include literature of Black authors. However,
instead of merely expanding the literature offerings, the curriculum will need to reorganize around
concepts that better reflect the experiences of African Americans. Instead of focusing only on slavery,
immigration, Manifest Destiny, and American Exceptionalism, the re-set curriculum will engage
questions of sovereignty, liminality, otherness, hegemony, and reparations. Rather than presenting
questions that suggest some defect in Africans that permitted them to be captured and enslaved, the
curriculum would ask what kind of people think it is permissible to enslave others. The curriculum
would address myths of origins of various cultures. What is the story Indigenous peoples tell about
their origins? What is the story Africans tell of their origins? What is the story European Americans
74 G. LADSON-BILLINGS

tell of their origins? The work of the school would be to help students experience a comparative
study of the world in which they live, not propaganda designed to uncritically valorize the US.
In addition to content, the curriculum will need to expand to meet the social-emotional needs of
students. Instead of a more Western-centered approach to the human as separate and compartmen­
talized, a significant aspect of African American culture is the need to fully integrate mind, body, and
spirit. Thus, social-emotional and mental health and wellness concerns would be integrated into a re-
set curriculum. These social-emotional and mental health components of the curriculum are
necessary if the re-set school takes on the challenges of a world that is increasingly perilous for
African Americans. Shootings of unarmed African Americans and increased risk of death through
a viral pandemic pose important questions for school-aged African Americans. Why do these
shootings keep happening? Why do the police keep getting away with the shootings? How is it
that Black and Brown people are more vulnerable to this disease? Although these questions have
empirical answers, they arise out of emotional concerns that also must be addressed.

Pedagogy
No matter how good the curriculum content, the curriculum cannot teach itself. In a re-set schooling
experience, teachers will have to exemplify the aspects of culturally relevant pedagogy described
earlier in this paper (i.e., student learning, cultural competence, and socio-political consciousness).
Teachers will need to build their pedagogical repertoires to ensure they are reaching all students.
Teachers must move beyond lectures and telling as teaching. Teachers must become skilled in using
authentic discussion and debate strategies, cooperative grouping, and small group activities.
A re-set pedagogy can pull on youth culture in innovative ways. Students can assume teaching
roles through the development and demonstration of spoken word and hip hop art forms. What
Paris and Alim (2017) call culturally sustaining pedagogies, Emdin (2017) calls reality pedagogy, and
Love (2019) calls abolitionist teaching. These all reflect approaches to pedagogy that are departures
from traditional teaching that has teachers as the sole authority in the classroom and one way
transmission of knowledge from teacher to students.

Assessment
As the nation’s schools wound down in mid-March of 2020 school districts recognized that they
could not administer high-stakes tests that had become a part of the routine of the academic year.
Where we were once led to believe that we absolutely must test students every year, we quickly
learned it was possible to complete a school year without standardized testing. This does not mean
there is no place for assessment. It merely means that there can be more innovative and culturally
relevant ways to determine what students know and are able to do.
In a re-set school environment, we will begin a school year with an accurate assessment of what
students already know. The school year will have varied and regular formative assessments to
determine how well students are understanding what they are taught, and an end of the year
assessment would be keyed to what was actually taught in their classrooms. Assessment would no
longer be a punitive tool to “catch” students but rather a diagnostic and developmental tool that will
tell teachers and schools how to adjust their curriculum and pedagogy.
An important aspect of assessment in a re-set school is that it will reflect incredible variety.
Students will have the opportunity to use art, music, and dramatic performances, as well pencil and
paper tests and essays.

Parent/community engagement
One of the things schools, especially schools serving students in grades K through 8, discovered as
a result of moving to remote teaching and learning in the spring of 2020 was that much of what they
 EQUITY & EXCELLENCE IN EDUCATION 75

wanted students to do required the cooperation and involvement of the parents. Unfortunately,
parents, struggling to maintain jobs, raise more than one child, or coping with other stressors, may
not have had the time, knowledge, or energy to assist with remote learning. Schools who were
serious about reaching all students needed to reach out to parents and provide support on using
mobile devices and accessing both synchronous and asynchronous computer-based instruction.
In a re-set environment parents will occupy a central role in teaching and learning. This
means that schools will need to negotiate with parents and caregivers about roles and respon­
sibilities for teaching and learning. It also means that schools may need to re-think their use of
time and resources. For parents who are working during normal school hours, formal teaching
and learning may have to occur in the evenings. For some students, most instruction may have
to occur on the weekends.

