Presented by Adeyemi Stembridge, PhD, at the ESD101 Equity Summit, June 17, 2024
I’m going to be making three points today:
1. In terms of Equity, difference does not equal deficit.
2. To meet the needs of increasingly culturally and neurodiverse classrooms, the insights
drawn from psychographic data are a rich source of useful information to guide our
pedagogy, and…
3. Rigor is the workspace for responsiveness.
I’ll take some time to unpack and thread these statements together hopefully making a coherent argument seasoned with a little bit of information, encouragement, and caution for taking our Equity work forward.
Ok, so I’ve got this fantastic idea for a big budget, Hollywood, blockbuster script. Of course, it’s a movie about teachers because teachers are movie stars to me. It’s gonna have everything—action, drama, great dialogue, intrigue, and suspense. There are several versions of this epic story floating around in my mind. Are you ready for the premise?
This is Bailey, Bennett and Bartholomew, and they have a problem. This trio’s problem is that they have obviously been hanging out with humans too much and they don’t know how to migrate south for the winter, and so this is creating big issues because without the ability to migrate, Bailey, Bennett and Bartholomew are hungry, homeless, and lonely! They need a teacher, and the movie documents their search and subsequent journey.
What about Spencer. Spencer is a spider with a problem. Spencer can’t quite get his spider webs to look like the other spiders’ neat and geometrically-composed webs. Spencer is troubled by all the spider-shaming, and he’s got a bad case of web-envy. Spencer needs a web-making teacher.
What about Harper the honeybee? Harper has big problems and no friends because all the other honeybees communicate by doing the honeybee dance, and she’s clumsy and awkward and has no rhythm! Harper needs a dance teacher—or she won’t ever be able to kick it with any of the other bees in the colony.
Despite whatever doubts you might have, I’m confident these stories are destined to be huge, big-screen productions, but of course, they’re all fictional accounts not based on any actual bird or spider or honeybee’s life story because migrating, and web-making, and bee dancing don’t require instruction. Birds, spiders, and honeybees are born with these abilities. Nature is full of fascinating examples of innate abilities encoded in the DNA of various species:
We can learn a lot by looking at the classifications of birds, spiders, and honeybees. Every single time that you deal with any individual member of any one of these species, you can be assured that they possess the inherent abilities shared by their species. Humans, on the other hand, are a different situation… While there are many species of birds, spiders, and bees, there is but one species of humans. Birds and spiders and bees have been able to survive their environments with a particular evolutionary strategy called speciation. To thrive in their surroundings, birds, spiders, and bees adapt, anatomically, to increase their prospects for finding food, shelter, and mates. We humans don’t speciate to survive in the environment, we adapt how we human (v), and culture is the secret to our success. We humans use culture to serve many of the same goals of speciation.
Humans, have to learn how to human (v). Birds, spiders, and honeybees are all born with innate abilities that define the category. Humans aren’t born with any inherent abilities other than the ability to learn how to human (v). So how do humans learn how to human (v)? Yes, through direct experience, but the much more efficient way to learn how to human (v) is through social learning or the process of downloading the know-how and effective strategies for survival that have been accrued over countless generations of the humans who’ve already figured things out and developed habits and schema that solve for the pesky problems of human-ing.
The ways we human (v) show up in not just surface level features of food, fashion, and festivities, but deep down to how we think and feel, perceive even, the world around us. Culture is what gives energy to the whole process. Think of culture as a blueprint for how to human (v). There are many ways to define culture. I like two for our purposes here:
Culture is the norms, habits, and guidelines that govern human interactions in specific spaces; and,
Culture is the information that lives in human minds that affects behavior and decision-making.
So if the only truly special characteristic of humans is that humans can learn how to human (v)… that means that humans have an advantage over other species because humans don’t have to anatomically adapt in order to survive in an environment, they only need to adapt how they human (v).
I’m fascinated by you humans. You’re easily the weirdest species on the planet. I’m also fascinated by this concept we call Equity. In fact, Equity is why we’re here. Equity in Education is a dope concept, and we should be able to define it.
Equity in Education is the policy and practice directive to provide quality and effective learning opportunities so that background and identity are neither correlative nor predictive of student performance and/or achievement outcomes. I discuss more of the origin story of Equity in Chapter Two of my book Brilliant Teaching: Using Culture and Artful Thinking to Close Opportunity Gaps, and I want to give particular attention to the third meatball here: In terms of Equity, difference does not equal deficit.
This isn’t my definition of Equity in Education. This is the definition of Equity in Education. Equity in Education is based in the historical origin story of American public schools and follows the epistemic and legal direction of state and federal Supreme Court cases ruling on various issues of access and civil protections afforded under the United States Constitution. The concept of Equity in Education wasn’t authored by any single person, and its development isn’t necessarily linear, but it is coherent—and it stands up to rigorous interrogation. This is an idea with references in scholarship and policy going back at least 50 years. What I’m trying to say is that Equity is NOT a new idea.
