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Seven Forms of Bias in Instructional Materials: Teacher Checklist

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Seven Forms of Bias in Instructional Materials: Teacher Checklist

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Seven Forms of Bias in Instructional Materials: Teacher Checklist

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It is sometimes argued that decolonisation is not necessary in the context of university mathematics. Isn’t mathematics a universal language? How can something universal possibly need to become more inclusive?

In truth, though, we need only look at the bitter feud between Newton and Leibniz (and their supporters) over who first developed calculus, to see that mathematics is not a subject that exists independently of debates over influence and focus. When two differing conceptions of the same idea, or two different methods aimed at achieving the same result, develop separately, which one will win out? And are we absolutely sure the winner will always be, in some sense, the “best” one? What does “best” even mean in this context?

Mathematics and culture are not always easily disentangled. An entire discipline exists that studies the link between the two. To take an extremely simple example, the power of ten represented by the word “billion” differs from country to country. For decades the British definition differed from the American definition, but following the Second World War, the original British definition (10^12) found itself more and more replaced by the American definition (10^9, taken from the numbers definition in French), until eventually the American version won out. Does this shift in language relate in any way to the changes in relative global influence of the UK and the US following World War 2? It’s at least worth considering the question.

It might then be inaccurate to suggest mathematics is a universal language, so much as different cultural approaches to mathematics are always translatable from one form into another. But then that is true of all languages! The question of whether we have allowed western mathematicians to dominate in our discipline is no less relevant than whether we have allowed western authors to dominate the field of literature. It may even be more important, if only because mathematics is rather more central to the advancement of science than is literature.

Decolonising the mathematical curriculum, then, means considering the cultural origins of the mathematical concepts, focusses, and notation we most commonly use, along with the goals we cite as justification for creating mathematics as a job, rather than a hobby. It involves ensuring the global project to expand our understanding of mathematics genuinely is global, and frankly assessing the discipline’s failures – past and present – to work toward that aim.

So how can we do this? I include some suggestions and resources below.

Suggestions & Resources

Consider giving short biographies of the mathematicians whose work you present in your modules. If in doing so you realise that they are almost entirely (or even completely) white and/or male, ask yourself why this is. See if you can find contributions to the field from mathematicians of other genders/ethnicities.

As an example of this, we have used the following links to highlight the contributions of Indian mathematicians, in particular Bhaskara, to the field of mathematics in our first year Single Mathematics A module: https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Projects/Pearce/chapter-13/, https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Bhaskara_II/.

When tying examples in to real-world contexts, consider whether you can present the context outside of a western frame of reference. To give an example from statistics, two common examples of Simpson’s paradox involve survivors of the Titanic, and enrolment in an American University, both examples from the western world. But there is also an example one can cite which is based on the representation of the under-representation of Maori in New Zealand jury pools – an example that both decentres Europe, and also offers the ability to discuss how maths can be used to aid attempts to secure equality.

The Open University has begun to collate resources regarding the history and practice of mathematics with an eye to decolonisation.

Two books to consult on the topic of decolonising maths are Mathematics Across Cultures: The History Of Non-Western Mathematics, and Mathematics Elsewhere: An Exploration of Ideas Across Cultures. Both books are available online via Durham Library (see links).

A brief video celebrating black mathematicians as part of Black History Month 2021 can be watched here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKp-_Kj8P9E.

Here are 10 Questions to Begin Decolonising Your Maths Curriculum - the opening two diagrams are particularly powerful.

The fractals at the heart of African designs:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7n36qV4Lk94. In mathematics, a fractal is a subset of Euclidean space with a fractal dimension that strictly exceeds its topological dimension (taken from Wikipedia). The video is a TED talk which shows that Africans have been using the concepts of fractal for their designs before it was really invented in the West.

A discussion about Indian Mathematicians and their contributions to Mathematical Sciences: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0038xb0.

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The Conceptual PlayLab is Australia's first programmatic study that aims to test ground-breaking play-based models of teaching science, technology, engineering and mathematics to young children. It aims to create significant shifts in the ways STEM concepts are taught to young children in Australia, and around the world.

It has three parts:

Part 1

To find out how infants, toddlers and pre-schoolers form concepts in STEM.

Part 2

To investigate the way families support their children to learn about STEM.

Part 3

To develop an evidence-based model for teaching STEM in early childhood.

Over the life of the project we will be following the experience of more than 100 young children.

We will be looking at how and why the children form concepts in STEM, and the ways Conceptual PlayWorlds help them.

Working with early childhood educators, we will collect insights, experiences and track concept development.

Visual data will be collected by our Conceptual PlayWorld app. Downloading and sharing of videos referred to during our interviews will only occur where consent has been given by educators and families.

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The Conceptual PlayLab is Australia’s first programmatic study that aims to test ground-breaking play-based models of teaching science, technology, engineering and mathematics to young children. It aims to create significant shifts in the ways STEM concepts are taught to young children in Australia,…

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Foundations of Early Childhood Education in a Diverse Society

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Foundations of Early Childhood Education in a Diverse Society

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Foundations of Early Childhood Education in a Diverse Society

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Now available with the free workbook Resources for Observation and Reflection , FOUNDATIONS OF EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION provides an even more practical introduction to caring for and educating children from birth to age 8. The text presents an overview of important theory grounded in the key skills new educators need to succeed - from respect for the diversities of children and families to achieving the most current NAEYC standards.

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Foundations of Early Childhood Education in a Diverse Society

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Foundations of Early Childhood Education in a Diverse Society [Gonzalez-Mena, Janet] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Foundations of Early Childhood Education in a Diverse Society

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Capacity Building in Educational Leadership: A Path Towards Decolonizing and Indigenizing 

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Capacity Building in Educational Leadership: A Path Towards Decolonizing and Indigenizing 

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Decolonizing Our Classrooms Starts With Us

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Decolonizing Our Classrooms Starts With Us

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Being an antiracist is an active and ongoing practice one engages in for life. It takes patience, reflection, and commitment. I believe that being an antiracist starts with going inward and taking stock of what we feel and know to be true. Only then can we begin to analyze how dominant ideology and white supremacy have shaped our individual beliefs and behaviors. While the work and act of understanding oneself deeply can be challenging and uncomfortable, it is absolutely critical if our goal is to uproot and decolonize the spaces and systems we move through, subscribe to, and in many cases, benefit from.

Being an antiracist educator is no different. But I do believe that because our work is dynamic and our reach is wide, our job is more urgent than ever. The time is long overdue to think radically about teaching and learning, and it begins with us.

Don't talk about it, be about it.
Lerone Bennett Jr. said, "An educator in a system of oppression is either a revolutionary or an oppressor." I see no lies. Educators have a special role in the revolution, they always have. With the number of students and families we serve, I believe that our impact is truly unmatched. This is a privilege and I say that with both joy and urgency. I implore you all to take action and stay active even when words are no longer buzzworthy.

Here are some ideas to help you get started.

Assess how the culture of power is manifested in your classroom.
Educators have a responsibility to dismantle racism that is built and wired into schooling, testing, response to behavior, and curriculum. However, the first step is to address our own role in perpetuating racism and assess how we may be replicating the culture of power (or dominant culture and aspects of whiteness) in the classroom as described in Lisa D. Delpit's, The Silenced Dialogue: Educating Other's People's Children.

Teachers are, by nature, incredibly quick, decisive, and efficient. We have to be. We hear things like "work smarter not harder" and "what has the highest leverage?" You know what I am talking about. But, what if, for a moment, we slowed down and looked at these decisions and the status quo that currently exist within our classroom walls. Have we become complacent?

Take a moment to write down your teaching ideology when it comes to your students and their abilities.

You might start with:

How do you view success?

What are your expectations for your students?

Now, think about your seating arrangements and the types of learning activities you plan and have your students engage in. Are students seated facing you at all times?

Do students collaborate and engage in interactive learning structures?

Think about if and how you actively amplify student voice and build student agency in the classroom. Do students have a voice and do they have a say in their learning?

Think about the student to teacher talk ratio and the nature of discussions in your classroom. Are you the sole or loudest voice in the classroom?

Think about how you talk to your students and about your students. Do you use deficit-based language or hold assimilationist beliefs?

Think about how you resolve issues in the classroom. Are you inquiry-stanced and solutions oriented?

Do you engage in power struggles with students?

How often do you give students referrals and how quickly?

Now, do your answers align with your ideology?

In Mapping the Terrain(s) of Ideology, Paula Elliot writes: "Ideological clarity allows teachers to make instructional decisions so that all their students can cultivate critical skills and dispositions to co-construct curricula that are relevant to their world." Teachers can support students to learn that they are not dependent on having access to the canon and knowledge legitimized by others. A commitment to seek clarity helps teachers define student achievement that provokes understanding of the content, context, and purposes of standardized test requirements, as well as purposes of a more just society. So equipped, their students can then make ethical and responsible choices in terms of how they want to live their lives and how they want to contribute to society at large. We must keep this the forefront of our teaching and planning.

Amplify the voices and stories of our students and their ancestors.
Textbooks and core curriculum are manifestations of the culture of power. It is imperative that we take a closer look at these texts that we have been assigned and for some, passively assigning to our young people. We cannot contribute to the erasure of history. It is our responsibility as educators to take steps in finding texts that not only showcase the voices and stories of our students and their ancestors, but prioritize and humanize them beyond a month on the calendar. But what if I am white? Nobody is asking you to be an expert or to pretend to know more than you do. This question is rooted in you being at the center. But I don't know where to start and I don't have access to the right people or resources. This is another example of you being rooted at the center. I invite you to take your white liberal teacher hat off and be the student. Continue to read and soak up information from those who have been doing the work for years. The information is out there.

Teaching and planning beyond the basics.
We cannot continue to prioritize basic skills and test preparation.To put so much emphasis on standardized testing, which is rooted in inequity and the eugenics movement, is and continues to be a disservice for our young people. When educators focus on achieving basic skills, we fail to equip students with the agency to evaluate, create, and analyze for themselves. What we need to be focusing on is holding space to learn and practice skills needed to navigate the world. This includes critical thinking skills and world knowledge required to make informed decisions. This includes the truth and history of the country so that our students know a false narrative or lie when they are presented with one. They need to know their rights.

