The Dreamkeepers Summary

Gloria Ladson-Billings is an American author, pedagogical theorist, and researcher who wrote the critically acclaimed book The Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers of African American Children (2009). Ladson-Billings currently serves as the Kellner Family Chair in Urban Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and is known for researching and examining pedagogical practices of teachers who are successful with African American students. In 2005, she served as the president of the American Educational Research Association and was elected to the National Academy of Education. She has received numerous scholarly awards and distinctions in honor of her contribution to the field of Education including the H.I. Romnes faculty fellowship, the
She profusely discusses culturally relevant teaching and demonstrates how this style of teaching does not rely on race, gender, or teaching style. The greatest indicator of culturally relevant teaching is the teacher’s effort and desire to work with and not around the distinctive strengths and weaknesses a child brings to the classroom. By reflecting on her own experiences, observations, and personal views while including empirical data, Ladson-Billings confers the idea of culturally relevant teaching and how it intrinsically relates to the teacher, classroom social interactions, literacy and mathematics teaching, and knowledge itself. She further examines the significance culturally relevant teaching holds for African American students in education and teacher education as a
Chapter one, A Dream Deferred, provides insight into the current climate of African Americans in education, poses the question of “is there a case for separate schools?” (XVIII), and distinguishes between excellent teaching and excellent teachers by emphasizing that the “book looks at a teaching ideology and common behaviors, not at individual teaching styles” (p. 14). Chapter two, Does Culture Matter?, discusses how schools can be more accepting of students’ cultural backgrounds, how culturally relevant teaching addresses the lack of literature on the experiences of African Americans, and how assimilationist, or traditional, teaching practices compare to culturally relevant teaching practices. Chapters three through five, through teacher interviews and classroom observations, begin the discussion on three distinctive critical aspects of culturally relevant teaching. Chapter three, Seeing Color, Seeing Culture, examines the teachers’ conceptions of themselves and others; chapter four, We Are Family, discusses the manner in which classroom social interactions are structured; and chapter five, The Tree of Knowledge, delves into the teachers’ conception of knowledge. In chapter six, Culturally Relevant Teaching, Ladson-Billings, offers “a more contextualized examination” (p. 111) of the use of culturally relevant teaching and how it surpasses