In Defense of the Kid Who “Doesn’t Do Their Part” in Group Work
There’s this kid James* in my fifth period class. Keeps his backpack on the whole time, doesn’t say a lot, sits by the door but never with his back to it, sometimes wears gold teeth.
Last month, I presented the kids with a definition of literacy — meaning-making using a shared symbol system — and we worked through each part of that. Meaning-making is reading and writing — and speaking, listening, cooking, dancing, driving, etc. Symbol systems? Marks on the page (written language) and noises we make (spoken language), gestures, art, style. We explored the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives, and they wrote their own narratives of literacy in their lives.
This kid wanted to write about his love of guns and how he learned about them with his dad, that he and his dad had visited his grandfather in Arkansas, and that shooting together on his grandfather’s land had lowkey been the best experience of his life. That’s what he told me when I saw his blank document and asked him if he was thinking or stuck. He said, “I know what I want to write about, but I don’t want you to think that I’m some, like,” he got quieter, “dangerous person.”
I asked him if that had happened to him before, and he said, “Yeah, at my old school I had some issues with teachers. That’s why I came here. I wanted to have a fresh start.” I assured him that I definitely wanted to read the story he’d just told me and that it sounded kinda beautiful to me.
He did make a start on the story, but abandoned it before it could get to a point where he was proud enough of it to finish it. (So far.)
This month, we’re reading about love, heartbreak, and related emotional experiences in Brene Brown’s Atlas of the Heart, and the kids are working on teams to collaboratively write love stories. Each team started by making a plan (conflict, setting, characters, and plot), which they then divided up by the number of team members; each kid drafts a (600-word, exactly) section of the story. Soon, they’ll bring their drafts together and do the messy but productive work of collaborative revision.
James’ team had a problem, though. James, Alex, and Ahmad sat back resignedly on their phones while their teammates — Tatiana, Bea, and Mara work feverishly on the story.
I sat down with them to find out what was happening. “Can someone give me a brief summary of what your story is about?”
Tatiana: “It’s about these two teenagers from, like, rival summer camps who — ”
I asked Tatiana to pause so we could find out, “Okay, who here has been to summer camp?”
Tatiana, Bea, and Mara raise their hands. Tatiana is Vietnamese and White. Bea and Mara are White. James is African American; Alex is Latino; and Ahmad is Yemeni. (All of this according to the school’s online data management system.)
James, Alex, and Ahmad looked around at each other and seemed to find some relief in not being the only one who hadn’t been to summer camp. James laughed, “Yeah, I have no idea what that is,” which cracked up the tension on the team. For a while, the boys and I asked questions and tried to find ways into the story. The girls attempted valiantly to explain, looking up YouTube videos of summer camps to help paint the picture.
“Any of this sounding like anything you can work with?”
James, Alex, and Ahmad shook their heads and agreed that it was worth it to them to start all over together. They couldn’t see how to write themselves into this summer camp world that sounded like nothing they knew. Tatiana, Bea, and Mara graciously agreed to split the story into three rather than six, and got back to it. James, Alex, and Ahmad, and I circled up, and I typed up the notes as they came up with a new plan.
James was ready to go: “Okay let’s do something we all know, like sports. Do y’all like basketball?”
Alex shrugged his shoulders; Ahmad: “No.”
“What about football?”
Alex was in, but Ahmad said that though he did like football, he had never been to a game.
“What about soccer? Do y’all like soccer? I’ve been to a soccer game, so I could do that, too.”
They’re writing a story about a guy who’s been asking his girlfriend to come to his soccer games for a while, and when she finally comes to a game, they lose. He comes back to the locker room to find a text from her on his phone: She’s breaking up with him. It goes on from there.
His grin made it clear right away that James was lifting this story from the pages of his own life, so we laughed with him and prodded him for more details. Okay, he admitted, so there had been an argument on the phone before the game. She was mad because… … because he didn’t take out the trash!