Educators who are antiracist have the capacity to teach and plan through a critical race lens. When planning from scratch, educators use backwards design and are intentional with essential questions and learning goals, objectives, and outcomes. Educators who are antiracist are also able to look critically at existing curriculum within our content areas to decide if there is opportunity to make it antiracist and if there is opportunity, be able to identify it and act on it. By the same token, educators know if something is inherently racist and/or perpetuates white supremacy or dominant narratives, and gets rid of the lesson or unit altogether.
It is also essential that we teach our young people about what racism is and model for them how to be antiracist. This starts with giving your students sanctuary within four walls to learn, practice, and speak up against injustice. Students must learn how to be antiracist and we must teach them.
There are many ways to approach this act of decolonizing the classroom. Continue to listen, learn, reflect, act, and, then, repeat. Before creating content and speaking on a topic or on behalf of a group of people, take a pause and seek what has already been shared, researched, and created from educators and leaders before you. Remember that what works for one teacher and their classroom may not work for you and yours.

For now, I encourage my fellow educators to take the final weeks of summer to recharge and rethink your physical and digital classroom for the upcoming school year. For those who are soon to receive children in the coming weeks, good luck! May us all recognize there are no days off for an antiracist educator. Happy Planning!

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decolonizing our classrooms starts with us

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Decolonizing Our Classrooms Starts With Us | PBS Education

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Your source for teaching inspiration, blogs, and online professional events.

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Advances the literature on decolonizing educational leadership that offers both a theoretical framework as well as practical applications in schools

Responds to current issues that educational leaders are facing

Offers new, more inclusive ways of thinking about educational leadership

Table of contents (7 chapters)

About this book

"Grounded in historical context, Lopez draws on her experience as a practitioner and scholar to methodologically examine 'the continued tensions in education and schooling.' Decolonizing education in these unprecedented times amid a pandemic and racial unrest is a call to action in schools and society."

-Gaëtane Jean-Marie, Dean and Professor of Educational Leadership, Rowan University, USA

"Lopez effectively and brilliantly presents the case for critical and liberating approaches to educational leadership. The work is massively unique in its temporality in that it focuses on an area that has somehow mostly avoided the urgent need to examine its structures and outcomes. Indeed, the contents of this book are forwardly recasting educational leadership as a pragmatically constructed, cognitively dynamic, and programmatically inclusive platform for polycentric teaching, learning, and leadership. It will greatly benefit educational leadership scholars, students, and professionals."

-Ali A. Abdi, Professor, Department of Educational Studies, The University of British Columbia, Canada

This book offers new ways of engagement for leaders seeking to connect theory to practice in decolonizing education. In the current climate where xenophobia, anti-immigrant sentiments, and other forms of exclusion make up much of the discourse, educational leaders need to seek ways to foreground other forms of knowledge and transfer them into their daily leadership practices. Lopez contributes to other critical leadership approaches while foregrounding a decolonizing approach that unsettles the coloniality manifested in education and school practices. Chapters provide school leaders with examples of ways they can challenge coloniality, white supremacy, and other forms of oppression in schooling that negatively impact some students and their educational outcomes.

Ann E. Lopez is Professor in the Department of Leadership, Higher, and Adult Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), Director of the Center for Leadership and Diversity, and Provostial Advisor on Access Programs at the University of Toronto, Canada. She is the author of Culturally Responsive and Socially Just Leadership in Diverse Contexts: From Theory to Action (2016).

Reviews

"Grounded in historical context, Lopez draws on her experience as a practitioner and scholar to methodologically examine 'the continued tensions in education and schooling.' Decolonizing education in these unprecedented times amid a pandemic and racial unrest is a call to action in schools and society."

-Gaëtane Jean-Marie, Dean and Professor of Educational Leadership, Rowan University, USA

"Lopez effectively and brilliantly presents the case for critical and liberating approaches to educational leadership. The work is massively unique in its temporality in that it focuses on an area that has somehow mostly avoided the urgent need to examine its structures and outcomes. Indeed, the contents of this book are forwardly recasting educational leadership as a pragmatically constructed, cognitively dynamic, and programmatically inclusive platform for polycentric teaching, learning, and leadership. It will greatly benefit educational leadership scholars, students, and professionals."
-Ali A. Abdi, Professor, Department of Educational Studies, The University of British Columbia, Canada

"Amidst the current tensions of education, this book draws on a rich body of literature on social justice and decolonization interwoven with unique personal and academic experience. This cutting-edge resource is a must-read for twenty-first century educational leaders and policy makers who genuinely seek to make a difference through culturally responsive and decolonized educational leadership and policy as it studiously exposes one of the most somber global problems facing diversified societies."
- Khalid Arar, Associate Professor of Educational Leadership and Policy, Texas State University, USA, and Associate Editor, International Journal of Leadership in Education

"A 'must read' for educational leadership, this book advances the theoretical foundations and proactive approaches for decolonizing education through clarity in one's positionality, responsibilities, and approaches in achieving a more cognitively just education for all students."
- Marie Battiste, Professor Emerita of Educational Foundations, College of Education, University of Saskatchewan, Canada

Authors and Affiliations

Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto, Toronto, Canada

Ann E. Lopez

About the authors

Ann E. Lopez is Professor in the Department of Leadership, Higher, and Adult Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), Director of the Center for Leadership and Diversity, and Provostial Advisor on Access Programs at the University of Toronto, Canada. She is the author of Culturally Responsive and Socially Just Leadership in Diverse Contexts: From Theory to Action (2016).

Bibliographic Information

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Drawing on research conducted with school principals in the global south, Kenya and Jamaica and the global north, this book offers a decolonizing framework and praxis grounded in the values, norms and epistemologies of those who have been excluded in the educational leadership discourse.

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Interdisciplinary Approaches Toward the Ends of Empires

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Interdisciplinary Approaches Toward the Ends of Empires

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Applications are now being accepted until 07.01.2022!

The workshop will provide an interactive space for doctoral candidates and early-career researchers to present ongoing projects on the processes of decolonization in imperial metropoles. It aims to draw attention to the underexplored spaces and sources that historicize empire's lasting presence at home. Through a mixture of presentations and hands-on source discussion, we hope to foster debate on the historical experiences of decolonization as well as on interdisciplinary theoretical or methodological approaches to the study of the end of European and non-European empires.

In recent years, public attention has been directed to the remnants of empire hiding in plain sight throughout imperial metropoles. The tearing down of the Edward Colston statue in the UK, public outcry over the presence of streets named after colonial officers in France or Uganda, popular demonstrations in support of decolonizing university curriculums around the world, and controversial efforts to deal with the holding of colonial objects in museums are all testaments to the shadowed persistence of empire, long after its formal end. This awareness has been heightened by new historical research on the traces of empire, left to dust during and after the processes of formal decolonization. Building on these impulses, our workshop will bring together doctoral candidates and early-career researchers to discuss their new and innovative approaches to historicizing the afterlives of empire. By bringing a diverse group of scholars together, our workshop hopes to facilitate a wider understanding of the processes of decolonization and their impact on "post-imperial" societies.

We Invite proposals from a variety of imperial (non-European and European) and disciplinary contexts, concerning but not limited to:
- Identifying "empire" in imperial metropoles during and after decolonization
- Innovative sources in imperial history
- Perspectives on comparative decolonization processes
- Continuity of imperial practices and logics after the end of empire
- Theoretical or methodological approaches to sources in imperial history
- Examples of "overlooked" contexts of imperialism in post-imperial histories

The workshop will take place digitally over two days, with an evening lecture on the eve of the workshop to kick it off. The first day will be made up of presentations and discussions of individual projects, concluding with a keynote comment on historical sources in the writing of decolonization histories. The second day will be hands-on and include deliberation on the diverse body of sources used by the participants. We ask participants to bring a paper that includes consideration of their selected sources to be shared with the group. We aim to foster a discussion on the methodological and epistemological concerns regarding various sources and their potential(s).

An Abstract of 200-300 words should be submitted to stephen.foose@uni-marburg.de and lena.jur@uni-marburg.de by January 07, 2022. It should include a brief overview of the applicant's project and a few words on their proposed source.

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Sources of Decolonization: Interdisciplinary Approaches Toward the Ends of Empires

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The digital workshop will bring doctoral candidates and early-career researchers together to discuss underexplored sources and spaces of empire's lasting presence after formal decolonization. Through a mixture of project presentation and source discussion, we aim to foster debate on the historical experiences of decolonizations and on interdisciplinary methodological and theoretical approaches to the study of the end of non-European and European empires.

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Oxford University suggests ‘decolonising’ music syllabus, following years of pressure by students

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Oxford University suggests ‘decolonising’ music syllabus, following years of pressure by students

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Oxford University academic proposes 'decolonisation' of music syllabus. Picture: Getty

Oxford music academic proposes to "decolonise the syllabus" and make the subject more inclusive following pressure from Black Lives Matter demonstrations.

A professor from one of the world's leading universities is hoping to "decolonise" its degree-level music offering and enhance the diversity of the undergraduate curriculum.

In documents seen by The Telegraph, an academic from the University of Oxford proposed a lighter focus on Euro-American elite music, "arising from international Black Lives Matter demonstrations".

They said they want to address the "white hegemony" in Oxford's music syllabus, and to better represent other forms of music.

Possible changes to undergraduate courses include reducing the focus on canonic classical composers like Mozart and Beethoven, in a proposed move away from "white European music from the slave period".

It was reported that the professor questioning the music curriculum's "complicity in white supremacy" also proposed a lighter focus on western music notation, allegedly described in the documentsas a "colonialist representational system".

Western staff notation, which has become the most internationally accepted musical language, is one of the fundamental components of the western classical tradition in music. Notation, meanwhile, has developed over time and varies widely between cultures.

However, the music faculty denies any proposals to remove western notation from its curriculum.
Read more: ABRSM must include more black composers in exam syllabus, music leaders urge >

Proposals to increase representation of Black composers like Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. Picture: Getty

A spokesperson told Classic FM: "While retaining (and in no way diminishing) our traditional excellence in the critical analysis, history and performance of the broad range of western art music, we are exploring ways to enhance our students' opportunities to study a wider range of non-western and popular music from across the world than is currently on offer, as well as music composition, the psychology and sociology of music, music education, conducting, and much more."

The faculty added that the plans, forged "in consultation with our staff and students" will be published in the summer following University approval.

