Renowned pedagogical theorist, educator, & 2003-04 CASBS fellow Gloria Ladson-Billings chats with 2020-21 CASBS fellow Nuraan Davids about the history, progress, and challenges of creating more equitable institutions of education.
Nuraan Davids:: Hi, Gloria.
Gloria Ladson-Billings:: Hi, Nuran, how are you?
Nuraan Davids:: I'm well, thanks. How are you?
Gloria Ladson-Billings:: Good, good.
Nuraan Davids:: It's really such an honor for me to meet you. I've been engaging with your works for the longest time, so this is really such a privilege, and thank you so much for agreeing. When I saw your name, I thought, ah, I hope she says yes. So I'm really thrilled, I'm really thrilled that you have, and, um, yeah, so this is really good for me. Um, so as you might know, I'm in Cape Town, South Africa.
Gloria Ladson-Billings:: One of my favorite cities. Oh my gosh.
Nuraan Davids:: Oh really? Oh gosh, okay, so well, let's hope you can visit some come and visit soon again.
Gloria Ladson-Billings:: Yes, I think I— my last visit was 2018 for the World Education Research Association.
Nuraan Davids:: Yeah, okay, so it wasn't too long ago.
Gloria Ladson-Billings:: Not too long ago.
Nuraan Davids:: All the lockdown happened. Yeah, yeah. Well, you should come again.
Gloria Ladson-Billings:: I know.
Nuraan Davids:: Yeah, so as you know, um, I've got a few questions, um, it probably is going to take us through your CASBS kind of time and journey. And then I want to focus a lot more on just your work because I think that for me is the important bit. But I wanted to ask you, now that we're 7 years later and if you think back to that time, what are the things that kind of stand out for you at this point? Why would you tell any sort of— why would you tell scholars to possibly pursue a fellowship at CASBS?
Gloria Ladson-Billings:: So I think one of the wonderful things about the CASBS fellowship is that It provided enough structure for you to continue to work. I think sometimes if we get, you know, somebody just sends you the money, but you're at home, you keep doing stuff you've been doing. And I will never forget that our first, I believe it was the Sunday before the official start, the then-director Doug McAdams said to us, Number one, this is the place that you thought the academy was going to be like before you actually started working. And secondly, he said, if you're going to do exactly what you were doing at your home institution, you may as well go home. So there was this whole sense of, you know, this is an academic holiday from the standpoint of, you know, let's not worry about committee meetings, let's not worry about, you know, teaching and, and, and preparing lectures. Let's think, let's interact with people who you normally wouldn't interact with. And I, I took full advantage of that.
Nuraan Davids:: It's so interesting because We often talk about this person called an academic citizen, and what you've just said to me just actually alerted me to that in terms of what do we understand by that, because we certainly have ideas about what academic work entails, but of course, once we're in an academic environment, it so seldom is that. Do you find that's also the case with you? I mean, you've had a really good long tenure. Do you Is that fine?
Gloria Ladson-Billings:: Yes. I mean, I think there were lots of things. I mean, there were service commitments that were very tangential to my work. I think of things like finally being talked into becoming department chair. I really didn't want to do it. At my place, it's not a specific honor. We don't hire a chair. We vote a chair from the— existing faculty, and every time I was asked to be it, I had another excuse. Oh no, I can't do that, I'm editing this journal. Oh no, because I really didn't want to do it, um, because I didn't want to be bothered with all of the sort of personnel issues that come with that. I served 7 years as a member of our athletic department. I don't write on athletics, I don't I don't research athletics. And that's probably, you know, in a US institution, athletics is a very big deal. It's earning the university a lot of money. And for 17 and 18-year-olds, athletics is often the face of the university. I mean, sometimes the first time someone hears of a university, it's because they've turned on the television on Saturday And they see a football team or they see cheerleaders and they're like, "Oh, maybe I wanna go." So it's a big deal in the scheme of things, but it was not remotely related to the kind of work that I do.
Nuraan Davids:: And the other thing, of course, for me, certainly, although I wasn't able to get to CASBS physically because of COVID was this virtualness of collegiality. And I think there's so much being written on the erosion, or what's called academic disengagement, of academics just not being able to find a collegial kind of flow. Did you find that within CASBS? Was it very different to your work environment?