Try harder, I insisted, to represent the girlfriend as something other than flatly villainous. Ahmad stood up for James’ idea, and we went back and forth about it while Alex listened intently. A girl from another class happened to drop by, hear our discussion, and jump in to back me up: You can’t make that girlfriend look crazy. That’s not right.
Alex finally spoke up, slightly changing the subject — and with a plot twist! “Maybe she was only at the game because her ex was on the other team?”
James and Ahmad sat back in their chairs a bit. Me too. Positively smug, we were. They had come up with a story they are excited to write. Even more, they had shaken the awkward pose of not-sure-what-to-do-with-myself phone-scrolling while their teammates wrote a story that didn’t include them. (“I’ve got the beginning part!” Alex told me, and I swear I heard the exclamation point in his voice.)
Observing and getting to know James has many times made me think of the savvy persistence of Ta’Von in Anne Haas Dyson’s Writing the Schoolhouse Blues: Literacy, Equity, and Belonging in a Child’s Early Schooling. In Dyson’s telling, Ta’Von goes from being a respected, contributing member of his racially, ethnically, and linguistically diverse preschool community to one of very few Black kids in a predominantly White kindergarten class, where his White classmates perceived him as “needing help” (when he didn’t). She explains:
For most schools, as with Ta’Von’s, the underlying ideology fits the ideology descriptor “neoliberal” (Harvey, 2007). Schooling is a consumer good available on the marketplace, its value determined by standardized test scores (Au, 2016). In schools’ daily practices, individual learning is constituted by mastering the ladder of academic skills, laid out on a benchmarked timetable.
The goal of the curriculum, then, is for children to proceed in a timely way up that skills ladder and thereby be prepared for college or career. Although racial inequality may figure into the discourse of neoliberalism, continued racial inequality is the outcome (Au, 2016). Any education system that is built on narrowly defined skills and one academic ladder of success could not possibly accommodate the rich diversity of our children (Genishi & Dyson, 2009). (132)
And here’s the part that James made me think about:
Ta’Von’s case illustrates how inequality in schooling can be constructed within childhoods themselves, as those childhoods unfold within the policies and practices of schools. Socioculturally, learning in and out of school happens within social relations. A child’s opportunities to be seen as competent by their peers, and as such, to participate fully in opportunities to stretch their competence in new ways, are all entangled with belonging — with having a respected, reciprocal relation with others as part of the classroom community, the “we.” Small children should not be left to negotiate belonging on their own. And yet, on his own, Ta’Von pushed against the dominant children’s sense of normality. (126)
Indeed, James is pushing back against the dominant sense of normality, too, in at least three important ways:
- Against the narrative of willfully disengaged Black and Brown boys
- Against the normalization of Black and Brown boys’ low placement on the “skills ladder”
- Against the neoliberal ideology of schooling, of which the skills ladder is a key technology
Early in my career, I learned (by messing up, bad) to lead with questions when I’m roving the classroom and spot a kid who seems disengaged. I asked James why he hadn’t gotten started on his literacy narrative, and his explanation revealed a sophisticated read of the context and the risk he took in disclosing something about his authentic self to a potentially racist White teacher. I asked him, Alex, and Ahmad why they weren’t working on their team’s story, and it came out that they had been, unintentionally I am sure, excluded. Neither the blank screen nor the phone-scrolling were indicators of their irrationally rejecting education, as the rhetoric about kids like them often goes. Nonetheless, the kids co-authoring the summer camp story, like the kids who assumed Ta’Von needed help, demonstrated Dyson’s observation that:
Children may learn not only content, but also which children are most valued, privileged, as classroom members (Rosa & Flores, 2017; Tatum, 2017). Thus, inequity may be constructed among the children themselves… Children relatively high on the ladder may not see a value to interacting in academic, reciprocal ways with those deemed lower. As a consequence, children, disproportionately children of color and from low-income households, may be excluded from participation in both formal and informal opportunities to display and stretch their understanding… This exclusion from academic respect is not the doings of individual children or teachers but of the institution itself in these neoliberal times (Rosa & Flores, 2017). (96)
After we formalized the team’s separation into two stories, James deliberately worked to include Alex and Ahmad, and ultimately inspired more buy-in from both of them than I had. Indeed, all three boys collaborated intently on the details of their plan, and each has written more for this project than any other this year. This experience did not confirm their suspicions (nor their teammates’) that they couldn’t do this assignment.