According to the documents, the faculty member also suggested learning skills like playing the piano, or conducting orchestras, should no longer be compulsory. They said these skills "structurally centre [around] white European music", causing some "students of colour great distress".

Documents also highlight the issue of an "almost all-white faculty" giving "privilege to white musics".

The professor, hoping to expand their coverage of non-Eurocentric genres beyond hip-hop and jazz, proposed to rebrand "special topics" as "Introduction to Sociocultural and Historical Studies".

Options focusing on Schubert 's music could also be changed to focus on 'African and African Diasporic Musics', 'Global Musics' or 'Popular Musics'.

'Decolonising' the syllabus comes as part of an effort to acknowledge how Western Art Music has, throughout history, travelled and forced itself as a dominant genre, giving itself higher emphasis than diverse or grassroots styles.

It was also proposed that pop music could play a bigger role, allowing students to study flagship events in pop culture, from 'Dua Lipa's Record Breaking Livestream' to 'Artists Demanding Trump Stop Using Their Songs '.

The documentation, which arose from a faculty "away day", comes amid fears degree-level music will become inaccessible to students if universities do not increase the voices and stories on their curriculums.
Read more: Kadiatu Kanneh-Mason says music education is crucial for diversity >
While Music A-Level and GCSE uptake is at an all-time low, greater representation of non-European and American thinkers could also encourage a more diverse pool of students to take up music at university.

The conversation comes amid wider calls to "decolonise the curriculum" and to think about widely taught ideas - from music, to history - in a more globally connected way.

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Oxford University professor suggests 'decolonising' music syllabus to make it less 'white European'

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Oxford music academic proposes to "decolonise the syllabus" and make the subject more inclusive following pressure from Black Lives Matter demonstrations. A professor from one of the world's leading universities is hoping to "decolonise" its degree-level music offering and enhance the diversity of the undergraduate curriculum.

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All this new noise

Decolonisation is a cause célèbre that has been making the rounds on the agenda of an increasing number of universities in recent years, with rising staff consciousness and changing student demographics/ demands encouraging institutions to address overlooked narratives and silenced perspectives within still-operating systems of structural oppression. While many decolonial efforts have been undertaken actively in North America and Australia, and in departments of history, political science and sociology, increasingly in the United Kingdom, music departments are slowly, if sometimes reluctantly, seeking to address epistemological shifts in their very structures of existence. These exertions have ranged from questioning the raison d'être behind knowledge-building itself in an idealised (and unattainably) equal world, to curriculum reviews both superficial and extensive. Polite panel discussions have been organised alongside the rearing up of fiery messages channelling #RhodesMustFall campaigns on mailing lists, blogs, podcasts and vociferous social media platforms led by younger student voices - with social media becoming platforms crucial for the decolonisation of narratives and methodologies themselves, particularly in the affordance of spaces to both marginalised voices and thinkers who choose not to speak in, for want of a better word, potentially elite language styles of 'academese'. Tackling day-to-day anxieties of 'politically correct' versus 'triggering' discussions in classrooms of morphing and differently-privileged participants as well as teachers, has stepped up from the generic to the targeted. More specifically in the COVID-hit month of June 2020, the global fallout of the not-unrelated #BlackLivesMatter movement (henceforth #BLM), returned with renewed energy following protests against the murder of George Floyd, led to an increased call for actions on all academic and societal fronts. An intervention was made by scholar-musician-activist Danielle Brown, whose open letter to ethno/musicologists on her blog 'My People Tell Stories' and to the mailing list of the Society for Ethnomusicology exposed the long-unsaid but widely-known reality: that systemic racism is embedded within the field in small and large degrees; that academia itself (including ethnomusicology) remains a neocolonial enterprise - by dint of its default setup of (often, BIPOC/ Black & Global Majority [henceforth BGM]) research informants as secondary inputs to the careers of (often, tenured, elite and white) scholars in established institutions.

That decolonisation is caught up in uproar, debate, activism and necessary institutional change is clear enough. But can (or will) it be incorporated into the periodisation of musical epistemologies à la modernism, postmodernism or the still-trendy 'awakenings' brought about by queer theory and posthumanist thinking and pedagogies? What are the differences between decolonising music, decolonising ethnomusicology and decolonising the academy itself (including its human constituents)? Who gets to decide? Does musical decolonisation look different in the proverbial Global South as opposed to the Global North - and where does transnationalism link the two up? Can we decolonise decolonisation itself, as Yarmimar Bonilla (2020) asks? Is decolonisation a by-word for broader anti-racist campaigns in music studies? How can these conversations take place without degenerating into unhelpful binaries of Culture Wars-led identity politics?

As I write from within the UK, a panel discussion on the very subject - including the place of class - was convened by the Asian Music Unit at the Music Department at Goldsmiths, University of London, while global calls for dialogues on the same theme, in non-traditional formats, are being made by the International Council for Traditional Music. Earlier in July 2020 in the thick of an (ongoing) pandemic, several hundred interested parties from timezones around the world congregated online to engage in deep dialogue and activism on Decolonising The Musical University, the second event of its kind organised by a team from the University of Edinburgh. Across the sector, calls for/ discussions around decolonisation or diversification of curricula on public and/ or private fora have been made at institutions deemed 'traditional' and/ or 'elite' in the popular imagination, ranging from Oxford and Cambridge to the Associated Board for the Royal Schools of Music. At the same time, backlash responses have quickly arisen, openly and behind closed doors, in the form of anonymous anti-decolonial petitions and private email chains targeting and boycotting the work of alleged activists. Yet more sub-conversations about crises of 'trendy wokeness' (now turned into an ironic descriptor) and performative allyship on social media have muddied the waters in a swirl of discussions. These have arisen alongside intersectional demographic splits in BIPOC/BGM communities themselves, over fears of counterattacks and loss of precariously-gained ground/good faith/'polite' discussion spaces alongside white-aligned privileges that show up fissures brought about through shadism, colourism and class politics.

Ethnomusicology Forum's new conversation space: frank and brutal stories

In trying to create a published academic space that can platform frank and brutal dialogues grounded in lived and practical experience, and in deliberate avoidance of polarising rhetoric made in the name of 'Race-vs-Class Wars', the following series of reflections in this issue of Ethnomusicology Forum have been rounded up as a special collection of short to mid-length essays. These pieces of writing are featured in our journal's new alternative format introduced in 2018 and dedicated to the presentation of topical and evolving conversations on the discipline. Crucially, they are penned by authors from diverse positionalities, backgrounds and marginalities. In a deliberate attempt to rethink publication formats and notions of 'the final word' on a subject, this issue begins with a set of personal reflections by the b/Black philosopher and musician, Alexander Douglas. The piece is meant to be read as a prelude to necessarily evolving extensions of initial thoughts expressed here, which Douglas intends to publish on parallel video, internet and print platforms. Following this, three candid takes from the framework of praxis and on-the-ground negotiations in applied decolonial work at the International Library of African Music in South Africa appear, through thickly-descriptive contributions by Lee Watkins, Boudina McConnachie and Elijah Madiba. A fifth piece by Javier Rivas Rodríguez provides the student's voice 'from below', bringing the concept of 'care' into attempts at interrogating inclusivity in music studies as a separate discussion from equality and diversity. This is followed by an evaluation of Irish musical pedagogy as seen from the positionality of postcolonial Indian Ocean contexts by Karishmeh Felfeli-Crawford, who examines the positional usefulness of analysis today (including the recently-incendiary Schenkerian method). Yet another perspective from South Africa, this time expanded in a longer and insightful consideration of white and female pedagogical authority, is provided by Marie Jorritsma. In this article, she argues for more compassionate ethnomusicology that eschews narrow and polarised discourses on race-determined control of music curricula. Writing from Latin America, the symbolic 'origin' of decolonisation as a theoretical framework, Raúl Renato Romero provides a short memoir of his experiences in neocolonial Peruvian musical institutions of higher learning. Finally, I provide a closing view on intersectional approaches, via personal stories recounted through my vantage point as a transnational and postcolonial Singaporean (Chinese) ethno/musicologist.

As the titles and summaries suggest, individual entries are presented in diverse narrative styles ranging from urgent call-outs to quiet reflections and shows of open vulnerability. Even in articles from apparently similar vantage points in this special issue, the conclusions can be different. But therein lies a point: decolonisation cannot be reduced to a single approach; if anything, multiple re-voicings are part of its processes of upheaval, change, activism and re-engagement. Further, shifts in tectonic plates of global power have been amplified by new technological landscapes now dramatically altered by the ramping up of virtual communications in the thick of COVID-19, leaving formerly colonised states still battling inherited legacies of oppression even as they have also become new colonisers (in the case of China for example).

Decolonisation is messy and always situational. It is often conducted with ambivalence alongside hope, compromise and vulnerability in the need to go off-piste and rogue. It requires willingness to learn and bounce back from mistakes. It is always a work-in-progress, and as much about learning how to find and shape voices-in-the-making even as it is about reclaiming stolen platforms. Decolonisation is not a simple matter of returning to primitivism or a simplistic overthrowing of powers in the binary - whether of 'the West' by 'the East' or of 'the North' by 'the South' - but about how a search for equal playing fields across the world necessitates the recognition of colonial trauma unevenly passed down (and sometimes unwittingly reified) through the experiences of multiple generations. Situational and newer politico-economic privileges (and fragilities) have emerged in intersectional ways among the formerly colonised who still live within frameworks of coloniality (and in many cases have no choice but to hold onto minimal privileges - language; governance systems; religion - left behind by colonisers). Multiple, distributed agencies, micro-activisms and conversations are part of the paradigms. These are sometimes overlapping; other times not quite but almost intersecting, and yet other times at cross-purposes.

Often, the deliberate attempt to be reflexive and truthful - seen in many heartfelt testimonies in this issue - can be fraught exercises in self-flagellation and/ or the exposure of openness to attack. Minefields are aplenty: in writing about ourselves in our academic contexts there is the side effect of 'friendly fire' upon colleagues we respect (or not) in our immediate workplaces. In taking a stance itself on navel gazing and a tougher position on inherited structures of power and opportunity, we risk the wrath of governing or employer institutions, or of bringing unintended parties into collateral damage. We call to account disciplinary institutions (of ethnomusicology and music studies) which we hold dear (or not), and whose politico-economic structures we shelter under (for ethical, professional, paycheck and selfish reasons). And in so doing we humble ourselves as deeply-implicated scholar-musicians operating with different kinds of advantage within hierarchical structures, with our different kinds of academic and class privilege.