Gloria Ladson-Billings:: So I had a kind of hidden advantage. I was going back to a community that I had lived in for a very long time. I was a graduate student at Stanford. I had done my research in the Bay Area. I had friends, uh, and even family in the area. So it was really, uh, perfect for me. To be able to go down on the campus and check in with colleagues that I knew, you know, people who had fostered my career. I actually started attending the same church that I used to. I mean, I literally, I didn't even have to make dinner because I had enough friends and family that almost every night I was like, you want to go out for dinner? Or someone would call and say, come on, come have dinner with us. So I mean, had CASBS, had it been UCLA, maybe been a different environment for me, because I don't know Southern California as well, but it was perfect. I mean, something as simple as going to the Stanford Shopping Center and finding out that my sales associate still works there, you know, it was there. I just, it was perfect for me.
Nuraan Davids:: Sounds like a bit of coming home for you.
Gloria Ladson-Billings:: Yes, definitely.
Nuraan Davids:: Yeah.
Gloria Ladson-Billings:: But I was really like the social director of my cohort. I was always coming up with fun stuff to do. And I took probably half of the class to a baseball game because, see, that— back then, it was— I think it was Pac Bell Park. They change it every week. But it was when Barry Bonds was still there, and the guy would be out there in the bay with the net catching the home runs. And so one day I said, look, we're going to the baseball game. We're going on this day. Let's meet at the California Station. And we all went to the baseball game. We had a great time. But also planned the Super Bowl party. I mean, it's like, you got to do these, quote, American things while you're here. We had an Arnold Fest. Because you have to remember that was when the recall came. And it was right before Thanksgiving. We showed Pumping Iron that night so that people could see Arnold Schwarzenegger. And another scholar, philosopher, also from Germany, from Heidelberg, she was so upset after seeing this film. And she says, glory, you know, we have to let the people know I said, listen, not only do they know, they know in your country. I said, trust me, they all know about this dude. And then it turns out that he won, you know. But yeah, we had, we had a lot of fun. We had a lot of fun.
Mike Gaetani:: I had the great pleasure of meeting James Banks. His daughter Patricia was a fellow here a couple of years ago.
Gloria Ladson-Billings:: Yes.
Mike Gaetani:: He came to visit her. He's such a gentleman scholar. And also this year, Terry McCarty is a fellow here.
Gloria Ladson-Billings:: Yeah, Terry sent me a note to tell me. I think she's in my suite.
Mike Gaetani:: That's right. And James Banks was in yours. So what can you say about James Banks? Because he was such a sweetheart of a man to meet.
Gloria Ladson-Billings:: So when people say James Banks, they think of this sort of erudite, you know, uh, wise, uh, well-published scholar, which he is. But I've known Jim for 40 years. Uh, I was also a graduate student at the University of Washington in 1970 when he was an assistant professor. And I have people who can't even imagine James Banks as an assistant, and I think he sort of sprang out fully you know, hatched as a full professor. But Jim has, he has an incredible sense of humor. He doesn't always reveal it because I think he has a persona. But you said he was there, you had him interviewing with Patricia. He has two daughters, Patricia, who is a sociologist, and Angela, who was a legal scholar at Arizona State. I remember these, these young women as little girls. And I remember as they were entering their teenage years, Jim and his wife Cherry had an extra car that was kind of going to be the car that they would learn on and be permitted to drive. And it was one of those boxy Volvos, I think maybe a 246 or 264, I forget the numbering. And they hated it because, you know, it wasn't cool. And they complain that, you know, why, why do you have us driving this nerd car? And Jim's response was, your mother's a nerd. I'm a nerd. You're in a nerd family. So you have to drive a nerd car. And I thought that's the funniest, you know? Uh, so yeah, Jim is, he has, he has a wicked sense of humor that that, again, he doesn't always reveal because he's always seemingly so serious. But one of my oldest and dearest friends. I often refer to our relationship as that of Tony and Carmela Soprano. You know, that you're always asking me to do something. You know I don't want to do it. But then you know I'm going— in the end, I'm going to do it.
Nuraan Davids:: Okay, so looking back, is this something you would have liked to have changed? Or if you were to go back now, if you were to be asked to come and spend some time there, is this something you would hope to see that's different?
Gloria Ladson-Billings:: Um, hard to say. I mean, one of the challenges, of course, is that you have just a couple of people in your discipline or field. For me, it was Jeff Sachs from UC Berkeley. Everybody else was in a different social science field. But it turned out that that was perfect for pushing my thinking because I had to get out of that bubble. I would probably find it a little more difficult because many of the people who were at Stanford 18 years ago have moved on, you know. So unfortunately, some of them have passed on. I remember inviting Professor Elliot Eisner, who's a curriculum theorist, up to have lunch with me one day because I wanted him to meet another scholar who— from Harvard. And so we had a delightful dinner. Well, Elliot has passed on. A lot of things have changed and some other people have retired, so it might be like starting from scratch if I were to go back.
