By Mike Templeton

The collection of essays in White Folks Who Teach in the Hood… and the Rest of Y’all too: Reality, Pedagogy, and Urban Education, edited by Christopher Emdin and Sam Seidel and published by Beacon Press, offers an extensive set of viewpoints and reflections on the issues and challenges of being a white educator in a predominantly non-white educational setting. This collection contains an essay by local educator and urban Appalachian Glenetta Krause whose reflections reveal the local issues and singular pedagogical strategies that have perhaps a kind of global significance. Hers and other essays offer a variety of solutions to seemingly intractable barriers with concrete strategies for success in education. The Urban Appalachian Community Coalition has long had a stake in these kinds of educational issues and ideas, and it is particularly exciting to see a local urban Appalachian and educator make such a crucial contribution. Talking with Glenetta Krause, I got to learn about her background and other projects along with her work as a teacher at Cincinnati Public Schools.  

Glenetta Krause’s contribution to the book, White Folks Who Teach in the Hood, details some difficult, complex, but ultimately successful teaching strategies which center on and surround equally difficult and complex issues. I would never attempt to reduce her work, or the work of any of the contributors to the book, to a simple summary. Yet, I cannot help but pull a lesson from Krause’s essay for how to approach teaching and perhaps how to approach life: listening, arguably the most respectful gift you can offer—listening to understand rather than to respond. This is what an experienced and dedicated educator brings to a classroom, and this is what Glenetta Krause offers as she guides her students through the painful and thorny terrain of the social and economic upheavals of our times.

Krause’s essay describes working with a group of students as they grappled with the outrage and pain they felt in the days after the shooting of Timothy Thomas in Cincinnati in 2001. Thomas, as you may remember, was an unarmed teenager who was shot and killed by police as he tried to run away. This event, and the events that followed become the center of a set of lessons where Krause and her students wrestled with the problems of race and racism in contemporary urban American life, the workings and grinding wheels of democracy and local government, and the history and structure of economic and racial divides in America. These events also helped Krause begin to understand the vast differences between her, a white woman, and her students, young black teenagers, and the gulf that separates them in their experiences of life. But in working through the traumas of world historical events and the extremely local events of individual lives, Krause and her students found ways of understanding and growth that can only come from the most genuine and committed forms of communication. Krause sums up her essay by telling us that “(c)ertainly living through tragedies like these bond people together. Even more so, though, I think that what truly bonds us is that we listen to each other.” This is what a caring and committed educator brings: the capacity to truly listen.

Glenetta Krause has been teaching for thirty years, so she has the experience necessary to approach difficult subjects and situations. She is also an urban Appalachian, and that experience provides her with certain insights that may not be available to others. By being able to reflect on the fact of being an urban Appalachian, Krause is capable of seeing cultural difference as a path to understanding rather than a border.

Glenetta Krause told us, “When I was just starting to think about teaching, I heard Mike Maloney speak about Appalachians which caused me to view my family through a lens of culture. That was a necessary part of my trajectory.” She recalls the dawning of a realization that “my culture is something different than other people’s family and culture or at least different from the majority’s. That was the first time I had seen it that way. That unlocked some curiosity in me about my culture and other people’s culture.” It is the understanding that cultural difference is the space of exploration rather than division that makes the difference in Krause’s life—as a way of living and as an educator.

Krause is a second-generation urban Appalachian. Her parents and grandparents are from Mingo County in West Virginia, people who were tied to the coal mines in one way or another, and who learned the hard lessons of mountain life which they brought with them to the city. It is a familiar story for many of us. That lineage of proud working people instilled in Glenetta Krause a deep allegiance with labor. She is a member of the Cincinnati Federation of Teachers, and she is the daughter and granddaughter of union people. Organized labor is part of the backbone of Krause’s life, and she states proudly: “I think that unions are what have built this country and made our middle class and protected our people from a variety of injustices.” Even today, Krause insists that it is her work as a union-affiliated educator that keeps classrooms safe and not overcrowded. This kind of labor-oriented sensibility is another feature of Appalachian culture that carried over from the mountains to the cities.

Glenetta Krause is hard at work on so many things it can be difficult to single them out. Obviously, her work with Cincinnati Public Schools continues, and the lessons and ideas raise in White Folks Who Teach in the Hood are at the center of some the workshops she is running along with her colleagues. Krause’s current work with CPS involves helping other teachers. “I’m actually working outside of the classroom as a district-wide Mentor. This means that I am supporting teachers in reaching their goals to become better teachers and I love that work, too.”

Krause has taken some courses with Core UACC member Pauletta Hansel in creative writing, and she is ever so slowly but diligently working on a novel: “My next big writing project that I have been working on for way too long now is going to be a novel that’s very loosely based on my mom and her uncle.” Workshopping her creative writing took her to the Appalachian Writers Workshop at Hindman Settlement School, in Kentucky. Her drive to keep working and creating seems to come honestly, something she recounts in a poem in which she describes her own grandmother working to pull herself out of a bad situation. Krause’s poem “Metalwork” describes her “Granny” who “Walked away from/ her husband and other brutalities/ and made her way north.” And with that escape, the poem goes on to tell us of a young woman who “worked at Wright-Patt/ bending steel into airplanes.” The story of a Rosie the Riveter kind of woman, but also the story of the migration and transition from mountain folk to urban Appalachian. This is perhaps what instill the ethic and the energy in an urban Appalachian such as Glenetta Krause. 

One of the key issues that gave rise of urban Appalachian advocacy was education. Making sure our people had access to an educational system that was responsive to their needs as well as the needs of all communities in the greater Cincinnati area has formed the bedrock of the Urban Appalachian Community Coalition. This is one reason why it is so important for us to highlight urban Appalachians like Glenetta Krause whose work directly impacts the educational issues of our times. Krause’s essay in White Folks Who Teach in the Hood… and the Rest of Y’all too: Reality, Pedagogy, and Urban Education, edited by Christopher Emdin and Sam Seidel and published by Beacon Press, is one which takes the unique challenges of working within the Cincinnati area and provides invaluable insights for educators all over the United States. Glenetta Krause shows us yet again that it is the urban Appalachian community that is at the forefront of the work of shaping our society in the best possible ways.

White Folks Who Teach in the Hood… and the Rest of Y’all too: Reality, Pedagogy, and Urban Education, edited by Christopher Emdin and Sam Seidel and published by Beacon Press is available for purchase at this link: https://www.amazon.com/White-Folks-Teach-Hood-Rest-ebook/dp/B00Z3E2LVO.

Michael Templeton is a writer, and independent scholar. He is the author of The Chief of Birds: A Memoir published with Erratum Press and Impossible to Believe, forthcoming from Iff Books. He is also the author of Collected Apoems, forthcoming from LJMcD Communications and the awaiting of awaiting: a novella, forthcoming from Nut Hole Publishing. Check out his profile in UACC’s Cultural Directory. He has published numerous articles and essays on contemporary culture and works of creative non-fiction as well as experimental works and poetry. He lives in West Milton, Ohio with his wife who is an artist.