And yet, as we tell our stories; we speak for the sake of being heard; we perform micro-activisms against micro-aggressions; we 'call in' as well as call out. We test and stake our ethical, disciplinary and personal boundaries. Necessarily individual, always situational and in constant states of recalibration, these changing demarcations of limits in the form of conditional go-to zones and no-go markers help us figure out where we choose to make our separate interventionist (as opposed to default) stands. To channel Danielle Brown again, in these acts of (re)evaluating and (re)narrating our particularised ways of being (and ways of not-being, or ways of hopeful being), we determine, individually, what decolonisation might mean to each of our different selves in our ethos, pedagogy, practice, and as a means of imagining desired futures.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Shzr Ee Tan is an ethnomusicologist researching Sinophone and Southeast Asian worlds at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is interested in impact-based issues of music and decolonisation, aspirational cosmopolitanism, and race discourses in music scenes around the world (including HE). Her published and ongoing work tends towards understanding marginality through the lenses of intersectionality.

1 See the recent discussions on the SEM-L mailing list over the period of June-August 2020, and also posts on closed Facebook Group Decolonizing Ethnomusicology from June-August 2020. See also moving Twitterfeed textscape for #decolonizing music, and the following websites: https://projectspectrummusic.com/, https://decolonizingthemusicroom.com/, https://www.nateholdermusic.com/, accessed 1 November 2020.

2 See Alexander Douglas' contribution in this issue.

3 'An Open Letter on Racism in Music Studies'. Danielle Brown, June 12 2020. https://www.mypeopletellstories.com/blog/open-letter, accessed 7 September 2020.

4 Various terms, from POC/ BIPOC (Persons of Colour/ Black, Indigenous and People of Colour) largely used in the United States to BAME/ BME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic BME/Black and Minority Ethnic) and BBIAPOC (Black, Brown, Indigenous and Asian People of Colour) in the UK have been used to designate communities of colour. In this article, I use both the better known BIPOC label and the more accurate BGM (Black & Global Majority) which addresses and flips the erroneous notion that persons of colour belong to a statistical minority in a global context, even as their access to wealth and opportunity is grossly under-equivalent). I also specifically capitalise 'B' and 'I' in specific reference to Black and Indigenous communities as a mark of respect. For a detailed critique of ethnicity taxonomies, see Alexander Douglas' article in this issue and also his blogpost, https://alexanderdouglas.info/2021/05/07/a-critique-of-ethnicity-taxonomies/, accessed 26 May 2021.

5 Bonilla, Yarimar. 2020. With Ryan C. Jobson. Public Thinker: Yarimar Bonilla on Decolonizing Decolonization, Public Books. https://www.publicbooks.org/public-thinker-yarimar-bonilla-on-decolonizing-decolonization/, accessed 3 November 2020.

6 Music Panel: Decolonising Music. https://www.gold.ac.uk/calendar/?id=13316, accessed 7 September 2020. See also video recording https://vimeo.com/469503335, accessed 22 November 2020.

7 http://www.ictmusic.org/dialogues2021, accessed 23 November 2020.

8 Decolonising the Musical University website, University of Edinburgh. https://www.ed.ac.uk/edinburgh-college-art/reid-school-music/decolonising-musical-university, accessed 7 September 2020.

9 See for example petition run by the Musician's Union, https://www.musiciansunion.org.uk/ABRSM-Diversify, accessed 7 September 2020. Also petition run initiated by Grace Healy and documented by Musicians' Union, https://www.musiciansunion.org.uk/Home/News/2020/Jun/Decolonialising-the-Music-Curriculum-Sign-the-Peti, accessed 7 September 2020.

10 Examples of these include Twitter-based campaigns and spin-offs of the 'Musicians Against Woke Ideology' movement, as well as (to this author's knowledge) one secret closed-group email chain in the UK in an elite university.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Special issue: Decolonising music and music studies

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Decolonisation is a cause célèbre that has been making the rounds on the agenda of an increasing number of universities in recent years, with rising staff consciousness and changing student demographics/ demands encouraging institutions to address overlooked narratives and silenced perspectives within still-operating systems of structural oppression.

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New Music Decolonization in Eight Difficult Steps 

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New Music Decolonization in Eight Difficult Steps 

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By George E. Lewis.

My brief but memorable collaboration with the sound art collective Ultra-red at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2012 considered this question: “What is the sound of freedom?”

I was reminded of this when I read an interview with meLê yamomo in Outernational: “Wie klingt Kolonialismus?” With respect to the very interesting ideas I read there, I feel that we already know what colonialism sounds like. We hear it at all too many contemporary music festivals around the world, as they participate in the continuous recirculation of the stereotype of exclusive whiteness around classical music’s self-image. But the composers and improvisers are not the ones producing the sounds of colonialism. Rather, it is the music curators and institutions who have been composing and improvising colonialism.

So what we would like these people to do is to help audiences discover what decolonization sounds like. How can we counter the impoverishment and devolution of the field that has resulted from the consistent absences of the same ethnic, racial, and gendered voices from stages, media, music histories, and professional networks? How could music curators could start composing and improvising decolonization? What would a decolonized curatorial regime sound like?

To some extent, we know what such a regime would look like, with the advent of documenta 11 in 2002, when the late Nigerian Okwui Enwezor became the first nonwhite curator of the festival. Art historians Anthony Gardner and Charles Green observed that “documenta 11 painted a picture of contemporary art as a network in which New York, Lagos, London, Cape Town, and Basel were more or less equally important to a contemporary canon and similarly crucial in understanding contemporaneity, as opposed to some centers being exotic margins and others more genuinely cosmopolitan and contemporary.” Surely there is no reason why festivals and other important institutions that support contemporary music could not do the same. Why don’t they do it?

What I ultimately expect is that, like colonialism, we will be able to hear decolonization in the everyday life of sounds heard at festivals large and small. For the rest of this short essay, I’d like to propose eight “steps” that we can take toward achieving this end.

1) Move beyond kinship. Invest in new populations.

Sara Ahmed writes, “An institutional logic can be understood as kinship logic: a way of ‘being related’ and ‘staying related’… Institutional whiteness is about the reproduction of likeness... Institutions are kinship technologies, a way of reproducing social relations.”[1] Similarly, in music, genre and kinship often co-present, as predicted by its root, gen- (genetic, genotype, and even gender). Genre markers like improvised music, classical, contemporary, jazz, zeitgenössisch, Neue Musik, etc., are also about the reproduction of likeness, while too often functioning after the fashion of the Procrustean bed. As these kinship-like discourses become adopted as natural by institutions such as festivals, academic programs, and foundations, they act as obstacles to change.

2) Give up on meritocracy.

Some granting organizations and festivals in the US have always achieved greater gender and racial diversity than others—think MacArthur, Alpert, United States Artists. Others, including some of the most prestigious–and they know who they are—have never given an award to or programmed the work of an Afrodiasporic composer, although in the wake of the George Floyd murder, some felt obliged to offer pro forma expressions of solidarity with Black Lives Matter.

What we used to hear is that these kinds of decisions were based on merit—but in fact there is no such thing as “the best composer.” The impact of many years of fake meritocracy, as well as decades of curatorial, commissioning, and academic employment and admissions decisions proceeding from what theorist bell hooks has called “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy,” amounts to an investment in a certain sector of the society, and a complementary disinvestment in other segments of the population. The deleterious results of this disinvestment appear in the very low number of women and people of color that I have found over more than forty years (in several countries) of evaluating applications for graduate school, grants, academic employment, and more, as well as decidedly non-diverse outcomes in contemporary music programming.

This means that what has been called white privilege, a phenomenon that is by no means limited to the United States, becomes a form of unearned equity that crosses gender lines intersectionally. The tragedy is that undoubtedly brilliant composers—male, female, non-binary—who through accidents of birth stand to benefit from this regime are nonetheless trapped with everyone else in a system of bad faith.

3) Diversify school music programs.

Identify and recruit young composers and performers from non-majoritarian backgrounds and institute early composition programs. Private and public music programs up to the university level should have publicly articulated plans for increasing diversity, with outcome reporting.

4) Encourage ensembles to commission

…and program in diverse ways, including specific calls for composers of color and historical and cultural themes that foreground non-majoritarian experience. For those who see this as a form of the hated quotas, I can offer a recent saw: “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.” Once I asked my mother, “If they have Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, why they don’t have Children’s Day?” Her response: “Every day is Children’s Day.” Rather than being a victim of discrimination, I was actually taking for granted being a beneficiary of all that daily attention.

“There is no reason why major music institutions that tout themselves as international should continue to present all-white programs.”

5) Make decolonization an explicitly foregrounded part of cultural policy.

Muhal Richard Abrams, cofounder of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, once said: “We know that there are different types of black life, and therefore we know that there are different kinds of black music. Because black music comes forth from black life.” Similarly, decolonized music will emerge from decolonized life. But curators will need to start living decolonized lives, in which new genderrace relationships will produce new sounds. A failure to hear these new sounds constitutes not only a form of sensory deprivation, but also an addiction to exclusion-as-identity that ends up, as addictions often do, in impoverishment of the field, or even its eventual death.

6) Internationalize music curation decisions.

Many curatorial decisions, particularly at the most prestigious festivals, are international, not local to one country. There is no reason why major music institutions that tout themselves as international should continue to present all-white programs. Curators from non-majoritarian ethnicities, genders, and regions should be engaged, a practice that could allow audiences to hear a greater range of aesthetic and methodological directions. While themselves far from perfect, we can look to the best aspects of the policies and practices of major visual arts institutions since documenta 11 for guidance. It will also not be enough to limit artists of color to low-infrastructure commissions and inexpensive searches for existing work while excluding them from important investments in new creations.

7) Encourage media discussions of new music decolonization.

Find ways to discuss the decolonization of new music on radio and television, and in newspapers, magazines, and academic journals. Back in 1980, the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik actually published an article portraying diversity as an important trend in US music curation. [2] Find out what has been published lately on this topic, and encourage more.

8) Change of consciousness.

