Waking Up White by Debby Irving

Author:Debby Irving
Language: eng
Format: mobi
ISBN: 9780991331314
Publisher: Elephant Room Press
Published: 2014-01-15T23:00:00+00:00

Q

Think about five rules from the “rule book” of social interaction that you grew up with. For each rule, can you imagine how it interferes with honest cross-cultural dialogue, given what you’ve learned in this book or from other sources?

24 EVERYONE IS DIFFERENT; EVERYONE BELONGS

The power of inclusion.

IN 1999, when the time came for my oldest daughter to go to kindergarten, we entered the Cambridge Public Schools’ Controlled Choice lottery. About twenty years earlier, the Controlled Choice program had emerged as a method to desegregate schools by untethering one’s residential location from one’s school assignment. The goal was for each classroom population to reflect the city’s racial diversity. Though this meant we had no guarantee our daughter would end up at our neighborhood school, I liked knowing an intentional diversification strategy existed. It ensured the kind of racial mix I’d come to Cambridge to be a part of.

Fortunately for us, our kids did get into our neighborhood school, the Haggerty School. On the first day of kindergarten, I felt my prayers had finally been answered: the room was full of joyful children, with a variety of skin colors, playing side by side. At last, I thought, my children will grow up in a racially diverse world and be imbued with the kind of cross-cultural interaction and competence I long for.

The school’s motto, “Everyone Is Different; Everyone Belongs,” owes its origins to its longtime principal Joe Petner, an entrepreneurial white educator who placed at the core of his educational philosophy the inclusion of children with special needs in regular classrooms. Dr. Petner had masterfully cobbled together grant money, volunteers, and interns to build classrooms with two or three assistants able to support lead teachers as they strove to meet the widely differing needs of every child in their room. Dr. Petner believed that including and supporting students labeled by the educational system as cognitively impaired, emotionally disturbed, or physically disabled would empower all the children by offering a range of teaching and support strategies. “No one is really a ‘typical’ learner,” Dr. Petner would say. “We all have unique learning styles.” People’s academic, physical, and social abilities are variable, he stressed, as opposed to “normal” or “abnormal,” better or worse. This fundamental understanding, he argued, would make for more cohesive and productive communities both in the classroom and beyond it.

The power of this inclusive approach became especially potent for me in my oldest daughter’s third grade year. One of her classmates since kindergarten, Richard, had substantial physical and learning challenges. Though his speech was particularly difficult for me to understand, my daughter and her classmates not only understood him but found it surprising that many of us parents didn’t. Richard’s language had become part of their “normal,” his gentle kindness fully a part of their classroom culture. My daughter’s friendship with Richard made me ashamed of the way my friends and I had treated the one deaf boy with whom I’d gone to grade school. The potential realized by simply encouraging

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