Nuraan Davids:: There's something that I've picked up in your writing, and it's probably because, or maybe it's more profound in your groundbreaking book called The Dreamkeepers. It struck a chord with me, this idea of dreaming and hoping and and just instilling a belief in those that you teach. And then when I kind of read up on some more things from you, I found that you're unprepared or you weren't really planning to give an exit speech when you finish your tenure at your university of Madison, Wisconsin. And again, you brought up this word dreaming. In public. And I thought, well, that's interesting. From 1994 to 2018, she's still holding on to this dream. And I want to know from you, what does this mean for you? Is there something— I mean, I get it in terms of the writing, but there must be a deeper metaphoric or symbolic understanding, or is it a spiritual understanding that you have with it? What is it for you?
Gloria Ladson-Billings:: Well, I think it's very, uh, metaphorical for the Black experience in the US. When you have a scarcity of resources, when you were at one point legally cut off from certain things, then you dream. You know, your hopes get embodied in the dreams. And I think I've pulled on a number of people, everybody from Harriet Tubman to Martin Luther King to, a pedagogue named Septima Clark who invoked that sort of dream language. And of course, the, the term Dreamkeepers is from poet Langston Hughes, who asked the question, what happens to a dream deferred? In other words, if you can't realize that dream, what, what is it? What, what becomes of it? Um, you know, I've been to South Africa. I 3 times. And I think one of the first places that I went was fairly rural. I went to the Free State. So, you know, not Johannesburg, not Pretoria, not Cape Town, not Durban, not where everybody knows all this bustling. And, you know, there's something about city life that's the same worldwide. I've been to a lot of cities. And it's like the only thing different might be the language. Or the only thing different might be the way people look, but there's traffic, there's skyscrapers. But to go to the Free State, and then from— and, you know, I was based in Bloemfontein, but to go from Bloemfontein out to the township of KwaKwa, it was like, oh my gosh, this is so similar to what my own parents grew up with in the American South. And so you can see the sort of dreams that they had that took them, because, you know, my host at the Free State kept telling me as we were out there, "Oh, you've never seen anything like this before." I said, "Listen, you don't know. I've seen everything, including chickens running in the street. Yes, I've seen this before. This is not new to me." But it was, you know, it was so that— I mean, there's a kind of convergence of experiences that allowed me to feel so comfortable. And so you have to ask yourself, well, where did this come from? Well, probably it's, it's sort of in, in one's dream life. What would it be like to be able to move from perhaps the lowest rung of society to the, you know, what might be considered the highest. You know, I often will say in a public talk that, you know, as bad as things might be, I have to take the long view. And so I am 4 generations from chattel slavery. My great-grandparents were born in slavery. My grandparents were sharecroppers, which is, you know, the equivalent of, you know, tenant farming. You, you don't own the property, you just work it. And, and, and the system is set up in a way that you can never get ahead. At the end of the year when you go to settle up, the owner says, oh, you still owe this, you know, you owe for seed, you owe for farm equipment. My own parents were a part of our form of legal apartheid, state-sponsored segregation, where my mother could not try a hat on in a department store, where we couldn't buy property in certain areas. So then for me to be an endowed chair, to be president of national organizations, Um, this summer I was named a fellow to the British Academy. I mean, think about that, that, that, that road that I've traveled, and it's really all about the dreams that I had as a little girl.
Nuraan Davids:: Um, do you find it's easy for you to translate that dream to others?
Gloria Ladson-Billings:: Um, I think When I share with people what the road has been, when I explain to them that, you know, I wasn't special, you know, I think people want to think, oh, you were the one that stood out. No, I wasn't. You know, there's a combination of opportunity and a kind of luck. And I don't like to use the term luck, But all of the aspects kind of lined up correctly for me. It was in some ways serendipitous that I might get selected. You know, if you look at my early schooling, I skipped a grade. And people say, oh, well, you must have been smart from the beginning. I said, no. I just happened to be born in that baby boomer generation. And there were so many of us. That when they brought 2 additional students to my class and the teacher said, listen, this is just too many kids. The principal said, well, pick 2 that you think might be able to succeed at the next level. And she picked me and another girl. I'll never forget this. I was in 2nd grade. Barbara Jean Hampton, that was that girl's name. I have no idea. I have no idea what her life turned out to be. But the 2 of us were moved on from the 2nd to the 3rd grade. I don't think we were just— I don't think we were exceptionally smart. We were in the right place at the right time, and the teacher thought, well, you know, they might have a chance.