The present essay is adapted from a talk I gave in September 2020 at the conference “Curating Diversity in Europe: Decolonizing Contemporary Music.” The website text referred to a need for “keeping the discourse on diversity in contemporary music in Europe alive.” However, I’ve lately started to consider the possibility that diversity discourse, despite the progress it has made, has now reached its peak. I know that many among us were just getting started with diversity, and to have someone come along and say that it might already be over seems annoying at the very least. But hear me out on this. I’ve been hearing about diversity for a really long time now, and over the decades, I’ve experienced considerable skepticism around that discourse and how institutions deploy it.

In Western European countries, for example, gender statistics are more readily available than other demographic vectors, while the refusal of governments to log race and ethnicity outcomes is portrayed as justified to promote national unity and avoid identity politics. However, while under every colonizing regime, it is women who bear a greater share of the oppression, that oppression is regularly experienced intersectionally with race. Thus, as French socio-demographer Patrick Simon writes: “One may well wonder whether the negation of minority identities that prevails in France in the name of universalism is not often simply a tactic for consolidating the position of dominant groups.”[3] So an intersectional approach to gender and race should prompt suspicion and impatience with discourses that suggest that we can do one first, to the delay or even the exclusion of the other; after all, Dr Martin Luther King already told us “Why We Can’t Wait.”

Do not be taken in by the misdirections deployed by those who would have us spin in place, obsessing over spurious issues of “identity politics.” Such baleful binaries as “identity or excellence” and “quality or inclusion,” so often invoked in response to demands for greater and more diverse representation, are aimed at preemptively foreclosing initiatives by non-majoritarians to win space, while portraying women and people of color as the only identity politicians around.

“I have suggested that a mental envelope of creolization would allow contemporary music to move beyond its Eurocentric conception of musical identity.”

I have suggested that a mental envelope of creolization would allow contemporary music to move beyond its Eurocentric conception of musical identity toward becoming a true world music.[4] And by Eurocentric, I do not mean “Eurological”–a term I see more and more, one I invented in a 1996 article.[5] For me, the Eurological, alongside other cultural logics, could become part of a continuously interrogatory, networked project of decolonization. The Eurocentric, by contrast, seems simplistic, hegemonic, closed, and as that older article stated, “ethnically essentialist.”

I drew upon the model of creolization as a way toward inserting the imagined sound of new music decolonization into our collective inner ear. Of course, I originally chose this metaphor because it specifically references race and the multinational. A creolized contemporary music culture would be race-aware, not race-deaf, establishing a mosaic identity that recognizes historical, geographical and cultural cross-connections—not so much to achieve diversity as to pursue a new complexity that promises far greater creative depth.

Some of the children of color being born now, right here in Europe, will be writing a new sonic chapter in the history of the region and the world, one that recognizes, with the philosopher Arnold I. Davidson, the true promise of new music decolonization: “Multiplication of perspectives means multiplication of possibilities.” Then, perhaps we can redirect “diversity” toward “new music decolonization.”

But what keeps us from realizing this promise? A blockage of consciousness is probably the greatest obstacle. I fear that diversity discourse leads us to a prosthetics of inclusion—like a clunky metal knee replacement. Instead, you and I need to invent a new, incarnative “we” that understands contemporary music not as a globalized, pan-European, white sonic diaspora, but more like the blues, practiced by the widest variety of people in many variations around the world. If this new “we” can embrace “our” future, even with all its turbulence, if we can place ourselves conceptually in the situation of a creole, we can reaffirm our common humanity in the pursuit of new music decolonization. ¶

[1] Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2012), 38–39.

[2] John Rockwell, “’New Music' in Amerika,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (November-December 1980): 546–551.

[3] Patrick Simon, “The Choice of Ignorance: The Debate on Ethnic and Racial Statistics in France,” in Patrick Simon, Victor Piché, and Amélie A. Gagnon, eds., Social Statistics and Ethnic Diversity: Cross-National Perspectives in Classifications and Identity Politics (Heidelberg, New York, Dordrecht, and London: Springer Open, 2015), 75.

[4] George E. Lewis, "The Situation of a Creole,” in “Defining Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Music,” forum convened and edited by David Clarke, Twentieth Century Music 14:3 (2017): 442–46.

[5] George E. Lewis, "Improvised Music After 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives,” Black Music Research Journal, vol. 16, No.1 (Spring 1996): 91–122.

The present essay is adapted from a talk at the Symposium “Curating Diversity: Decolonizing Contemporary Music” on Sep 25, 2020 organized by "Sounds Now", a European network dedicated to promoting more diversity and inclusion in contemporary music and sound art, in cooperation with the Akademie der Künste Berlin, inm / field notes and Ultima festival in Oslo.

New Music Decolonization in Eight Difficult Steps

By George E. Lewis.

My brief but memorable collaboration with the sound art collective Ultra-red at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2012 considered this question: “What is the sound of freedom?”

I was reminded of this when I read an interview with meLê yamomo in Outernational: “Wie klingt Kolonialismus?” With respect to the very interesting ideas I read there, I feel that we already know what colonialism sounds like. We hear it at all too many contemporary music festivals around the world, as they participate in the continuous recirculation of the stereotype of exclusive whiteness around classical music’s self-image. But the composers and improvisers are not the ones producing the sounds of colonialism. Rather, it is the music curators and institutions who have been composing and improvising colonialism.

So what we would like these people to do is to help audiences discover what decolonization sounds like. How can we counter the impoverishment and devolution of the field that has resulted from the consistent absences of the same ethnic, racial, and gendered voices from stages, media, music histories, and professional networks? How could music curators could start composing and improvising decolonization? What would a decolonized curatorial regime sound like?

To some extent, we know what such a regime would look like, with the advent of documenta 11 in 2002, when the late Nigerian Okwui Enwezor became the first nonwhite curator of the festival. Art historians Anthony Gardner and Charles Green observed that “documenta 11 painted a picture of contemporary art as a network in which New York, Lagos, London, Cape Town, and Basel were more or less equally important to a contemporary canon and similarly crucial in understanding contemporaneity, as opposed to some centers being exotic margins and others more genuinely cosmopolitan and contemporary.” Surely there is no reason why festivals and other important institutions that support contemporary music could not do the same. Why don’t they do it?

What I ultimately expect is that, like colonialism, we will be able to hear decolonization in the everyday life of sounds heard at festivals large and small. For the rest of this short essay, I’d like to propose eight “steps” that we can take toward achieving this end.

1) Move beyond kinship. Invest in new populations.

Sara Ahmed writes, “An institutional logic can be understood as kinship logic: a way of ‘being related’ and ‘staying related’… Institutional whiteness is about the reproduction of likeness... Institutions are kinship technologies, a way of reproducing social relations.”[1] Similarly, in music, genre and kinship often co-present, as predicted by its root, gen- (genetic, genotype, and even gender). Genre markers like improvised music, classical, contemporary, jazz, zeitgenössisch, Neue Musik, etc., are also about the reproduction of likeness, while too often functioning after the fashion of the Procrustean bed. As these kinship-like discourses become adopted as natural by institutions such as festivals, academic programs, and foundations, they act as obstacles to change.

2) Give up on meritocracy.

Some granting organizations and festivals in the US have always achieved greater gender and racial diversity than others—think MacArthur, Alpert, United States Artists. Others, including some of the most prestigious–and they know who they are—have never given an award to or programmed the work of an Afrodiasporic composer, although in the wake of the George Floyd murder, some felt obliged to offer pro forma expressions of solidarity with Black Lives Matter.

What we used to hear is that these kinds of decisions were based on merit—but in fact there is no such thing as “the best composer.” The impact of many years of fake meritocracy, as well as decades of curatorial, commissioning, and academic employment and admissions decisions proceeding from what theorist bell hooks has called “white supremacist capitalist patriarchy,” amounts to an investment in a certain sector of the society, and a complementary disinvestment in other segments of the population. The deleterious results of this disinvestment appear in the very low number of women and people of color that I have found over more than forty years (in several countries) of evaluating applications for graduate school, grants, academic employment, and more, as well as decidedly non-diverse outcomes in contemporary music programming.

This means that what has been called white privilege, a phenomenon that is by no means limited to the United States, becomes a form of unearned equity that crosses gender lines intersectionally. The tragedy is that undoubtedly brilliant composers—male, female, non-binary—who through accidents of birth stand to benefit from this regime are nonetheless trapped with everyone else in a system of bad faith.

3) Diversify school music programs.

Identify and recruit young composers and performers from non-majoritarian backgrounds and institute early composition programs. Private and public music programs up to the university level should have publicly articulated plans for increasing diversity, with outcome reporting.

4) Encourage ensembles to commission

…and program in diverse ways, including specific calls for composers of color and historical and cultural themes that foreground non-majoritarian experience. For those who see this as a form of the hated quotas, I can offer a recent saw: “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.” Once I asked my mother, “If they have Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, why they don’t have Children’s Day?” Her response: “Every day is Children’s Day.” Rather than being a victim of discrimination, I was actually taking for granted being a beneficiary of all that daily attention.

“There is no reason why major music institutions that tout themselves as international should continue to present all-white programs.”

5) Make decolonization an explicitly foregrounded part of cultural policy.

Muhal Richard Abrams, cofounder of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians, once said: “We know that there are different types of black life, and therefore we know that there are different kinds of black music. Because black music comes forth from black life.” Similarly, decolonized music will emerge from decolonized life. But curators will need to start living decolonized lives, in which new genderrace relationships will produce new sounds. A failure to hear these new sounds constitutes not only a form of sensory deprivation, but also an addiction to exclusion-as-identity that ends up, as addictions often do, in impoverishment of the field, or even its eventual death.

6) Internationalize music curation decisions.

Many curatorial decisions, particularly at the most prestigious festivals, are international, not local to one country. There is no reason why major music institutions that tout themselves as international should continue to present all-white programs. Curators from non-majoritarian ethnicities, genders, and regions should be engaged, a practice that could allow audiences to hear a greater range of aesthetic and methodological directions. While themselves far from perfect, we can look to the best aspects of the policies and practices of major visual arts institutions since documenta 11 for guidance. It will also not be enough to limit artists of color to low-infrastructure commissions and inexpensive searches for existing work while excluding them from important investments in new creations.

7) Encourage media discussions of new music decolonization.

Find ways to discuss the decolonization of new music on radio and television, and in newspapers, magazines, and academic journals. Back in 1980, the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik actually published an article portraying diversity as an important trend in US music curation. [2] Find out what has been published lately on this topic, and encourage more.

8) Change of consciousness.