My pedagogy of late owes a lot to the work of adrienne maree brown, whose Emergent Strategy is essential reading for any teacher who wants help thinking deeply about the truth that as a species, we humans are designed to learn all the time, with our whole bodies. Right at the beginning of the shelter-in-place times in March 2020, someone on the Internet posted a pretty image of a couple lines from this prescient (and timeless) piece brown published in March 2018. I can’t find the one I saw now, so I recreated it the way I remember it (with apologies to the original content creator!).
I wrote it down, doodled with it a bit, taped it up on the wall by my desk, and got to work becoming a scholar of belonging.
Fast-forward to this school year: I started my classes with several weeks’ focus on belonging. I showed them Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, a concept from educational psychology for understanding human motivation that explains why hungry, tired, anxious, disconnected kids often struggle academically. Then, we read and talked about the indigenous wisdom traditions that Maslow was actually approximating/inspired by — during his six-week stay with the Blackfoot people in Siksika (Alberta, Canada). One stunning takeaway for me is the Blackfoot perspective of what Maslow called “self-actualization,” which I like to think of as the state of having arrived (i.e. Dealt and dealing with one’s demons, living one’s best life, and etc.) Maslow’s theory is that people who don’t have their lower-level needs met aren’t in the position to self-actualize. From the Blackfoot perspective, though, we are born our whole true selves. The work of the community is to prevent children’s whole true selves from being destroyed.
We also watched The Breakfast Club and talked about how the need for belonging showed up in each of the characters. They wrote about what we could learn from the Breakfast Club about developing bonds among a bunch of strangers stuck somewhere they don’t want to be. (Ahem… not that they would know anything about that.) We played hecka games, established our daily tradition of starting with a student-led check-in circle; we formed teams and developed a silly game where they get (and give each other) arbitrary numbers of points for acting according to their teams’ stated values ( — they settled on their shared top five from this list).
Thus, as the progress report grades come due, I’m struck by the irony of the differences between what I’m supposed to do and what I’m going to do. Generally speaking, though the Common Core Standards do seem to be going out of fashion, 10th grade English teachers like me in US public schools like mine are expected to make sure kids can close-read and analyze complex text and can write well-developed, evidence-based arguments. All good stuff. (The Common Core also nod to “Speaking and Listening Skills,” with an emphasis on giving presentations — a skillset that would cost a lot of money to assess because it’s harder for a robot to grade a presentation than a pencil and paper multiple choice test. 🙄) In years past, I would have worked really hard to teach these particular academic literacy practices — probably would have had kids writing a Toulmin-method essay about a book some of them had read — and now I’d be wrestling with the ethics of accurate, equitable grading decisions.
So by asking kids to collaboratively write love stories (lol), I’m already way off the mark in the eyes of the rigor police. But I promised the kids I’d try to move according to my stated values, pinned to the wall above my desk:
LOVE
EXCELLENCE
PLEASURE
INTEGRITY
FREEDOM
I am not a robot. I am a human with expertise in language and literacy learning that tells me that belonging is a far more basic “standard” we should be working toward than any of the nonsense that comes out of the most recent neoliberal reform efforts to commodify children’s time and efforts. Rather, given the inherently sociocultural nature of language and literacy, strengthening the relationships between folks, nurturing a sense of inclusion, is fundamental to practicing reading, writing, and everything else we do with language.