Nuraan Davids:: Yeah, but maybe you're being a bit too modest. I mean, clearly this—
Gloria Ladson-Billings:: no, and the reason that I don't think I'm being—
Nuraan Davids:: there has to be something.
Gloria Ladson-Billings:: I don't think that I'm being modest, Noreen. I think it's because, um, Because, and the reason I don't think of being modest is I can remember smarter people in my class. Here's what was different. And this is unfortunately borne out by the sociological literature. I was clean. My hair was combed. You know, my parents, I had both parents, you know, even though they were working class. So those factors that the external world looks at were working in my favor.
Nuraan Davids:: So you had the family structure which somehow facilitated an easier pathway?
Gloria Ladson-Billings:: Yes.
Nuraan Davids:: And of course, that's the big issue, isn't it? I mean, even in South Africa, we have an incredibly high incidence of child-headed homes. We have an incredibly high incidence of homes with only a mother figure and no father figure. And, and, and we, and, and we do see that as a really key, key role player in the slow eradication of the family unit. And, and so, yeah, I mean, that's a really powerful point there.
Gloria Ladson-Billings:: Yeah. And, and, and those— and I'm convinced that having, um, what we call a single-parent household is not the issue. I think the issue is not having enough adults, because even in a middle-class household with two parents It is very difficult to raise children. It just is. The young— the children and young people who are successful have several layers of adults. So where I live in Madison, most of the youngsters are white. They're middle class. But it's not just their parents. It's the soccer coach. It's the art teacher. It's the violin teacher. It's being in the Boy Scouts or the Girl Scouts. It's the church choir. I mean, every layer that you go out, there are some more caring adults around these kids. And so the kids who have enough adults around them, what I find is that the struggle— and I think COVID really underscored this— was the degree to which some children are in isolation, that they don't have anybody around them. They've got a parent who's working hard. Who essentially said throughout COVID, don't leave the house, you know, I'm going to work, don't open the door, don't go outside.
Nuraan Davids:: But yeah, I mean, and I suppose COVID exacerbated it, but I think we were really sitting with a cohort of young people who, other than a screen, really are not actually socializing, are not speaking to anybody, and that shows. So coming to how we teach these young people. I mean, you have a particular coining of what you refer to as culturally relevant teaching, and you have identified three aspects of what that constitutes. And of course, there's criticism about what we understand by academic success and the cultural factors which come into that. But you also made a comment in, I think it was an interview with the 75 4, if I remember correctly. I don't know if you can recall that. Sorry, Gloria, I'm maybe taking you back to things you might not necessarily remember, but you, you, you, you said something which I found was interesting, um, where you said it's that you haven't changed on your position on what you understand as culturally relevant teaching, but that people misinterpret you, right? And, and I wanted you to just tell me about that. Why is it really a case of people misinterpreting you, or is it a case of people not reading, or is it a case of people not reading at all, or is it a case of because it's you saying it, we're not reading?
