Chapter 7: Beyond Lip Service: Engaging Young African American Men in a Single-Gender Urban School

We constantly hear about high expectations. We hear about relationships with students at every training session where we fervently seek ways to make schools places of equity and possibility. Ryan Vernosh, a teacher at Maxfield School in St. Paul, Minnesota, has been struggling with these abstract concepts in concrete and meaningful ways-ways that connect to the culture and the real lives of his students. The following chapter is Ryan’s under-standing of what it means to be a culturally competent educator. He is a White male teaching in a single-gendered class comprised of male students of color. His self-reflections and observations are real, although students mentioned in the narrative are only identified by pseudonyms. Here is Ryan’s story.