Kids like Ta’Von and James do find ways to cultivate inclusion against the grain of hierarchical school culture. Teachers can and should work in solidarity with them, facilitating students’ connectedness — and then stepping back as appropriate to help kids learn to build community, navigate conflict, and be wholesome participants in the project of democracy. Though I do see it as important to help older kids like James and his teammates learn to manage their own relationships, I felt indicted by Dr. Dyson’s insight that “a small child should not have to work as hard as Ta’Von did to negotiate a sense of belonging” (125). She goes on:
When children are traveling down very different pathways to the school house door, the negotiation of belonging will always involve power and inequality (Massey 2005). This negotiation of relations — and thus, the construction of a social place called school — will be embedded within the systemic racism all wound up with our evolving history as a nation. As Tavon’s [and James’ stories have] illustrated, as children proceed through school, the negotiation of relationships and of belonging may reproduce societal hierarchies within the taken-for-granted policies and practices of schools (Crenshaw, 2001; Kendi, 2019).
Dr. Dyson says that the negotiation of relationships and of belonging may reproduce racist hierarchies; at my school, they absolutely without a doubt do reproduce them. In my classroom, too, all the time. It’s endemic.
Dear readers, those of you who are not high school English teachers might be alarmed to know how many kids are getting little to no practice with writing, how many kids never turn much of anything in. Having led a fairly type-A academic life myself, I know it alarmed me when I first started teaching. Many, many students simply avoid writing many, many of the papers assigned to them. They take the 0s and try to make up the points elsewhere. That’s how they get to 10th grade convinced that they can’t write — because many of them do currently suck at it. Everyone who’s relatively new at something complex sucks at it for a while. Of course, practicing anything is fundamental to developing facility and confidence, to achieving excellence. Kids who are avoiding writing need a reason to do it. They don’t know why they don’t want to do anything. If they knew how to get motivated — truly, authentically motivated — they would. It’s disastrous when their teachers and classmates find it normal for them to flounder.
Ah, but Ta’Von and James (and hecka more kids, even the very ones who aren’t carrying their weight in the group project) show us reason for hope (which is, Mariame Kaba reminds us, a discipline): “Belonging — having reciprocal relations with others — itself shapes opportunities to be ‘smart’” (Dyson again, 13).
So what will I do for grades? Well, the summer camp love story is coming along truly beautifully — partly a reflection of the kids’ openness to the fun of telling a cheesy, dreamy love story together, partly a reflection of their successes in climbing the skills ladder. There is such a thing as excellence, and the summer camp story is getting there! The soccer star’s heartbreak story is… certainly a more modest attempt. That said, when I consider how much time we spent studying — and explicitly practicing — belonging — which kid best met/exceeded my “learning target”? James. He demonstrated that in the face of exclusion he can create community.
We did self-report cards. Here’s what I asked:
Yes, I ask them what grade they deserve. Yes, I reserve my right to consult with them on that decision, but usually go with what they say. No, I don’t care about “grade inflation,” nor do I believe, existentially, in “accurately” placing them on the inappropriately narrow achievement ladder that needn’t and shouldn’t be the central tool we use in schools for organizing how kids’ spend their time with us. I don’t care to keep someone else’s gate. I do care to convince kids not to give up on themselves or one another.
Why does it matter for kids to get connected and committed to their own voices and to one another’s? Why does it matter for kids to have facility and confidence building relationships and nurturing community? Exhibit A: The world.
Without belonging, excellence is more like the narrow, arguably White supremacist “rigor” that neoliberal ed reformers often yap about. US schools have always been good at getting an exclusive set of kids access to rigor and its rewards; our “top” students compete with the world’s, and the most significant predictor of a student’s academic success is their parents’ income level. So hear me out: Can we please see what happens when those top students’ (with whom I do empathize!) eternal nemeses, the kids who don’t contribute to the group project, really feel welcome to share their stories?
* This and all kids’ names hereafter are pseudonyms.