Gloria Ladson-Billings:: You know, it could be some combination of all of those things. What I, you know, when I do professional development with teachers, and I don't expect them to go pick up an academic journal to read about any of this stuff, try to give them the image of an equal equilateral triangle. Pretty simple. Anybody knows the most rudimentary notions of geometry knows that an equilateral triangle is equal sides, equal angles. If you take any part away, you no longer have the triangle. And I have those— the vertices of those— that triangle, the academic achievement, or more specifically, student learning. And I do try to point out that The reason that I modify it by saying student learning is because when you say academic achievement, people immediately default to test scores. And we know that our young people learn a lot more than we could ever test. You know, you will have youngsters who will learn some work habits that, that don't get tested, right? But that now they know how to organize their information and study more efficiently. Or I try to point out, you may have a youngster who shows up 3 reading levels behind, and through a lot of diligent work, a teacher may get them, may move them 2 years in 1 year. Fabulous, but they're still behind. I want to give that teacher credit for having worked with this youngster and moving them 2 years in the space of 1 year. The external test is not going to give her that credit. They're going to— the external test is going to say, yes, he, he's now at the 4th grade level, but this is the 5th grade. What the external test will not notice is that he came in at the 2nd grade level, right? So this, for me, student learning is a much broader category. The other component is cultural competence, which I say is the most misunderstood. Because I think people believe that to be, oh well, you know, we have a list of dos and don'ts with this group of kids. And I'm suggesting no, it is allowing kids to bring their whole selves into a classroom, that their language, that their customs, that their traditions are not denigrated while at the same moment you are exposing them and helping them become more facile and fluent in another culture. Now, typically, if you are in that minoritized culture, the culture that you're becoming more fluent in is the so-called mainstream, but it doesn't let the majority people, uh, students off the hook. They too need to develop a cultural competence. They need to be able to, um, interact with the larger world, not just people that are just like them. I have some family members who raised their kids in Zimbabwe. And because the wife is married to a native Zimbabwean, and right after the revolution, they went back to Zimbabwe from the US because he was an engineer and he needed to help. And then of course, you know, things deteriorated. So the kids, because they have dual citizenship, came back to the US for college. And I'll never forget my niece said to me, "Auntie, there are things when growing up in Zimbabwe that I thought were just Xhosa. When I saw people do this, you know, in Zimbabwe, oh, that's what Xhosa do." She said, "But I got here in the US and these— I saw people who didn't have anything to do with Zimbabwe." But the way they were functioning and acting and performing, I was like, oh my God, that's hosa, right? And so we got into this conversation of how cultural continuity, you know, will transcend time and space. And so it's, it's that understanding of the deep recesses of our, our minds, our spirits, our bodies that hold our culture with us. And that people are not performing cultural practices to be oppositional. It's, it's important to them. So that cultural competence, I think, is very misunderstood. And it's misunderstood, I think, because the majority culture teachers, which are 70-plus percent of the teachers in the U.S., don't think they have a culture. They think culture is always about the other. And so a big part of the work is understanding, no, you have a culture, you have a, a language system, you have a, a value system, you have an ethical system. You think it's just the right way to do things, but it is culturally grounded. So that's probably the heaviest lift that I have in the preparation of teachers to get them to do, uh, probably what Foucault would call the archaeology of the self. To look inside and say, well, why do I think that way? Why do I do that? Then that third component is the most ignored, and that is the sociopolitical or the critical consciousness. When I work with high school kids, I call this the so what factor. In other words, you teach them something and they go, well, yeah, now I know this. So what? You know, what does this have to do with anything? And I was— I used to be a history teacher, so you know I got a lot of "so what," because everything I was teaching happened a long time ago. But I might teach something like the War of 1812 in the US, and students will say, "Well, so what? Yeah, now we know." But today I'd say, "Okay, the last time the US Capitol was under attack was in 1812." Now let's fast forward to January 6th. What is going on? What are the similarities? What are the differences? What's the symbolism here? You know, so having the— for me, the idea of the critical consciousness is not about the teacher taking his or her agenda to kids saying, yeah, let's work on saving the rainforest, which I see a lot of when I go to school and I ask kids about it and they go, I don't know what this rainforest is. It's just something she wants to do. No, that critical consciousness is about what are the problems that kids are coping with, and how do the skills and the knowledge that we teach in schools help them solve their problems. And their problems may seem trivial to you, but once they dig, once they realize that school has some purpose for helping them solve everyday problems, then they will be more likely to be engaged.
Nuraan Davids:: How do we get this culturally, critically conscious teacher into the classroom? Because clearly the kinds of challenges you're describing, I mean, it's, it's the same here. Our teachers think my job is to teach a subject. As long as I know my subject specialization, as long as I have my schedules and I have my assessments, I'm sorted. What needs to happen in teacher education training to get teachers to understand that the task is so much bigger and so much deeper?