We’ve already established that humans aren’t special because of some individual characteristic that makes our species superior to any other. In fact, by comparison, we’re a remarkably fragile species, profoundly under-equipped to stand up to the dangers of the environment. We humans don’t have the water-sensing abilities of camels, we aren’t born with an internal GPS system that allows us to return to the same beaches to lay our eggs like turtles, and we don’t even have the instincts to use echolocation to navigate our surroundings like bats or dolphins. Think about it: left to your own devices, you would definitely die of thirst or hunger or from the many concussions you incur from stumbling around in the dark. My point is, if we’re being objective about it, as a species, we really aren’t all that impressive.
The defining characteristic of humans is our capacity for thinking. Humans aren’t physically stronger or born with genetically encoded characteristics that allow us to navigate our natural environment. Humans are unique because we think, and we use our thinking abilities to learn. We can say that the capacity for thinking and learning is a function of intelligence, and any individual human’s intelligence is developed within what cognitive scientists call a cognitive niche. The cognitive niche is the environment in which a human learns to think—or is it the environment in which we think to learn? In other words, the cognitive niche is the environment where humans learn how to human (v).
Every time you think, you are seeking some “this-is-like” connection to something you’ve previously learned. What we learn is organized according to not only the information we’ve previously acquired but also the social situations, problem-solving mechanisms, learned motivations, and communication devices that organize our personal cognitive schema. To make sense of something is to frame it in the context of something we think is familiar, to find some analogical equivalent in one’s own cognitive niche—and since humans are so profoundly dependent on culture for learning, it’s reasonable to say that thinking is heavily influenced by culture too.
Since humans learn to human (v) in a particular cognitive niche and the purpose of intelligence is to enhance an individual’s survival and wellbeing, the expressions of intelligence vary according to the environment. Cultural differences in the expressions of intelligence do not imply that some people-groups are more or less intelligent than others; rather, intelligence is a relative feature of the human experience. What I mean by that is because of these cultural differences, every person in this room is profoundly unlearned, ignorant, and lacking in understandings and abilities that are widely known by people young and old in some social space where you lack cultural fluency.
Rigor, which I’m gonna talk about more in a minute, focuses on how students use their intelligence—intelligence, which is evenly distributed across the human species. Intelligence is intelligence. There aren’t multiple types of intelligence; that’s a flawed model for conceptualizing human intelligence. Instead, it’s more accurate to say there are differences in the expressions of intelligence.
This leads me to my second point which is to meet the needs of increasingly culturally and neurodiverse classrooms, the insights drawn from psychographic data are a rich source of useful information to guide our pedagogy… In order to define psychographics, I’m gonna benchmark another concept with which most of us are already familiar, demographics. We can refer to demographics as a conceptual cousin to psychographics.
Demography is the scientific study of people groups or human populations, focusing on their size, structure, and distribution. Demographics refer to statistical data that describe the characteristics of a population, typically categorized by factors such as age, gender, income, education, race, ethnicity, marital status, geographic location, household make-up, that sorta thing. Demographics help researchers gain a summative, group-level understanding of the people who make up a particular region, country, or community.
Most demographic data is collected through censuses, surveys, and administrative records. We use demographic data…
to sort;
to label;
to categorize.
Psychographics are in the same family of analytic devices as demographics, but where demographics concern people-group matters, the study of psychographics delves into the understanding of human psychological qualities—values, interests, attitudes, ways of living, and behaviors—or put another way, psychographics emphasize the individual person. Unlike demographics, which focus on descriptive characteristics at 30,000 feet, psychographics aim to uncover ground-level insights into why people make certain daily choices, and how any one person perceives the world around them. At the heart of psychographics is the recognition that individuals within the same demographic group can have vastly different preferences, motivations, and lifestyles.
Psychographic data might align with some demographic trends, but it also might not. Demographic data is most useful for analysis at the level of people groups. Psychographic data, on the other hand, is particularly useful when one has access to person-level information because at the person-level, it’s possible to fine-tune the observations to many orders of magnitude lower than population-level statistics.
These are just some of the psychographic data collection questions we can ask in classrooms, and then we can use what we find to set engagement traps for our students!
We use psychographics to provide on-ramps and entry points for rigorous thinking and integrated understandings—the kind that yield ownership and connection and enhance the quality of one’s thought life… meaningful understandings that bring together the head and heart.
Classroom instruction with a focus on psychographics is less likely to stereotype or misidentify the assets of students that don’t fit neatly into pre-determined demographic categories.