Re-thinking the unanticipated

As spring 2020 drew to a close, many schools scrambled to provide legitimate instruction. In
some states remote learning absolutely counted as “regular” school. In other states, remote
learning was a way to provide some supplemental activities for harried parents and caregivers,
but students were not to be held responsible for what was being delivered. However, there were
a number of unanticipated consequences to closing schools and shifting to remote teaching and
learning.
In a conversation with a high school principal in a large urban district, I learned that one
unanticipated consequence of remote teaching and learning was that many students used the time
away from face-to-face instruction to secure paid employment. We already know that many urban
high school students hold down afterschool jobs. Now, with remote learning, students can accept
more hours and earn more money that they can contribute toward their household.
Another example of the unanticipated was the large number of students whose families lacked wi-
fi or Internet access. So many people receive access to wi-fi from public access in places like libraries,
business establishments (e.g., restaurants, coffee shops, etc.), and community centers and agencies
(e.g., churches, recreations centers, etc.) and with those institutions closed due to COVID-19
mandates, many students and families were without access to online instruction. For these families,
their cell phones became the only means of remote communication and this was a poor substitute
for a laptop or even a tablet.
Perhaps not unanticipated but surely unplanned for, is the degree to which the pandemic and
remote learning would exacerbate social emotional and mental health needs. The isolation and lack
of interaction with peers and other caring adults caused many students and their families to
experience anxiety, depression, and trauma. For some students, school is a respite. It provides
predictability and routine. It provides food and it provides safety. Even more than the academic
concerns that many schools have about so much missed in-person time, the social emotional and
mental health needs of students are an over-riding concern for many students and families.
Some students experienced remote learning as an unplanned benefit. For students who struggle to
interact with others and make friends, as well as those who need additional time to process and
complete schoolwork, remote learning can be a boon. Not having other classmates see you struggle
can give some students the needed psychological safety to complete school tasks at their own pace.
Additionally, students diagnosed as ADHD can use the remote setting to take breaks on their own
time and work at their own pace.
It is important to acknowledge that students with diagnosed disabilities are not the only ones able
to benefit from learning situations where they can work at their own pace. For years the US
curriculum has been crowded with hours of reading, writing, mathematics, and other traditional
subject areas. Areas of study and exploration like the arts (both fine and industrial) and physical
education have been relegated to once a week or not at all. Remote learning has afforded many
76 G. LADSON-BILLINGS

students more unstructured physical activity and a chance to experiment in the arts. It also has
allowed students to learn household skills like cooking, gardening, and cleaning.
Another unanticipated outcome of the move to remote and online schooling was the need to re-
tool teachers for effective instruction in an online environment. For all of the discourse about
teaching with technology, most teachers were unprepared to deliver instruction solely via technol­
ogy. Without the ability to see students, facilitate student-to-student interactions, and help students
on the spot with problems they may encounter along the way, teachers were compelled to re-design
and re-orient instruction.