Gloria Ladson-Billings:: Uh, fabulous question. And I think the challenge that we are facing is, number one, people do believe they're teaching a subject. They don't understand they're teaching a human being. They're teaching a school subject to a human being. And I also think you have a lot of folks who enter teaching who come in believing that the current order of things is just fine, and that their job is to sort and select those who can fit into that order, and those who can't, well, just too bad. You know, that's what we have McDonald's jobs for. That's what we have custodial jobs for. It goes back to me being selected in second grade. There was something that that teacher said, oh, well, she probably can make it in the way that, you know, after all, her hair is combed. After all, she's clean. She's already set up to get, you know, probably some low-level clerical job, you know, but, you know, she could probably do a white-collar job. She won't have to clean toilets. But it's accepting of that, you know, what I would call the pyramid, you know, and that people think, oh, well, they're doing a good job if they can move some of the non-white or non-middle-class kids up the pyramid. That's very different from teachers who have the orientation that says the pyramid is wrong. My job's not to integrate the pyramid. My job is to help develop those young people who will destroy that particular structure as the way to think about, um, the, the social order, that the social order has to become more democratic. So I've gotta raise the kind of questions, I've gotta challenge orthodoxy. So we are really talking about, um, sort of a worldview that has to be in, in place before people can do this. And I think where culturally relevant pedagogy falls flat, uh, in practice is that we're not dealing with the fact that people don't fundamentally believe certain things. They don't fundamentally believe that some kids can learn. They— I mean, really, if you push them hard enough, they'll just say, well, you know, we'll, we'll be doing good to get these kids to, you know, take a job with the state, you know, perhaps being a clerk. I mean, that's their worldview. And I'll just say to you, while I was in the Kwakwa Township, I got to visit a community-based school that some grandmothers have put together for kids with obvious special needs. And they said to me, they said, listen, the, the school system doesn't accommodate these kids. They stay home all day, every day. They have nothing to do but get older. They will always be dependent. And we just decided they, they ought to be able to do something. And we don't know if we're doing the right thing, but we're just doing it anyway. And, you know, they talked about, you know, we took them to the beach not because we wanted to just have fun on the beach. They'd never seen the ocean. So, and I mean, talk about bringing tears to one's eyes. Here is a community realizing even kids with some severe limitations, someone can, quote, dream and have a vision for them beyond what the society is saying. And so it's that kind of person that is capable of implementing a culturally relevant approach to teaching.
Nuraan Davids:: I mean, what she's saying is just so powerful, but of course, and it's, it's so true as an opposite effect as well, isn't it? Because somebody saw you, saw something in you, you use your words you were clean, and, and so you're probably going to— you, you were set up. And by the same token, sometimes teachers look at kids and go, well, this kid is not clean, this kid doesn't have the family structure, he's going to amount to nothing, so let me treat him as such. So that myth can kind of become either kind of aspirational or destructive, right? You know, in terms of how we perceive people, and that's so powerful. Yeah, it's really something I think that I think sits at the heart of pedagogy, this idea that you have to believe in those you teach. You have to be able to see something for them, you know, regardless of circumstances. I mean, that's—
Gloria Ladson-Billings:: Right. I mean, it's like, who do you see? And I say this to teachers, when you look out in that classroom, who do you see? One of my teachers in my study used to, she would say in a classroom, "Somewhere my doctor's in here somewhere." And so I need to make sure that my doctor is learning X, Y, and Z. My lawyer is in it because, you know, you know, Miss— you know how Miss Lewis is. She gonna get in trouble. She gonna need a lawyer. One of y'all gonna have to fix things for Miss— I mean, she would speak that into them. And it just was so— was amazing. Now, I ended up having a teacher like that in 5th grade. Who just, she was like sky's the limit. I remember distinctly having this conversation with her where she said to me, "Well, what makes you think you can't be the best fifth grader in the class?" And I kind of shrugged my shoulders. She said, "What makes you think you can't be the best fifth grader in the school?" I'm like, "Mm." "What makes you think you can't be the best fifth grader in the city?" I mean, she would just, you know, Till we got to, what makes you can't— what makes you think you can't be the best fifth grader anywhere? And I'm thinking, oh my gosh, do you see this? But what it was saying to me is she was holding me to such a high standard. She was pushing me in ways that literally set me up for secondary school because I went to school in my community, which was an all-Black community. But I went to secondary school in a mostly white community. But I could hear her voice echoing while I was in these classrooms with mostly white students saying, "Well, what makes you think you can't be?" And so, you know, every youngster needs— I can't remember who said this, whether this is, you know, somebody like Toni Morrison, I think might've said, Every child needs somebody whose face lights up when they enter the room.
Nuraan Davids:: So on that note, after being moved along in grade 2 and being told to be the star pupil in grade 5, you end up being the first Black woman to become a tenured professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison. And that's in 1995, right?
Gloria Ladson-Billings:: Right. That's in the School of Education, not in the university. But in the School of Ed.
Nuraan Davids:: Okay, I must tell you, I was kind of thinking, wow, only 1995. That, that was the first thing that went through my head. That was like, I thought that was the year after we became a democracy.
