Ratchetdemic Reimagining academic success

Columbia University education professor Emdin (For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood) offers an illuminating guide to decentering whiteness in the classroom in order to allow students of color to thrive. Co-opting the slang meaning of ratchet ("the embodying of all 'negative' characteristics associated with lowbrow culture"), Emdin proposes an educational model that teaches traditional academic subjects while uplifting BIPOC students' "culture and community" and giving them agency over their learning. He uses his Jamaican mother's disapproval of her fellow immigrants who were "too loud, too expressive, and too unabashedly Jamaican" as an example of how some teachers replicate the system "that silenced and harmed the very essence of who they were as students," and argues that today's "education-industrial complex" has its roots in "plantation pedagogies" enacted during the slavery era. Emdin illustrates his arguments with rap lyrics; the example of educators and civil rights activists including Septima Clark, whose citizenship schools, from the 1950s to 1970, helped illiterate African American adults "become part of the political process"; and stories of students of color who found success once they were given the freedom to pursue their own interests and speak without fear of having their language policed. This impassioned and richly detailed call for change will strike a chord with teachers in historically marginalized communities. (Aug.)

Emdin (science education, Teachers Coll., Columbia Univ.; Inst. for Urban and Minority Education) builds on his previous book, For White Folks Who Teach in the Hood, and proposes methods of teaching and learning that welcome and nurture students of color. He writes that modern schooling should encourage behaviors and identities that it has historically vilified and sought to eradicate, especially among Black students. The book's title refers particularly to the dismissal of ratchet identity in whiteness-centered schooling; Emdin defines ratchet identity as "the embodying of all 'negative' characteristics associated with lowbrow culture" like hip-hop. Using thoughtful metaphors and anecdotes, Emdin details situations in education where teachers and students have been encouraged or forced to surrender the most valuable parts of themselves, their energies, their creativity, their lived experiences, and their emotional intelligence. The dismissal of or outright hostility toward these students' and teachers' whole selves deprives them of an education, he writes, whether or not they continue to earn degrees. Emdin explores the intersections between the personal and the institutional and suggests that deeper, more individual pedagogical shifts are essential to reforming a system that continues to do lasting harm to children and communities of color. VERDICT This engaging book makes its points clearly and effectively; even readers with decades of classroom experience will come away with new knowledge and perspectives. A must-read for educators, students, parents, and anyone with a vested interest in an equal education system.--Sarah Schroeder, Univ. of Washington Bothell