White Teacher Fails: Part 2- Curriculum

As a first year teacher in the South Bronx, I had no guidance for my curriculum other than ten year old textbooks. So I designed an environmental science curriculum based upon my own white middle class upbringing. It was heavily centered upon ecology: symbiosis, niches, nutrient cycles, etc. Other than one field trip to a botanical garden, we did none of the field studies I’d thought were important to do. So I limited a lot of my teaching to lectures.

Students had little context for understanding what I was talking about. This became apparent to me a year later when I was leading a camping trip for students from the Bronx and saw that they were terrified that the deer would eat them.

Because I limited the curriculum to my own experience, I missed the opportunity to make learning meaningful to my students. The South Bronx and particularly Mott Haven where my school was located, suffered from environmental racism: that is, it was burdened with tons of environmental hazards while it enjoyed few benefits such as parks (hence, why ecological concepts were so abstract). The school was surrounded by polluters: waste transfer stations, sludge plants, industrial areas, landfills, highways and the largest food distribution plant in the country. The distribution plant was particularly infuriating as it brought in 40,000 polluting trucks weekly, but locals had no way to buy any of the food that went right past their neighborhood: the South Bronx was a food desert lacking grocery stores. The air quality was so poor that my students suffered rates of asthma more than three times higher than the national average.

I wish I had centered my curriculum on my students rather than myself. We could have tested for the tropospheric ozone that exacerbated their asthma. We could have explored the history of racist redlining in the neighborhood. We could have visited the Sustainable South Bronx, an amazing non-profit just down the street where local activist Majora Carter fought for green spaces, against new polluters and started a “green collar jobs” program that trained locals in skills such as solar panel installation and green roof construction.

I feel badly about letting my South Bronx Students down.

For the past four years I have taught science for a public high school in Seattle. I incorporate environmental justice and local issues into my curriculum. But I continue to make mistakes.

Last summer, before the pandemic, I was working with colleagues across the district to design a chemistry curriculum that would be accessible and interesting especially since all students were suddenly required to take three years of high school science whereas previously they only needed two years in order to graduate. A black colleague suggested using the phenomenon of spicy food to frame a unit about molarity. This was a great idea and led to engaging discussions and involvement of more students. But when she also suggested extending the topic to include a discussion of pepper spray and tear gas in relation to Black Lives Matter protests, that seemed to me like taking it too far.

Now, I wish I had listened and taken her word for it. It would have been relatable to students and possibly could have helped them prevent eye damage in our city where some police have turned medieval on protesters. But I couldn’t predict the lessons utility because I was centering curriculum on my own white experience rather than the needs of my students. In the future, if I am trying to design curriculum for students of color, I should take advice from my colleagues of color.