Gloria Ladson-Billings:: Yes.
Nuraan Davids:: And, and, and I thought, wow, okay, it's quite interesting. Now, are you finding— and, and I know this came up during my CASPer's year as well— are you finding that it's any easier for Black women to become full professors in the US?
Gloria Ladson-Billings:: Um, no. And how can—
Nuraan Davids:: and how— another part of the question, how can critical race theory assist us in dealing with this, this war?
Gloria Ladson-Billings:: Yeah, this is, uh, you know, the, the point that I became— I earned tenure in 1995. It's interesting because I've been in settings at the university for women in philanthropy, alumni settings, and they will announce that. And people will clap. And I always say, don't clap. You should be embarrassed. 1995. The university was founded in 1848. And education was one of the first fields. You know, I'm old, but I'm not that old. I mean, come on. From 1848 to 1995, it took you that long? That should cause some deep soul searching on the part of the institution that, you know, makes you ask what was going on? What were we doing? And I think that there are Black women everywhere who are having that same struggle. Now, I think, you know, people will say, oh, well, you wrote this book and you got this award and you did this. But if you were to pin me down around the question of legacy, I would say the legacy really resides in the students that I was able to bring along behind me. So in the 27 years that I was at Wisconsin, I have supervised 55 doctoral students. 19 of them are Black women. And I don't think that's an accident. Yeah, I don't think that's an accident. I think they came looking for me. Both U.S. students. I have a couple students who, um, who are African. I've got a student from Malawi, I have a student from Botswana. They came looking for me. And the only way that we make this an easier task is that folks who end up in positions like mine have to really nurture that next generation. They have to really look to do that for another generation of women, Black women.
Nuraan Davids:: How do we begin to address the fact that so few Black women are sitting in the academy? How do we— I mean, it's fine, it's fine for you as an individual to be doing X, Y, X, Y, and Z, but how do you provide a counter-narrative to the institution so that it becomes a more hospitable environment?
Gloria Ladson-Billings:: Yeah, well, there, I think, are a confluence of factors that send folks on a different track. Um, I clearly took a pay cut to go into the academy. I'd been a teacher in a public school system. I could have retired years ago had I stayed in the public schools and been fairly comfortable, you know, because here the school systems have bargaining units and I would have been getting raises and what have you. What typically happens to Black women, and I would say to Black academics in general, is they get waylaid. They get moved away from the knowledge production aspect that is being a professor, researching, and writing, and get drawn into administration. Oh, you should be the dean. You should be the associate dean. Oh, you should be director of diversity. Now, all of those roles are important, but those roles are not producing more knowledge. They're not, you know, nobody comes to a university because so-and-so's the dean or so-and-so is the 'Uh, director of diversity and equity.' They don't. They come because a scholar I've been reading is there. So, and it— and sometimes it's hard to convince people to stay on the scholarly track because it doesn't pay as well, let's face it. And, you know, I remember talking to a scholar at Rutgers University, Brittany Cooper, who was done fabulous work on Black feminism. And Brittany is a single woman, and she says, you know, people think because I'm a single woman tenured professor that I have all kinds of money. She says, what they don't understand is how many people I'm literally feeding off of this paycheck, that I have family members who can't get a job, I have family members who are incarcerated, So no, I don't have children. No, I don't have a partner. But people are dependent on me in ways that my white counterparts, you know, they get to take their check home and not only spend it for themselves, you know, they have a partner who's probably paying the big bills, the mortgages. So just our life circumstances are such that we are, we are drawn into other fields. I mean, if you literally counted the number of Black women who have terminal degrees in education, that number is pretty good, but very few stay in the academy. They go back into the PK-12. Yeah.
Nuraan Davids:: That's so interesting. I'm just so struck by how similar that explanation you've offered is to South African context. We We don't have enough Black academics coming in because they say the pay is so bad. And it's— and the corporate world beckons with higher salaries. It's so interesting. Across your rich, rich academic life, what is the argument or the contribution that you would most like us to know you for? To know you by?
