Understanding Diversity, Opportunity gaps, and Teaching in today’s Classrooms

Richard Milner IV is a Cornelius Vanderbilt Distinguished Professor of Education in the Department of Teaching and Learning at Vanderbilt Peabody College of education and human development. He has secondary appointments in Peabody’s Department of Leadership, Policy and Organizations and the Department of Sociology in Vanderbilt’s College of Arts and Science.

Milner is a researcher, scholar and leader of urban education and teacher education. Centering on equity and diversity, he has spent hundreds of hours observing teachers’ practices and interviewing educators and students in urban schools about micro-level policies that shape students’ opportunities to learn. He examines the social context of classrooms and schools and looks at ways in which teachers talk (particularly about race) influences student learning, identity and development. 

His research in urban schools and his book, “’These Kids are out of Control:’ Why We Must Reimagine Classroom Management,” (Corwin Press, 2018) has influenced designs and practices of teacher education courses and programs. To improve relational, curricular, assessment and instructional practices, school districts across the United States and beyond draw on his recommendations to support students of color, those who live below the poverty line, and those whose first language is not English.

To date, Milner has contributed significantly to the field of education in four interconnected ways:

Milner has advanced conceptual and empirical understandings of what he calls “opportunity gaps.” The term stands in contrast to the more generally used “achievement gap” as a means of explaining and disrupting disparities between students. Specifically, he has introduced an Opportunity Gap Framework as a tool to describe the ways in which Black students continue to experience individual, structural and systemic inequity in classrooms and schools across the United States. Researchers have adopted the Opportunity Gap Framework as an analytic frame to explain aspects of their research. In addition, practitioners have drawn from the framework to develop and/or revise teacher education programs, courses and professional development in schools and districts. The framework has been developed from empirical case studies he has conducted over the past 18 years. The Opportunity Gap Framework is described and explained in his award-winning book, “Start Where You are, But Don’t Stay There” (Harvard Education Press, 2010). The book represents years of research and development efforts and is widely read in teacher education programs and school districts across the United States. Milner has constructed a Researcher Positionality Framework to challenge and support researchers in designing and enacting studies and programs of research that recognize, name and work through what he describes as dangers “seen, unseen, and unforeseen” in studying race and culture in education science. Published in the journal, Educational Researcher (2007), the framework has been adapted across disciplines including nursing and health sciences as an essential element to conducting research. Milner (with colleagues Lori Delale O’Connor, Adam Alvarez and Ira Murray) has developed a survey, the Teachers Race Talk Survey, one of the first survey instruments focused on teachers’ reported beliefs about race and discourse. The survey attempts to capture teachers’ reported beliefs about the role and importance of race in classroom talk and learning. Researchers interested in capturing the relationship between race and classroom talk, particularly focused on race, have found the survey useful as it is being adapted and adopted for studies across the field of education. Because the survey is designed for open- as well as closed-ended responses, researchers are able to triangulate, nuance and disrupt participants’, pre- and in-serve teachers’ responses. Implications from his research about race and poverty in schools and classrooms are outlined in his book, “Rac(e)ing to Class: Confronting Poverty and Race in Schools and Classrooms” (Harvard Education Press, 2015). In an effort to build synergy between and among empirical studies and conceptual arguments in and related to urban education, Milner has called for and advanced stronger conceptual and definitional work of urban education. He described and conceptualized three sites of urban education that other researchers use to make sense of and describe urban contexts: urban characteristic, urban emergent, and urban intensive.

Bringing together leading scholars of urban education in the edited volume, “Handbook of Urban Education” (2014), Milner and co-editor Kofi Lomotey have attempted to describe and discuss what urban education is, what we know about it (empirically and theoretically), how we know what we know about urban education, and what other knowledge, as a field, is important for us to study in order to advance policy, research, theory and practice in urban education.

 

Show Highlights Authentic vulnerable moment break barriers  Will you knock down walls so students get the education they deserve?  Relationship building and cultivation has to be essential throughout  for sustainability Ethnic matching-showcase the differences that make a difference Help teachers build their toolkit, their repository to be responsive in all spaces Opportunity centered connections and teaching. See them beyond the walls

“We have to as educators, we have to be our authentic selves. Young people don't need you to be more of who they are. They need you to be the best of who you are in order to compliment and advance their identity spaces, their exposure to different kinds of things. They need you to be anti-racist. They need you to be pro people, pro equity, projustice. Those are the things that matter to young people, more than the other pieces. When you don't come from the same community, when you don't share the same background there are concrete, really transformative ways to build those links, to build those relationships.”

-Rich Milner

 

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Rich Milner Transcript

 

Rich Milner’s Resources & Contact Info: H. Richard Milner: Books - Amazon.com Twitter Facebook LinkedIn rich.milner@vanderbilt.edu   Looking for more?

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