Lost in the alphabet soup of educational acronyms

I have always had a gut-level aversion to acronyms. Why do I hate these so? I love silent sustained reading, but I hate SSR. I agree that it’s useful to survey a text, ask questions to predict before you read, the recite (or summarize) after read, and then review by trying to answer your initial question…but don’t come at me with SQ3R. I’m always up to drop everything and read, but DEAR I always found annoying and campy. And daily oral language, or DOL, is just…No.

These are memories from my childhood, from acronyms that populated my early years in public education. But my distaste for (and distrust in?) acronyms extends to higher education and academia as well. I prefer to write Black, indigenous, and people of color (or better yet, specially name the groups I’m talking about) rather than BIPOC—and you definitely won’t catch me saying BIPOC aloud even though many people I respect, including people who identify as Black, indigenous, or people of color use it. It feels trivializing when I use it as a White person, a different form of erasing the complex and unique identities that the three words intend to call attention to.

I rarely shorten critical race theory or culturally responsive teaching to CRT; obviously, these two can be confusing, and even if I define them earlier in the paper before introducing the acronym, some people tend to associate it with one or other. I don’t want to draw on the wrong associations or worse yet, conflate the two. I tend to use culturally sustaining pedagogy more than culturally responsive teaching anyway, because I understand it to be more current and expansive.

The origins of my of acronym resistance

As a kid, I think it was an annoyance with slick names that adults put on work to try to make it seem cool. They were trying too hard, or trying to name and brand something that I didn’t think needed to be branded. But maybe all along it was a deep resistance to the over-programitizing and branding pf something that doesn’t truly belong to one person, practice, or context. Maybe all along it was a protest against forgetting the actual name and essence of something in favor of the quicker, easier, and often watered down original. Silent reading is in my bones, and I love to get into the flow of truly sustained immersion in a book—but SSR is a chunk of time carved into the school day, another piece of the efficient schedule created for all the little cogs in the educational system. John Proctor couldn’t betray his name—he was more willing to give up his soul—because it was the only one he could ever have. Yes. There is something sacred about names, and I want to hold onto them.

I obsessed about my own name as a kid. My given name is Kate, but as a young child my family called me Katie. In first grade, I wanted to sound more grown up, so I asked to be called Kate in school. In fifth grade, I wanted to sound more fun so the popular kids would like me more, so I switched back to Katie. And somehow I morphed back to Kate in college, when I started anew and didn’t correct professors who called me Kate. My name meant something to me, and I thought a lot about how I wanted to present myself to the world through my name.

Resistance to the acronym—not the theories that inspired it

This tendency to fixate on the power of words is no doubt at the root of my discomfort with acronyms that obscure the essence, origin, and/or complexity of an educational concept. One example of an acronym I’m uncomfortable with is GLEAM, a branded acronym used by the educational consulting group UnboundED .

Here’s the definition of GLEAM on UnBoundED’s website:

UnboundEd supports educators at every level of the system to provide students of color with instruction that we have come to call GLEAM™ —  Grade-Level, Engaging, Affirming, and Meaningful. The ideas behind GLEAM™ are not new. They rest on UnboundEd’s learning from many extraordinary educators and on theories and evidence associated with learning science and culturally relevant and responsive teaching.  UnboundED: “What is GLEAM?”

Every word in their acronym is worthy of describing what we want students to experience in their learning experiences. But together, the words gloss over the focus on critical consciousness and justice that are the cornerstone of what Gloria Ladson-Billings originally set emphasized in her theory on culturally relevant pedagogy. Ladson-Billings has often said and written that critical consciousness is the most-neglected aspect of her original theory of culturally relevant pedagogy, and Paris & Alim build on that in their remix, which they call culturally sustaining pedagogy.

My first impression of GLEAM’s definitions and the approach they describe in their appear to be carefully apolitical terms that blunt the critical, liberatory focus on critiquing systemic racism and oppression in schools and classrooms. In my initial read, GLEAM feels like an interest-convergence-inspired term to offer (predominantly White) administrators and teachers an unthreatening way to attempt to adopt, roll out, and standardize culturally sustaining pedagogies.

Criticality is the crux of the work, and I wish it were more prominently featured in the acronym and the words that make it up. Critical pedagogies are about reconsidering, re-examining, multiple perspectives, challenging everything—even and especially power structures. It is meant to be a radical challenge to the status quo, which is entrenched dominant ideologies, most notably White supremacy.

Criticality as a lens, not a recipe

Where is the criticality in GLEAM? Now, granted, at this point, I’m talking mainly about the words of the acronym themselves, since only a brief glimpse of UnboundED’s GLEAM approach and materials are available online. I would imagine there is some attention to identity in the “affirming” and some attention to real-world application and critique in “meaningful.” There are a few blog posts and a few videos, but it appears that most of their program materials are only available through their professional development conferences and consulting services. That’s right, you have to pay to GLEAM.

In addition, Gloria Ladson-Billings has specifically said there is no one way to enact culturally relevant pedagogy. She has repeatedly said that it cannot be boxed or bottled, and when people attempt to, it loses its critical edge. Nevertheless educational organizations like UnboundED are repackaging years’ worth of theory and research, selling it to schools—at best, without adding anything original, and at worst, diluting its power. Theories like culturally relevant and culturally sustaining pedagogy are lenses that inform our instructional planning and practices, but they do not provide recipes for one-size-fits-all solutions that every educator can replicate.

As I learn more about GLEAM in the book I borrowed by UnboundED’s CEO, I’ll remain open to finding ways that the acronym and approach may address some of my questions. In particular, I’ll be interested in how the GLEAM approach incorporates more recent research by critical educators who have spent the last decade or more challenging the more superficial approaches to Ladson-Billings’ theories, as well as how the program goes beyond single recipes or seemingly uniform practices.

MFWEA (Moving Forward with Educational Acronyms)

Beyond this one particular acronym and the program it stands for, what I’m advocating for is a critical approach to working with educational acronyms and the programs behind them. Since educational research and theory rarely—if ever—provide recipes that can solve all problems (if they did, we would have solved our educational challenges long ago), I hope we can resist thinking of acronyms as quick fixes or neat recipes and instead remember that they are, at best, examples of catchy mnemonic devices aimed at helping us crystallize a complex idea or theory so that we can remember and apply it more readily.

Here are some of the questions that I plan to keep in mind as I unpack other common acronyms I encounter in education moving forward:

• What are the research foundations of the program behind the acronym (PBA)?
• How do facilitators encourage educators to activate their prior knowledge about the related research? Or is it presented as a completely novel approach?
• How does the program invite educators to engage with the research themselves?
• What theoretical concepts do the words in the acronym highlight? What do they hide?
• What new insights, approaches, or original research does the PBA contribute to the field?
• How/does the PBA include or invite multiple perspectives or critiques on their approaches?
• How does it provide multiple entry points for educators to apply the theories? Or is it more of a one-size-fits-all recipe?
• What similar or complementary discipline-specific approaches might teachers also consider to better attend to the unique needs of their teaching contexts?
• What might teachers and students gain by using the acronym and its program? What might they lose?
• If educators are asked to add or adhere to this acronym and program, what do they need to subtract or de-prioritize?