Gloria Ladson-Billings:: Um, well, you know, I just have— just did a book launch the other night for a compilation of works that I've done on culturally relevant pedagogy, and the subtitle of that book is "Asking a Different Question." And I think that's the thing that I hope people will think of, that she's the one that asked the different question. I came out of Stanford as a graduate student where the question was constantly, what's wrong with these kids? You know, why can't they learn? You know, and so people were searching for answers to that question and they were coming up with things like, well, their mothers don't speak enough words to them. Oh, they're in a single-parent household. Oh, they're poor. Oh, they have some cultural deficiencies. They're from a, you know, everybody had a reason to tell you about what was wrong. And I just asked a different question. And my question was, well, what's right with them? What do we know about these kids that's absolutely spot on right? And that, I think, raised the eyebrows of people. I mean, but that's essentially the fundamental question that undergirds the Dreamkeepers. Like, let's go find out. Let's find some places where everything seems to go right, that the teachers get it right, the kids get it right, their families and the community gets it right. And what does that look like?
Nuraan Davids:: Any last comments from you in terms of getting it right? What else can we do? Not only— I think for me the biggest issue again, and I come to you as a South African, how do we— we can have all the kind of content aspects lined up, we can have teacher training lined up, How do we ensure, particularly in a society that is beset by issues of race, how— what do I need to do to make sure my kids have a sense of belonging? How do I create an inclusive class where every kid feels she gets me, she sees me?
Gloria Ladson-Billings:: Well, um, you know, one of the things that, you know, I studied anthropology while I was at Stanford, and so culture is something that just totally fascinates me. I started out as someone studying history, and then when I paired it with anthropology, it was a perfect match. I actually took a course on anthropology and history taught by historian, huh, um, Connell Jackson and an anthropologist, Renato Rosaldo. No, perfect merging of my interests. Um, and so one of the things that I hope people begin to understand is about this incredible continuity of experience. I gave a talk once at the, um, oh gosh, the Comparative and International Education Symposium called— and I actually published this as a paper later— called "From the South Bronx to Soweto." And that paper I talked about is not different. It's not different, guys. And that the, that the similarity is that in both spaces, our Black children are experiencing colonial education. Now people in the U.S. will go, what do you mean colonial education? It's because the education system is external to the community. The curriculum is It's not about the community. It's about something outside of the community. It has all the elements, and colonial educations are designed to do the same thing no matter where they are. Identify a few exceptions, you know, the, the Glorias, right? Pull them out because then you can say, no, the system works. But most of the people will stay exactly where they are. They will still struggle. They will stay, will not be successful. And they'll produce another generation of kids who probably won't be successful. Well, when I finished that talk and it was the question and answer time, everybody from around the world said, "You could have said from Bahia to, you know, from Melbourne to—" because everybody had a colonial story to tell. I have not been anywhere in the world where I have not seen The indigenous folks, the minoritized people, always struggling. So that's one thing that I want people to realize, that that's a common experience. We're not exceptional here in the U.S., not at all. We, we see this played out every single place where you have these, uh, asymmetric or unequal power relations at play. London, you know, it's like when I go to Brixton, I'm like, oh gosh, I might as well be in West Philadelphia. You guys just have better access. You know, the truth of the matter is you're struggling in very much the same way we are. So I think the challenge is always got to be about trying to disrupt the power relations that continue to place people one down, to change the knowledge construction, that the West, the Western world is not the only way to organize an epistemology, that there are ways that people have that teaches lots of things. I was in a Twitter chat the other night, we're looking at Maslow's hierarchy And we were looking at the hierarchy needs developed by Indigenous, the Ho-Chunk Nation here in Wisconsin. And it was just fascinating. I'm sitting here going, how come we didn't know that? You know, how come that's outside of our repertoire? So I think our big challenge is to broaden the quote canon, to bring in new experiences and new ideas. One of my dear academic friends is there in South Africa, Jonathan Jansen, and he is the epitome of what we mean by getting into good trouble. That you just don't want to get in the institutions, you want to transform the institutions.
Nuraan Davids:: Well, Jonathan is in my department, and I'll close with this bit because like you, I absolutely I absolutely did not enjoy being the chair of my department, um, and I certainly did not enjoy having Jonathan in the department at the time because I think Jonathan just enjoys stirring. He just—
Gloria Ladson-Billings:: he's a stirrer. Yes.
Nuraan Davids:: Ah, he likes to stir a pot. But wow, Gloria, this has been stunning. It was really good. I, I, I— it was just good to talk to you about the, the concept of dreaming, and, and I'm glad we could touch on the issue of critical race theory and the issue of race, which just pervades, you know, education wherever you go. So thank you so much, this has been super.
Gloria Ladson-Billings:: My pleasure has been mine. Thank you.