[Presenter’s Note: PAUSE so that last sentence can sink in a little…]
I try to listen to the arguments of people who are critical of Equity in Education, and I’ve found two frequently recurring tactics taken. They either straw-man the definition of Equity ridiculously simplifying it into something utterly indefensible. And, they also try to argue that Equity in Education isn’t compatible with rigor—but I think that’s just because they don’t have a sufficiently viable definition for rigor… and this brings me to my third point: Rigor is the workspace for responsiveness.
Rigor doesn’t mean how difficult, how much, how often, or make reference to any particular text. Rigor focuses on how students use their intelligence. Rigor is cognitive effort channeled in specific directions. Rigor is the application of intelligence. I like to say that cognitive engagement is the flip side of the rigor coin. Cognitive engagement demonstrates how we function as thinkers…. Cognitive engagement reveals rigor in action, the socially-situated, task-related, experientially-dependent expressions of intelligence that are developed in the cultural context of a cognitive niche.
As many of you know, I’m a huge fan of Karin Hess and Norman Webb. Hess gives us the cognitive rigor matrixes which I encourage teachers to use to track their targets for rigor, and her work builds on the work of Norman Webb who gives us the Depth of Knowledge levels.
By the way, we’re all familiar with this graphic: Well, TRASH IT! This graphic does more harm to the idea of rigor than good. It tragically oversimplifies Webb’s definitions of the DOK levels.
This is a much better chart.
Teachers, spend some time reviewing the descriptions of DOK-4 thinking. Play with prompts and projects to inspire students’ behavioral, affective, and cognitive engagement. When designing, ask yourself: Is this a prompt that might emerge from the student’s own inquiry? Is this a question students might ask themselves?
We should think of rigor as a verb. Rigor is best defined as an action, by what it requires in cognitive engagement. DOK-4 thinking, high-rigor thinking is complex reasoning—the opportunity to think about things in relation to other things, the opportunity to think about things in relation to the whole. DOK-4 thinking, high-rigor thinking is the application of knowledge toward problem-solving and project-building impulses... with justification and based in evidence. DOK-4 thinking, high-rigor thinking is personal. DOK-4 thinking, high-rigor thinking is personal because it requires us humans to demonstrate our competence, to channel our understandings through some familiar medium of human experience. DOK-4 thinking, high-rigor thinking is not just completing assignments but learning how to learn. DOK-4 thinking, high-rigor thinking is where students can make meaning of what they’re learning through their own cultural lens, leveraging their own cultural fluencies, making use of the tools bequeathed to them through their cultural inheritance. When students’ identities are drawn into the classroom in this way, we are facilitators rather than conductors. We can give better feedback while we learn more about who our students are as thinkers and also who they are as social beings.
But my larger point is about culturally responsive education in the classroom: rigor is the workspace for responsiveness. Responsiveness, according to Social Psychologist, Harry Reis, is made up of three parts—understanding, validation, and care. It’s unlikely that students will feel understood, validated, and genuine care when we’re asking them to comply with low-rigor tasks that don’t actually allow for them to apply their intelligence. It’s the DOK-4 thinking, the high-rigor thinking that creates the workspace for those meaning-making, identity-shifting, trust-building experiences. The kind of learning experiences where we gain understandings that integrate the head and heart. The thinking that leads to life-changing understandings.
You can see where I’m going with this. In classrooms, we can both open pathways for responsive learning experiences and learn most about the psychographics of our students through high-rigor learning experiences. The classroom is the ideal research environment to collect and act on the psychographic data we need.
And so, in CONCLUSION, the three points I wanted to make were:
1. In terms of Equity, difference does not equal deficit.
2. To meet the needs of increasingly culturally and neurodiverse classrooms,
the insights drawn from psychographic data are a rich source of useful
information to guide our pedagogy…, and
3. Rigor is the workspace for responsiveness.
My argument is that any invitations to DOK-4 thinking must provide meaningful opportunities for students to make their thinking personal. When students are cognitively engaged in rigorous thinking, they are drawing on their backgrounds, schema, and identities in order to understand. The cognitive effort gains momentum when students are able to make this-is-like connections while drawing from their cultural fluencies in demonstrating their competence. This is the workspace for culturally responsive teaching, the kind that students perceive as understanding, validating, and genuinely caring for their wellbeing.
Teachers know that all of our students are one-of-one. Our students aren’t weird birds, bungling spiders, or rhythmless honeybees. Our students are loaded with funds of knowledge inherited in the cultural spaces, the cognitive niches where they learn how to human (v). There is the influence of demography, for sure. But the answers we’re looking for require us to build further on our psychographic sensibilities.
Humans aren’t like birds, spiders, or honeybees—and schools can only be equitable spaces for students by building our policies and practices around the finely-tuned recognition of their uniquely defined and expressed humanity. Only that… is Culturally Responsive Education.
Thank you for listening.