Editor-in-Chief: Lyn Miller-Lachmann

 

In the late 1970s when I began looking for my first teaching job, such jobs were hard to find. I had left graduate school without a teaching license, which restricted my search to private schools, and my first position—a mid-year replacement for a teacher who’d joined the foreign service—proved a disastrous match. A poor recommendation and a tight market left me with few prospects. Fortunately for me, the New York City Public Schools had experienced a severe teacher shortage and offered to accredit me, along with a thousand other applicants, through a five-week summer program.

With my only teaching experience in a suburban private school, I found myself in a troubled neighborhood high school in Brooklyn, which I had chosen over several other schools because of a caring, committed assistant principal and a brand-new building. Ultimately, I divided my time between that neighborhood school and a nearby academic specialized high school. For the two years that I lived in New York City, I taught a culturally diverse group of students at the broadest range of academic ability and preparation. Following my negative experience at the private school, I believe that I became a teacher in my years in urban public schools. I developed confidence as I became sensitive to my students’ diverse backgrounds and needs; I also came to realize my responsibility for creating a well-structured lesson compatible with the dynamics of each class. My students rewarded me with their enthusiasm. Even after moving to Wisconsin, I returned to my two high schools and to other New York City schools to offer writing workshops.

With one-third of teachers expected to retire in the next five years, urban schools face a teacher shortage far more critical than the one New York City faced 20 years ago. Even suburban schools now scramble to fill vacant positions. And too often, teachers’ decisions as to where to apply are based on stereotypes, misconceptions, and fear. Most teachers surveyed in education classes express a preference for suburban schools over urban ones. And as Dierdre Glenn Paul points out in her article, "The Blackboard Jungle Resurfaces in the ’90s: Critically Interrogating Hollywood’s Vision of the Urban Classroom," these preservice teachers—predominantly white, female, and middle class—have little direct experience with nonwhite urban students and thus get much of their information about these students and their schools from popular culture media. Paul examines the Hollywood teacher movie as one aspect of popular culture and shows how movies perpetuate stereotypes and misconceptions of urban schools. She describes how she teaches students to view these movies critically as a first step to confronting their own prejudices.

Paul’s lessons in critical media literacy are essential, and not only for those teachers needed to staff urban schools. The sought-after suburbs are becoming increasingly diverse in terms of race, ethnicity, and class. Stereotypes of urban schools and students often follow students of color into the suburbs, as those students face harsher penalties for misbehavior and are less likely to be recommended for gifted programs and honors and accelerated courses. In addition, teachers with unexamined prejudices and stereotypes often transmit the message that students of color do not "belong" in suburban schools at the same time that they reinforce the prejudices of their white students. For example, an African-American student recalled hearing, on her first day at a suburban high school, the assistant principal describing the metal detectors and violence at a nearby urban school. In truth, the urban high school had no metal detectors, no more violent incidents than the suburban school, and a better record of getting students into Ivy League colleges.

Over the years, Patricia Goldblatt has contributed several articles that highlight the curriculum in her twelfth-grade post-colonial literature course and the outstanding work produced by her ethnically diverse students in Toronto. In "Action Research Goes to School," she describes her class’s study of Sembene Ousmane’s novel God’s Bits of Wood, based on the 1947–48 railway strike in Senegal, and the ways in which her students have interrogated and depicted the characters’ thoughts and actions through poetry, drama, and the visual arts. One student’s work graces the cover of this issue; others’ appear within. The writing and art included in the article demonstrate the potential of teenagers to think, to empathize, and to create. These works are an inspiration for teachers as they search for ways to bring out the best in their own students.

The supernatural has commanded an almost universal fascination, and the rapidity of communication across the globe has brought supernatural events and beings to a worldwide audience. The television program The X-Files has maintained its popularity in the United States through many seasons, and books for children and adults explore such supernatural figures as Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster. Animals that people claim to have seen, but have not been confirmed by scientists, play a prominent role in the literature and lore of Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central and South America. Because of increased Latin American immigration to the United States and the popularity of the literary genre known as magical realism, many in the United States have become familiar with the chupacabras, the cadejos, and other mythical creatures of the lands to the south. Danilo H. Figueredo’s "The Latino X-Files" offers an entertaining, accessible introduction to these creatures, the regions in which they have appeared, and the literary works that have incorporated them—novels by Gabriel García Márquez, Alejo Carpentier, Miguel Angel Asturias, Manlio Argueta, and others.

For several years, MultiCultural Review has presented interviews with noted indigenous filmmakers of the Americas. Christine McDonald, who contributes an annual roundup of the Native Forum at the Sundance Festival, conducted an interview at the 2000 Festival with the acclaimed Cayuga actor Gary Farmer. Best known for his role as the father in Chris Eyre’s Smoke Signals, Farmer began his career with a role in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Next. At the 2000 Sundance Festival he starred in Heater and made his directorial debut with What the Eagle Hears, a documentary-in-progress on disabled First Nations peoples in Canada. The interview with Farmer is unusual in many ways—most notably in the actor/director’s frank comments on films about indigenous peoples made by cultural outsiders and on his quest to broaden the media presence and power of First Nations peoples through a network of radio stations in Canada and through his e-journal, Aboriginal Voices. Many readers have become familiar with Farmer through his many film roles; McDonald’s interview gives readers a sense of Farmer as a person and the energy and political commitment he brings to all his enterprises.

Many of the points Farmer makes in his interview are echoed in the "Parting Words" essay by Santee/Cree librarian Doris Seale. Seale cofounded Oyate in the 1980s to provide teachers and librarians with the tools to select children’s books and nonprint media about the indigenous peoples of the Americas. In her essay Seale examines the works of the British-born author-illustrator Paul Goble and wonders what happened to an author often praised for his sensitive, respectful early work. Seale’s essay should provoke a discussion not only of Goble’s work as it has evolved but also of the appropriate use of humor in children’s books and the line where humor and sarcasm cease to be funny and instead turn to insult.

Like Hollywood film, humor is not generally known for its subtlety. Both types of entertainment tend to play on the stereotypes and generalizations that we all possess. In that sense, the parting essay and the lead article of this issue of MCR ask us, as readers and consumers of popular culture, to look critically at what entertains us and the assumptions contained within that we so often take for granted.