The present essay is adapted from a talk I gave in September 2020 at the conference “Curating Diversity in Europe: Decolonizing Contemporary Music.” The website text referred to a need for “keeping the discourse on diversity in contemporary music in Europe alive.” However, I’ve lately started to consider the possibility that diversity discourse, despite the progress it has made, has now reached its peak. I know that many among us were just getting started with diversity, and to have someone come along and say that it might already be over seems annoying at the very least. But hear me out on this. I’ve been hearing about diversity for a really long time now, and over the decades, I’ve experienced considerable skepticism around that discourse and how institutions deploy it.

In Western European countries, for example, gender statistics are more readily available than other demographic vectors, while the refusal of governments to log race and ethnicity outcomes is portrayed as justified to promote national unity and avoid identity politics. However, while under every colonizing regime, it is women who bear a greater share of the oppression, that oppression is regularly experienced intersectionally with race. Thus, as French socio-demographer Patrick Simon writes: “One may well wonder whether the negation of minority identities that prevails in France in the name of universalism is not often simply a tactic for consolidating the position of dominant groups.”[3] So an intersectional approach to gender and race should prompt suspicion and impatience with discourses that suggest that we can do one first, to the delay or even the exclusion of the other; after all, Dr Martin Luther King already told us “Why We Can’t Wait.”

Do not be taken in by the misdirections deployed by those who would have us spin in place, obsessing over spurious issues of “identity politics.” Such baleful binaries as “identity or excellence” and “quality or inclusion,” so often invoked in response to demands for greater and more diverse representation, are aimed at preemptively foreclosing initiatives by non-majoritarians to win space, while portraying women and people of color as the only identity politicians around.

“I have suggested that a mental envelope of creolization would allow contemporary music to move beyond its Eurocentric conception of musical identity.”

I have suggested that a mental envelope of creolization would allow contemporary music to move beyond its Eurocentric conception of musical identity toward becoming a true world music.[4] And by Eurocentric, I do not mean “Eurological”–a term I see more and more, one I invented in a 1996 article.[5] For me, the Eurological, alongside other cultural logics, could become part of a continuously interrogatory, networked project of decolonization. The Eurocentric, by contrast, seems simplistic, hegemonic, closed, and as that older article stated, “ethnically essentialist.”

I drew upon the model of creolization as a way toward inserting the imagined sound of new music decolonization into our collective inner ear. Of course, I originally chose this metaphor because it specifically references race and the multinational. A creolized contemporary music culture would be race-aware, not race-deaf, establishing a mosaic identity that recognizes historical, geographical and cultural cross-connections—not so much to achieve diversity as to pursue a new complexity that promises far greater creative depth.

Some of the children of color being born now, right here in Europe, will be writing a new sonic chapter in the history of the region and the world, one that recognizes, with the philosopher Arnold I. Davidson, the true promise of new music decolonization: “Multiplication of perspectives means multiplication of possibilities.” Then, perhaps we can redirect “diversity” toward “new music decolonization.”

But what keeps us from realizing this promise? A blockage of consciousness is probably the greatest obstacle. I fear that diversity discourse leads us to a prosthetics of inclusion—like a clunky metal knee replacement. Instead, you and I need to invent a new, incarnative “we” that understands contemporary music not as a globalized, pan-European, white sonic diaspora, but more like the blues, practiced by the widest variety of people in many variations around the world. If this new “we” can embrace “our” future, even with all its turbulence, if we can place ourselves conceptually in the situation of a creole, we can reaffirm our common humanity in the pursuit of new music decolonization. ¶

[1] Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2012), 38–39.

[2] John Rockwell, “’New Music' in Amerika,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (November-December 1980): 546–551.

[3] Patrick Simon, “The Choice of Ignorance: The Debate on Ethnic and Racial Statistics in France,” in Patrick Simon, Victor Piché, and Amélie A. Gagnon, eds., Social Statistics and Ethnic Diversity: Cross-National Perspectives in Classifications and Identity Politics (Heidelberg, New York, Dordrecht, and London: Springer Open, 2015), 75.

[4] George E. Lewis, "The Situation of a Creole,” in “Defining Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Music,” forum convened and edited by David Clarke, Twentieth Century Music 14:3 (2017): 442–46.

[5] George E. Lewis, "Improvised Music After 1950: Afrological and Eurological Perspectives,” Black Music Research Journal, vol. 16, No.1 (Spring 1996): 91–122.

The present essay is adapted from a talk at the Symposium “Curating Diversity: Decolonizing Contemporary Music” on Sep 25, 2020 organized by "Sounds Now", a European network dedicated to promoting more diversity and inclusion in contemporary music and sound art, in cooperation with the Akademie der Künste Berlin, inm / field notes and Ultima festival in Oslo.

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New Music Decolonization in Eight Difficult Steps • VAN Outernational #14

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Scope & Sequence - Integrated Curriculum

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Scope & Sequence - Integrated Curriculum

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Link to editable spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/14R8pniCXBzmByh_bug-BNom7ZWpepS5KrZNq9IIxiHE/copy

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Decolonising Math is Rooted in a Decades-Old Conflict

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Decolonising Math is Rooted in a Decades-Old Conflict

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For decades, a conflict has been simmering in the elementary school classrooms of the English-speaking world. On one side are those who place mathematics understanding above all else and whose teaching methods involve asking students to figure out ways to solve authentic mathematics problems, focusing on the process while de-emphasizing the importance of obtaining correct answers. On the other side, often painted as stuffy traditionalists, are those who assert the importance of explicit teaching, practice, and memorization. Welcome to the math wars.

The origins of the math wars stretch back to the educational progressivists of the 19th century. Drawing on the writing of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, while reviling the strict discipline and recitation of the school house of the 1800s, they demanded a new, reformed mode of education. Learning should proceed through experience. After all, kids can learn lots of things through pure immersion, from recognizing individual faces, to speaking their mother tongue, navigating their local area or sharing resources with friends. Why should they not learn math the same way? Why can't learning be more natural and joyful? The traditionalists, for their part, insisted that young children need to have math fully explained to them and that attention must be devoted to the task of memorizing "math facts" such as that 7 × 8 = 56.

Such debates continue today, with prominent educationalists still arguing against children "rote learning" multiplication facts. Add to this the evergreen motif of the patronizing and foolish mathematics professor who notes, as if nobody has ever thought of this before, that school math is different to what professional mathematicians do. Professional mathematicians formulate conjectures, waving their hands in the air while dancing around seminar rooms and writing funny symbols on whiteboards in spasms of inspiration. Why cannot school math be more like that? Instead of solving sets of routine problems, why not give students complex, real-world problems to solve so that they may also wave their hands and feel inspired?

The empirical evidence weighs heavily on one side of this debate. Despite concerted efforts, there is no body of properly controlled education research that demonstrates that relative novices learn math best through solving problems. In fact, the research suggests quite the reverse. This can be explained by a widely accepted fact of our mental architecture. "Working memory" is the term psychologists use to describe the thoughts we are consciously processing at any one time-the thoughts we are aware we are having. (It is sometimes referred to as "short-term memory" and contrasted with "long term memory.") Our working memories, through which all new academic learning must pass, are extremely limited and so giving complex problems to children who have few existing mental resources to tackle them-such as a knowledge of multiplication facts stored in their long-term memories-simply overloads working memory, leading to frustration and little learning. Novices are quite different in this sense to experts. Experts have entire networks of interconnected concepts stored in their long-term memories they can wield at a problem with little effort-they have relevant knowledge to think with-and that's why the best methods for teaching novices do not necessarily look like the methods used by professional mathematicians.

If this is true, how come we can learn so many things without explicit teaching, like our first language? Here, educational psychologist David Geary may be on to something. The capacities that we are able to learn through experience are perhaps ones we have evolved to learn. Humans have been speaking to each other for a long time and long enough for evolution to act on the process of children learning their mother tongue. In contrast, writing and symbolic math are only a few thousand years old at best and for much of that time have been the preserve of only a tiny proportion of the human population. There simply has not been sufficient time for us to evolve natural ways to learn to read or do math through immersion.

The evidence is now so strong for the efficacy of the explicit teaching of academic subjects that few serious educational psychologists proffer learning through problem solving as superior, with those inclined towards that view now retreating to the position of arguing that a little open-ended problem solving prior to explicit teaching may help children learn more than explicit teaching alone, a proposition that has been the subject of my own PhD research. For what it's worth, I did not generate any evidence to support this idea.

So, will we see an end to the math war? Hardly. Educational psychologists do not have the last word on educational methods, an environment in which they are vastly outnumbered by other kinds of academics and bureaucrats who apply quite different standards of evidence. This conflict will keep going and it is instructive to understand why.

Those who support the learning-through-problems approach are always able to find a new angle. Sometimes it is technology. Once, it was the advent of the 21st century. In 2021, the strategy appears to be one based on social justice. You may think that the ends of social justice would be best served by teaching math in the most effective way possible, but that does not appear to be the case.

California's new mathematics framework, for example, devotes two chapters to equity and engagement. In these chapters, we read that equitable and engaging teaching involves using open, engaging tasks, teaching towards social justice and inviting students' questions and conjectures. The problems teachers pose to their students must be authentic:

An authentic problem, activity, or context is one in which students investigate or struggle with situations or questions about which they actually wonder. Lesson design should be built to elicit that wondering. In contrast, an activity is inauthentic if students recognize it as a straightforward practice of recently-learned techniques or procedures...

This approach is sold on the grounds that it honors the diverse lives and histories of students from a range of cultures and from historically marginalized groups. In reality, such tasks are likely to overload the working memory of children who have not yet mastered the relevant concepts, unless degraded to the point that they involve little, if any, math. But then, who wants to be "inauthentic"? That sounds bad.

Some take this approach even further, arguing for an antiracist approach to math education. A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction: Dismantling Racism in Mathematics Instruction, is a document created by teachers and educationalists in California with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Some of what it propounds does not sit within the frame of the traditional math teaching debate, such as the need to "center ethnomathematics." Ethnomathematics is apparently the relationship between culture and mathematics and is a term that "requires a dynamic interpretation." Centering ethnomathematics asks teachers to, "Identify and challenge the ways that math is used to uphold capitalist, imperialist, and racist views." This looks like an attempt to politicize math and turn it into one of the humanities. If disadvantaged children receive this kind of teaching while their more advantaged peers learn actual math, any achievement gap can only widen.

