Teaching for Race and Diversity

“If you don’t teach your kids about race and about racism, the world will.”

~Dr. Handel Wright, UBC education professor in CBC interview

Several scholars interviewed in the CBC article, How to Talk to Kids about Race,  recommend that learning about race should start at an early age. Current events can provide learning opportunities to develop curiosity and empathy regarding unjust matters that occur to diverse ethnic minorities. There is no better time than now to discuss these matters of race and inclusion.

The article introduces the following points, elaborated on in the sections below:

1. What does an inclusive classroom look like?
2. How might we educate “for” and “about” the Other?
3. Recommended Open Resources on BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Color)
4. Caution when reading novels
5. Examples of Assignments that raise consciousness on race

What does an inclusive classroom looks like?

A proposed Model for Inclusive Curriculum (from the book Future We Want: Building an Inclusive Curriculum) highlights that an inclusive curriculum would:

• recognize and reflect the diverse experiences of all students, regardless of ethnicity and race, gender or any other aspect, thus readings should be drawn from various resources
• go beyond a “heroes and holidays’ approach that looks at contributions in yearly events, instead looks at different groups contributions and struggles throughout the curriculum.
• encourage an inclusive educator to form relationships with students and learn about their life experiences and learning styles. They would also engage students with issues that matter to them such as discussing migration which invites students to explore push/pull factors that led their families to migrate.
• place equity as a guiding principle when planning for lessons, field trips, classroom layout, and evaluation tasks.

How might we educate “for” and “about” the Other?

• In his article “Towards a Theory of Anti-Oppression Education,” Kevin Kumashiro (2000) suggests four approaches to anti-oppressive education. Two of which will be highlighted here; Educating for the Other, and Educating about the Other.
• Kumashiro defines oppression as a situation or dynamic in which certain ways of being (e.g. having certain identities) are privileged in society while others are marginalized.
• The ‘Other,’  as explained by Kumashiro (2020), refers to “those groups that are traditionally marginalized in society, i.e., that are other than the norm, such as students of color, students from under- or unemployed families, students who are female, or male but not stereotypically ‘masculine’ and students who are, or are perceived to be, queer” (p.26).

Educating for the Other

Kumashiro recommends:

1. creating safe spaces at schools to embrace the otherness where students feel safe and supported
2. teaching in culturally-sensitive and culturally-relevant ways and incorporating students’ home cultures into the classroom.

Educating about the Other

With knowledge about the Other being incomplete, either due to exclusion or silence (i.e. schools select only what is considered as normal by society), or due to a distorted and misleaded representation of the other based on stereotypes, researchers have suggested two ways to deal with the Other.

One idea is to include specific units on the Other. Another approach is to integrate lessons about the Other throughout the curriculum. This second approach “enables educators to address the intersections of these different identities and their attendant forms of oppression,” (Kumashiro, 2000, p.33). One example would be exploring Feminist spaces by women from working class.

BIPOC Open Resources (Black, Indigenous and People of Color)

An interesting example of a class activity on racism is “A Class Divided,” conducted by Jane Eliot, a third-grade teacher in 1968 after the assassination of Martin Luther King. The activity includes dividing her class into blue-eyed and brown-eyed groups and allowing them to experience discrimination through exclusionary activities. A full documentary of this experience is available here.

Interestingly, Common Lit provides this activity as a possible learning resource titled “Blue-eyed, Brown-eyed exercise.” In addition to text, other learning options include read aloud section, definitions, guiding questions, assessment questions, as well as prompts for discussion. A wide range of resources (poems, stories, speeches, and informational texts) on race and racism are provided by Common Lit.

The following local resources have separate posts here in the Scarfe Digital Sandbox:

• Voices into Action
• Delta School District Anti-Racism website

Caution when reading novels

• “Using novels to learn the truth about Others is problematic” (Kumashiro, 2020, p.34). He explains that this occurs because every novel has silences, where it privileges certain ideologies and provides partial perspectives.
• Kumashiro (2020,  proposes interesting questions when reading novels to allow for disruptive knowledge, where the exploration of various perspectives is explored.

Examples of questions Kumashiro proposes in relation to the ethnic group Native Hawaiians (2020, pp. 34-35)

• Instead of asking “what does this novel tell us about ethnic group Native Hawaiians,”

Ask “how can this novel be used to learn more about Native Hawaiians, or about racism against Native Hawaiians, or about Native Hawaiians in the mainstream-U.S. imagination?”

• Instead of asking “what do we know, based on this book, about Native Hawaiian cultures and people,”

Ask “which stereotypes of Native Hawaiians does this novel reinforce, and which ones does it challenge?”

Examples of Class Assignments

• One of the Afrocentric pedagogies for raising consciousness and resisting systemic marginalisation is ‘Village Pedagogy’ (Tarver & Acosta, 2020).
  • Village Pedagogy is based on i) deconstructing systemically racist policies and practices; ii) fostering critical consciousness, and iii) developing a collective responsibility (Tarver & Acosta, 2020).

Below are examples of assignments that could be used in class, as explained in the chapter “Afrocentric Pedagogies for Raising Consciousness” by Tarver & Acosta (2020).

Critical Dialogue and Case Studies:

• Encourage students to reflect on their positionalities (including race), discuss how their experiences privileged and/or marginalised them during the upbringing.
• Encourage students to translate knowledge of their privileged spaces into areas of collective responsibility.

Interactive Writing Assignment:

• Let students examine how they were socialised regarding various aspects such as gender, race, sexual orientation, etc.

Cultural Immersion Assignment:

• Encourage students to choose a non-dominant cultural group that they do not identify with, interview someone, and write a paper describing their experience.

Diversity Workshop Assignment:

• Assign students to diverse groups and let them select a group that they are not part of, and encourage them to explore the cultural group, in terms of variations in group’s characteristics, critical historical experiences that contributed to group’s identity/experience in society, relevant existing issues, and culturally relevant strategies for working with the members of the ethnic/cultural group.

Guest Post: Nashwa Khedr, EDCP graduate student, project assistant 2020

References

Kumashiro, K. (2000). Toward a Theory of Anti-Oppressive Education. Review of Educational Research, 70(1), pp. 25-53. Retrieved April 20, 2020, from www.jstor.org/stable/1170593

Tarver, S. Z. & Acosta, M. M. (2020). Afrocentric Pedagogies for Raising Consciousness. In Steinberg, S. R. & Down, B. (Eds), The SAGE handbook of critical pedagogies (Vols. 1-3). 55 City Road, London: SAGE Publications Ltd