Re-Setting with culture

For many years, educators have given lip service to the notion of leveraging students’ culture to teach
them well. Unfortunately, few teachers actually understand what culture is and how it impacts
cognition and learning (Author, 2006). The global pandemic known as COVID-19 gives us an
opportunity to dig more deeply into our study and use of culture as a way to re-set education.
Given that the occurrence and mortality rate for COVID-19 falls disproportionately upon African
Americans and Latinx citizens, we can begin with a question as to why this is the case. Responses are
likely to include their over-representation in frontline, lower wage jobs, underlying health challenges,
and dense living conditions. Teachers can use each of these issues to build powerful units of study that
trace back to historical injustices as well as cultural resilience to overcome injustice.
For example, the question of income inequality links to which jobs people occupy and how
historically Black people have been left out of a job market that leads to upward mobility.
A generation ago Black people were relegated to low-wage, low skilled jobs. Students can examine
the work their parents, grandparents, and perhaps great grandparents did and determine the degree
of social mobility they have (or have not) been able to achieve.
Teachers can work with students to look at cultural values that exist among a variety of cultures.
In mainstream US culture values might emphasize liberty, individualism, efficiency, and winning. In
many African cultures the values might emphasize liberation, collectivism, effectiveness, and the
nobility of struggle. The role of the teacher is not to elevate one culture or denigrate the other but
rather to help students understand that different cultural stances help us to see the world differently.
Teachers also can ask students generic questions like, “How does your family celebrate a particular
holiday?” or “What are some special foods your family makes?” These questions can be used to help
students understand their everyday cultural practices.
I use the term “cultural practices” in the way Gutierrez and Rogoff (2003) do to explain that no
one person is the carrier of an entire culture and that culture shifts and changes over generations. In
her poignant family story, The Latehomecomer, Yang (2008) tells the story of a three-generation
Hmong family—grandmother, parents, and children—who participate in Hmong culture to varying
degrees. No one generation is the bearer of the full culture, but each participates in some cultural
practices—language, customs, beliefs, and so forth.
In an education hard re-set we have the opportunity to draw upon students’ cultural practices.
We also have the opportunity to expand our understandings of culture to include youth culture
(Emdin, 2017; Rawls & Robinson, 2019). Developing a knowledge of youth culture indicates
a teacher’s willingness to truly engage in the lives of students and take seriously what those students
bring to the teaching-learning experience. The work described by Hill (2009) and compiled by
Emdin and Adjapong (2018) are additional examples of how teachers are working to better under­
stand the complex and changing cultures that youth represent in the classroom.
Teachers who respect and invite students’ cultures into the classroom have opportunities to
expand the understanding and perspectives of everyone. Sims-Bishop (1990) cogently wrote in her
essay, “Mirrors, windows, and sliding glass doors” that it was important for students to engage with
literature that allows them to see themselves as well as literature that shows them a world beyond
their own. Additionally, students need access to sliding glass doors so they can actually step into
 EQUITY & EXCELLENCE IN EDUCATION 77

those other worlds. Teachers willing to do the hard re-set will themselves step through sliding glass
doors to better understand the perspectives that students bring with them and to support their
students’ cultural practices.
Learning to do a hard re-set is not a simple task. It challenges educators to engage and
interrogate their own worldviews and develop the facility to move from the center to the margins.
This de-centering is something that Black students have always done if they wanted to be
rewarded in dominant culture settings. The very idea that their ideas, ways of thinking, and
cultural practices might be seen as normative is an important shift that the entire society must
prepare to make.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor
Gloria Ladson-Billings is the former Kellner Family Distinguished Professor of Urban Education in the Department
of Curriculum and Instruction and faculty affiliate in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at the University
of Wisconsin, Madison. She was the 2005-2006 president of the American Educational Research Association (AERA).
Ladson-Billings’ research examines the pedagogical practices of teachers who are successful with African American
students. She also investigates Critical Race Theory applications to education. She is the author of the critically
acclaimed books The Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers of African American Children and Crossing Over to Canaan:
The Journey of New Teachers in Diverse Classrooms, and numerous journal articles and book chapters. She is the
former editor of the American Educational Research Journal and a member of several editorial boards. Her work has
won numerous scholarly awards including the H.I. Romnes Faculty Fellowship, the NAEd/Spencer Postdoctoral
Fellowship, and the Palmer O. Johnson outstanding research award. During the 2003-2004 academic year, she was
a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. In fall of 2004, she
received the George and Louise Spindler Award from the Council on Anthropology and Education for significant and
ongoing contributions to the field of educational anthropology. She holds honorary degrees from Umeå University
(Umeå Sweden), University of Massachusetts-Lowell, the University of Alicante (Alicante, Spain), the Erickson
Institute (Chicago), and Morgan State University (Baltimore). She is a 2018 recipient of the AERA Distinguished
Research Award, and she was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2018.

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