Other antiracist approaches to math teaching outlined in the paper seem more aligned with the progressivist tradition, such as the directive to, "Teach mathematics through project-based learning and other engaging approaches." Because, you know, reasons. And you'll be a racist if you don't.

There is an odd tension here. It's not entirely clear whether the advocates of new math regard the subject as a legitimate form of enquiry that should be made more accessible to people of color or merely an expression of white supremacy that needs to be dismantled, decolonized, and turned into a social science. Recently, Twitter blew up with a discussion about whether 2 + 2 can equal 5. The central point of contention seems to be between math's claim to universal truth and the kind of subjective, lived-experience approach embraced by many social justice movements. As A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction explains, "The concept of mathematics being purely objective is unequivocally false, and teaching it is even much less so. [sic] Upholding the idea that there are always right and wrong answers perpetuate[s] objectivity as well as fear of open conflict." Which is, of course, a profoundly silly take.

There are even those who think that objective, rational linear thinking-math-is a facet of "whiteness." I view such an attitude as racist, not least because it discounts the work of non-white mathematicians as well as the obvious fact that math courses are often more popular with minority students than with white students. However, if you really did believe that math was somehow an expression of an oppressive white culture, why teach it at all? Or at least, why teach it well?

If that's your attitude then ineffective teaching methods are not a bug but a feature.

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Decolonising Math is Rooted in a Decades-Old Conflict

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For decades, a conflict has been simmering in the elementary school classrooms of the English-speaking world. On one side are those who place mathematics understanding above all else and whose teaching methods involve asking students to figure out ways to solve authentic mathematics problems, focusing on the process while de-emphasizing

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10 Questions To Begin Decolonizing Mathematics In Your Classroom

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10 Questions To Begin Decolonizing Mathematics In Your Classroom

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10 Questions To Begin Decolonizing Mathematics In Your Classroom

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In order to rehumanize mathematics, which has been an emergent theme recently in mathematics, we must first start to tell the correct…

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At a time when decolonisation, part of which involves changing the content of what's taught, is dominating debate at many universities, the discipline of mathematics presents an interesting case.

But it's not obvious how mathematics can be decolonised at the level of content. This means that those within the discipline must consider other aspects: curriculum processes, such as critical thinking and problem solving; pedagogy - how the subject is taught and, as a number of people have argued, addressing the issue of identity.

Students' mathematical identities - how they see themselves as learners of mathematics and the extent to which mathematics is meaningful to them - are important when thinking about teaching and learning in mathematics.

In his book Leading for change, South African educationist Jonathan Jansen suggests that transforming university campuses into deracialised spaces requires attention to both the academic and the human project. I take the human project to mean how students see themselves. What might this mean for mathematics?

So what is mathematics?

For starters, it's important to explore what mathematics actually is.

Mathematician and academic Jo Boaler points out that mathematics is the only subject where students and mathematicians give very different answers to this question.

Mathematicians view the subject as an exciting, creative endeavour in which problem solving, curiosity, excitement, intuition and perseverance play important roles - albeit in relation to abstract objects of study.

For school and even undergraduate mathematics students, these aspects of mathematics are often not experienced and remain opaque. Students tend to believe that mathematics is a set of procedures to be followed. They think only particularly gifted people can do and understand these procedures. This suggests that the way mathematics is usually taught doesn't provide opportunities for accessing mathematical knowledge. It doesn't allow students to identify with mathematics, nor make them aspire to become mathematicians.

As a result, mathematics has a problem with diversity. All over the world, black and women mathematicians remain rare. They simply don't take mathematics at higher academic levels as much as their white and male peers.

One reason for this is given by a study in the US, which showed that the more a field attributes success to giftedness rather than effort, the fewer female and black academics are in that field. This is because the field perpetuates stereotypes about who belongs in the field. The same study found that mathematics professors hold the most fixed ideas about giftedness.

But this view of giftedness versus effort is not borne out by research. A number of scholars have argued that all people are capable of learning mathematics, to high levels.

This suggests that a lot of the "bad press" around mathematics as a subject and discipline lies with how it is taught and learned.

What is learning?

When scholars theorise learning, the thinking always happens in two directions: to the past, and to the future.

Some see learning as building on current knowledge in a step-wise linear way. Some see it as working in a spiral -- coming back to old ideas in new ways. Still others view learning as disrupting or transforming current knowledge.

For teachers, working with current knowledge means finding ways to ascertain, predict, anticipate and think about students' ideas - and finding ways to engage with these. An important part of students' ideas about mathematics is how they see themselves in relation to mathematics. Research in schools has shown that one of the key factors in students' mathematics achievement is a teacher who believes that they can do mathematics.

The future is important because universities must produce future thinkers, leaders, professionals and citizens. These institutions are the bridge between the past and the future.

Educational theorist Etienne Wenger argues that learning is fundamentally about becoming a certain kind of person. At universities, students are inducted into disciplines, fields and professions that require them to be certain kinds of people with certain orientations to the world, to knowledge, to other people and to practice.

Traditionally universities have focused on knowledge and hoped that identity will follow. This hasn't been entirely unsuccessful. But to genuinely transform the academic project, universities must do explicit identity work with their students. Academics must engage in the human project, thinking about who their students are and what their previous experiences of mathematics and of learning mathematics have been.

Towards genuine change

There have been attempts to transform the content of school mathematics curricula. These include ethnomathematics, which excavates the mathematics in cultural objects, artefacts and practices; and critical mathematics, where mathematics is used to critique aspects of society and where students critique mathematics, for example, how algorithms structure our lives in ways which reproduce inequality.

However, not all of mathematics can be accessed in these ways. For true epistemological access to mathematics, students need to study it systematically, as a body of knowledge in and of itself. This can be both empowering or disempowering.

Much, though certainly not all, of mathematics was created by dead white men. But maths should and does belong to everybody. Everybody deserves access to its beauty and its power - and everybody should be able to push back when the discipline is used to destroy and oppress.

To transform mathematics teaching and learning in ways that empower students, universities need to give students the theoretical grounding they need to access the subject and support them to identify with it -- to want to learn it, to become the mathematicians of the future, to enjoy and critique mathematics and its applications.

This means that as teachers, my colleagues and I need to believe - to know - that all students can do mathematics. This knowledge must be transmitted to them. They must be shown that mathematics is a human enterprise: it belongs to all, and it can be taken forward to transform society.

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Yes, mathematics can be decolonised. Here's how to begin

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Some have suggested that deracialising the academy requires all researchers, teachers and students to link knowledge and identity. What might this mean for mathematics?

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Decolonizing Place in Early Childhood Education

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Decolonizing Place in Early Childhood Education

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"In this groundbreaking work, Dr. Fikile Nxumalo invites critical thinkers, educators, and activists into a series of unsettling pedagogies of resistance and geographies of radical kinship. Dr. Nxumalo asks us to reimagine the practices of early childhood education, and environmental education in historically contextualized, politically demystified, and ethically-reflexive ways. Through interrogations of anthropogenic, anti-Black and settler colonial complicities in early childhood education, Dr. Nxumalo opens up new possibilities for ethical living and learning- a radically relational kinship with all of our relations. Situated in a compelling critical analysis of environmental degradation, precariousness, and exploitation, Dr. Nxumalo offers a timely intervention in the field of education. In contrast to preoccupation with psychocentric notions of complex trauma and damage-centered narratives of childhood, Dr. Nxumalo calls educators to take seriously the structural materiality of violence and alterities to it. To chart these unknown futures, Dr. Nxumalo brilliantly theorizes with Black, Indigenous, post-humanist, and feminist studies¬; and invites us to consider refiguring presence, witnessing, friction, and the super-complexity of ethical entanglements with one another and more-than-human life. This book is nothing short of strong medicine-to affirm Black and Indigenous life, futures and freedoms; and to call us to action towards different ways of being and doing with, and of land, water, and more than human life. This book should be required reading in studies in education, not only for its incredible theoretical contribution, but for the ways it will enliven radical imagination and movements of resistance."

-Jeffrey P. Ansloos, Assistant Professor of Indigenous Mental Health and Education, University of Toronto-Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, Canada

"Decolonizing Place in Early Childhood Education by Dr. Fikile Nxumalo should be required reading for educators, researchers and students concerned with the most salient challenges facing early childhood education in the age of the Anthropocene. Dr. Nxumalo builds on decades of experience as an early years scholar, pedagogista, and early years practitioner to offer boldly reimagined theoretical work that disrupts the compromised white anthropocentric anchors of traditional early years education.
The volume draws from Nxumalo's sustained engagement with early years research sites and practice in settler colonial contexts. A lively transdisciplinary dialogue is enacted through concrete examples that reconfigure children's messy entanglements with the more than human, including mountains, fallen trees, bees, worms and gardens. Chapters are anchored around new theoretical and methodological frames, such as refiguring presence, geotheorizing, and testifying-witnessing. Each frame is a call to action to meticulously destabilize the damaging logics of settler colonial anthropocentrism. While holding space for the many promises of posthumanist and more-than-human perspectives, Nxumalo confronts their limitations for resolving the persistent Western appropriation of Indigenous world making and place relations. The standout final chapter proposes an ethico-ontological framework for nuanced, contingent alliances among Black and Indigenous pedagogies that tackles questions of (de)coloniality across transits of empire.

This vibrant volume brings a provocative and resoundingly productive vision to bear on the thick ethical conundrum of early childhood education in settler states."

-Sandrina de Finney, Associate Professor, School of Child and Youth Care, University of Victoria, Canada

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Decolonizing Place in Early Childhood Education

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This book draws attention to the urgent need for early childhood education to critically encounter and pedagogically respond to the entanglements of environmentally damaged places, anti-blackness, and settler colonial legacies.

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About our Presenters:

About Dr. Fikile Nxumalo:

Dr. Fikile Nxumalo is an assistant professor in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching & Learning at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Her work is centered on environmental and place-attuned early childhood education that is situated within and responsive to children's inheritances of settler colonialism, anti-Blackness and environmental precarity. Her book, Decolonizing Place in Early Childhood Education (Routledge, 2019) examines the entanglements of place, environmental education, childhood, race, and settler colonialism in early learning contexts on unceded Coast Salish territories.
About Dr. Cristina Delgado Vintimilla:
Cristina Delgado Vintimilla is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Education at York University. She is also a pedagogista within the Italian tradition. Cristina's area of research is pedagogy as living knowledge and as that which thinks and troubles education as a normative project. Currently, her research focus on creating pedagogical inquiries and pedagogies that address the complexities of educational contexts (formal and informal) in the Global North and South. As a pedagogista, Cristina is particularly interested in the intersection between pedagogy and the arts as a generative intersection for imagining alternative onto-epistemologies.

