Educational Resources & Tech Tools 02/01/2021

• 7 Steps Toward Building an Equitable School Culture | Edutopia

  • microaggressions, they wrote, are “brief, everyday exchanges that send denigrating messages to individuals because of their group membership.
  • The persons making the comments may be otherwise well-intentioned and unaware of the potential impact of their words.”
  • such comments also position the dominant culture (Euro-American) as normal and the marginalized group as aberrant.
  • You can find additional examples of different forms of microaggressions here.
  • Antiracism is the process of unlearning these biases and observing ourselves to see where and when these biases surface.
  • Anti-racism is the commitment to fight racism wherever you find it, including in yourself.
  • For White people, that means taking time to examine and unlearn internalized dominance of White supremacy.
  • Think of yourself as an agent for a healthy, antiracist culture, not as the sole creator of it.
  • Develop humanizing ways to begin and close meetings. Check-in questions
  • Closing rituals such as process checks, which surface patterns of participation and facilitator moves, bring a reflective and purposeful closing tone.
  • Make sure the adults in the building are employing the same language and concepts when it comes to antiracism work.
  • Terms such as implicit bias, structural racism, White supremacy, and microaggressions should be explicitly taught, discussed, and defined within the context of the local school community and history.
  • “right to comfort,” a symptom of White supremacy culture that aims to smooth over conflict without getting to the root of the issues. Instead, norms should reflect a culture of curiosity, listening, and vulnerability: bravery. In brave spaces, adults can work in their optimal zone of development.

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Educational Resources & Tech Tools 01/30/2021

• Principal found that applying a clear f...

  Principal @jessicacabeen found that applying a clear framework to her decision-making process made it a lot easier—for everyone. https://t.co/FtqZ1hq3FG

• “Brave spaces” are key to anti-racist en...

  “Brave spaces” are key to anti-racist environments. Learn more about how to support anti-racist practices at your school. https://t.co/O9kASfpb2I

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Educational Resources & Tech Tools 01/04/2021

• Frame of Reference Exercise

  tags: DEI social justice diversity racial justice

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Educational Resources & Tech Tools 01/03/2021

• NAIS - Addressing Anti-Blackness and the Trauma of the Past and Present

  • “How does your identity impact your pedagogy?” Group members sat in silence looking around the room for an entry point to start this uncomfortable conversation. I grimaced as I watched my colleagues shift in their seats. As a Black, queer woman from the South and a humanities scholar, I had engaged in deep self-examinations around this issue.
  • Why were they employing euphemisms and talking about racism in the abstract as if it were not here among us? 
  • it became obvious that the colorblind lens helped assuage those who were not people of color of any feeling of discomfort.
  • When we do talk about diversity, school leaders, administrators, faculty, and DEI practitioners often conflate Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC), LGBTQIA+, and international students as one monolithic group. But this conflation erases the experiences of Black students. The harsh reality is that our independent schools are disproportionately harming our Black students.

• NAIS - The Truth About Making Real Change for Racial Justice

  tags: DEI social justice diversity racial justice

  • To look at ourselves honestly means to ask: Why are our schools here? The raison d’être of independent schools has been, and continues to be, that of advancing the interests of those who already have privilege—to provide a return on investment (ROI) to those who have sufficient disposable income to afford independent school. To put it differently, our main job is to preserve the social status quo or reproduce the elite; this class-bound purpose results in a hierarchical view of the world in which our students are destined for leadership. In our mission statements, the idea that we are creating leaders is almost universal. On their face, these statements provide a binary and hierarchical understanding of society, one in which there are leaders and followers, and we are teaching the leaders.
  • noblesse oblige, a worldview that accepts and perpetuates existing social hierarchies while promoting social good.
  • When we look at our schools’ service programs, the idea of “giving back” is ubiquitous. Yet we fail to discuss or even question how much taking is appropriate.
  • Families send their kids to our schools, and we must prove that we are better than local public or other school options. In other words, we ask the majority of our families to give us financial support so that their kids can get more—not necessarily different—than what their taxes pay for; the “more” is the ROI.
  • Furthermore, this hierarchical worldview permeates our practices—from grading to sports, we promote hierarchies cemented on ability, access, and popularity, among other things. By viewing race problems in our schools in purely cultural terms, we are articulating our hope that we will promote some hierarchies while erasing other hierarchies based on race, gender, and sexual orientation. But as we know, hierarchies intersect and sustain each other.
  • the demand that our teachers get better or different professional development, that we hire and admit more people of color, and that we collectively become culturally competent is a way to deal with the symptoms of racism, not with a system of racism.
  • Why would those who have privilege, and want to keep it by paying for a special pathway for their children, want to give it up? Anyone familiar with the college admission process knows the tensions that emerge around race and class. If our students and families are happy to embrace the language of inclusion, such superficial pretense often evaporates when college admission lists appear. It is then that we see the hard limits of our inclusivity.
      
     The families in our communities are essentially good people who want to share, but they don’t want to be left out.
  • They like the idea of “giving back” but do not want to take less.
  • many of our enrollment challenges derive from the fact that millennial families are looking for meaning and value—not access. We need to stop worrying about providing an illusory ROI and ensure that we help our students develop lives of meaning and purpose; we need to stop worrying exclusively about leadership and prepare them for ethical and active citizenship. It is only when we can talk to our students about the need to take less so that others can have their fair share that we will be able to honestly talk about race.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.