About Danielle Alphonse:

Danielle has worked for many years in Aboriginal Education in early childhood/child care settings (infants and toddlers), First Nations Education (FNED) in Victoria working with children in kindergarten as well as high school level students regarding cultural awareness. As an Aboriginal Supported Child Development Consultant (ASCD) at a Victoria agency she worked on providing services to urban Aboriginal families. Danielle is in her sixth year as the BC Regional Innovation Chair for Aboriginal Early Childhood Development (AECD) and is working on a number of exciting community-based initiatives.
About Norm Leech:
Norm has been the Executive Director for the Vancouver Aboriginal Community Policing Centre (VACPC) since May 2016, and is a frequent speaker, facilitator, and storyteller, about the experience of Indigenous peoples in Canada. Norm shares about the Indigenous Worldview and ways of being and knowing and communicating, and sharing about Indigenous relations including genders, the written word, and with the land. Norm is trained in facilitation with the Canadian Human Rights Foundation (now Equitas) and with St'at'imc Restorative Justice in Lillooet.

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Fall 2021: Decolonizing Childhood Spaces - The Learning Centre

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About Dr. Fikile Nxumalo: Dr. Fikile Nxumalo is an assistant professor in the Department of Curriculum, Teaching & Learning at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Her work is centered on environmental and place-attuned early childhood education that is situated within and responsive to children's inheritances of settler colonialism, anti-Blackness and environmental precarity.

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Our Research

After the demise of apartheid, higher education has been concerned with gender, race, class, sexuality, and ability but little attention has been paid as yet to age as a category of exclusion. In particular the concepts of child and childhood have not been included in decolonial discourses about the transformation of educational spaces and curricula. Despite decades of sustained academic critique and contestation in early childhood research, current programmes of study globally and the pedagogies promoted in their courses still tend to assume the essentialised, universal western child who develops according to a stage-like linear process of formation according to his/her/their innate potential (developmentalism).

Moreover, the concept 'child' tends to refer to a chronological child-being in the world and childhood as a phase in a human being's life with little or no relevance for pedagogies and methodologies in higher education. Some power-producing binaries continue to do their damaging exclusionary work, such as Culture/Nature, Adult/Child, Higher Education/Early Childhood Education. The DECD project continues to de(con)struct notions such 'Indigenous', 'postcolonial' and 'decolonising' by troubling unilinear temporalities and a meta/physics of individualism. Theorising difference differently opens up these (and other) concepts to include young children's animistic philosophising and material-discursive non/sense making. Natureculture philosophies are urgently needed in the (controversially) termed Anthropocene - the geological time of a human-damaged planet as the result of global industrial capitalism, the standardisation of universal time, the mechanisation of labour and the extraction of fossil fuels.

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The DECD project provides caring intellectual spaces - both face to face and virtual, for philosophers, theorists and practitioners to intra-ract across diverse geographical contexts to engage in enquiry and deliberation about agential realism, posthumanism, new materialism and the impact that these philosophies have for de/colonising early childhood, in particular developing approaches which have resonance for southern perspectives and contexts. One of the critiques that posthumanism is based on is the unproblematised western character of knowledges - white, male, heterosexual, able - which are assumed to be applicable in all contexts and which have been used to subjugate other knowledge practices in their dominance. What sets this project apart is its interest also in how posthumanism itself tends to ignore how age is often overlooked in its theorising. The researchers on this project are acutely aware of these knowledge practices and one of the objectives of the project is to investigate and problematise knowledges from both Northern and Southern contexts, to trouble adult-centrism, with an eye on developing and evaluating postcolonial posthumanist frameworks to innovativepedagogies, research practices and academic programmes in all phases of education.

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DECOLONISING EARLY CHILDHOOD DISCOURSES PROJECT

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DECOLONISING EARLY CHILDHOOD DISCOURSES: A CRITICAL POSTHUMANIST ORIENTATION IN HIGHER EDUCATION

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Link to editable spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-1dMB-lcoVBSuTU051kfuS3S85GcAwoElCg133GnoBI/copy

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Link to editable spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1h9kuFSOjmdx7lMrdddJAs_9tUsxfGukEtYfLabYaOV8/copy

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Districts Advancing Racial Equity (DARE) Tool

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Districts Advancing Racial Equity (DARE) Tool

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Decades of reforms have proven insufficient to address persistent racial disparities in educational opportunities. In school systems across the United States, meaningful efforts to ensure access to strong educational opportunities require a bold and significant shift. Policies and practice must not only prevent discrimination; they must move beyond simple notions of equality-in which every student gets the same-to equity-in which all students get what they need to develop academically, socially, emotionally, and physically.

School leaders who have been committed to racial equity understand the historical legacy of structural racism that reaches to our present context and that results in the educational opportunity gaps that students still experience. District staff who have focused on racial equity recognize that students' individualized experiences, opportunities, and successes in school are deeply contextualized in the social reality of institutionalized racism across the United States. They seek to educate the individuals and ameliorate the systems that perpetuate inequitable opportunities and resulting outcomes for students.

The Districts Advancing Racial Equity (DARE) tool brings together-in a uniquely broad and practical way-what is known about district actions that can support racial equity. The tool captures research-informed, high-leverage aspects of schooling that leaders must address in order to create systems that build on the strengths of and respond to the needs of students of color. This tool is not an exhaustive, one-size-fits-all manual for advancing racial equity in school districts. Rather, it helps conceptualize and organize systems-level equity work and provides a guide for district leaders to interrogate their systems, set equity-oriented goals, and track progress over time. The tool offers a framework for district leaders and staff to understand the complex ecosystem of policies and practices they design and enact. The tool also contains a set of qualitative and quantitative indicators to support data-informed decision-making and track progress toward greater racial equity.

The system we need requires educational leaders in every corner of our nation to respond in new ways to the complex challenges they navigate and to pay attention to the social, historical, economic, and political contexts of the communities they serve. Although the domains of district work included in this tool are not new, few researchers or practitioners have applied a racial equity lens to these key areas. The DARE tool responds to this need, leveraging what we know about district systems to build on the assets of and respond to the needs of students of color.

The Framework

The following graphic presents the framework for advancing racial equity that sits at the heart of this tool. The framework for advancing racial equity is based on the supposition that achieving racial equity means that student success is not predetermined by student race. Student success occurs when students demonstrate developmentally appropriate academic knowledge and skills; preparation for work, life, and civic participation; and the social-emotional skills that undergird healthy self-image and relationships with others and the broader world. The framework also recommends that districts set direction and take action in an ongoing cycle of improvement in partnership with school community members. The DARE framework consists of six key domains. To achieve racial equity, districts must have the following:

A clear vision for racial equity

Deeper learning and culturally responsive instructional practices

Safe, healthy, and inclusive school environments

Resources that are equitably distributed

Meaningful partnerships with families and the community

Data systems that drive progress toward racial equity

The domains are arranged in a wheel to demonstrate their essential interconnection in a system approach to racial equity.
The Southern Education Foundation, in partnership with the Learning Policy Institute and the National Equity Project, launched the Racial Equity Leadership Network (RELN), a fellowship that brings together superintendents and other cabinet-level leaders to strengthen their capacity to advance racial equity in their school systems. The DARE tool was developed to support the work of the fellows and staff from other districts interested in leading this work. It is based on a systematic review of literature and existing instruments for advancing systems-level equity. In its final form, the DARE tool was peer-reviewed by leading academic scholars and practitioner-experts.
This tool is published jointly by the Learning Policy Institute and the Southern Education Foundation.

This research was supported by the Southern Education Foundation. Core operating support for the Learning Policy Institute is provided by the Heising-Simons Foundation, Raikes Foundation, Sandler Foundation, S.D Bechtel Jr. Foundation, and William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. We are grateful to them for their generous support. The ideas voiced here are those of the authors and not those of our funders.

Districts Advancing Racial Equity Tool by Maria E. Hyler, Desiree Carver-Thomas, Marjorie Wechsler, and Larkin Willis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

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Districts Advancing Racial Equity (DARE) Tool

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Decades of reforms have proven insufficient to address persistent racial disparities in educational opportunities. In school systems across the United States, meaningful efforts to ensure access to strong educational opportunities require a bold and significant shift.

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Diversity in Schools Must Include Curriculum

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Diversity in Schools Must Include Curriculum

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The evidence paints a clear picture: students who attend diverse public schools learn more, exhibit less racial prejudice, and report higher overall self-confidence. But to fully realize the potential of these benefits, schools must ensure diversity exists on every level by ensuring diverse enrollment, integrating classrooms, and crucially, implementing curricula which reflects the history and culture of students of all backgrounds-advocates for equitable education reform must be invested in diversifying not only classrooms, but lesson plans, too. Unfortunately, a recent change to the Advanced Placement World History curriculum shows that the fight for diversity in curricula remains an uphill battle.

As researchers Amy Stuart Wells, Lauren Fox, and Diana Cordova-Cobo note in their report How Racially Diverse Schools and Classrooms Can Benefit All Students, support for school integration "must go beyond creating schools with diverse enrollments to curricular and accountability approaches that allow educators to tap into the multiple educational benefits of diversity." What does this recent curriculum change say about diversity in American education today, and what can be done to respond?

AP World History's Eurocentric Makeover

This May, The College Board unveiled a plan to narrow the scope of its World History Advanced Placement Exam, having its subject matter now range from c. 1450 to the present. The new test removes over 9,000 years of history, eliminating lessons ranging from the birth of Confucianism to the expansion of the West African Kingdoms. This revision represents a step backwards for diversity in school curriculum and towards an even more Eurocentric view of world history in American education. The College Board, a nonprofit organization which administers a variety of tests, including Advanced Placement (AP) exams and the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT), argued that the change would focus the course, as its current scope is far too broad to be covered in a year's time. It proposed, instead, teaching what would have traditionally been the first half of AP World History in a separate, "pre-AP" course, reasoning that such a similar course would be taught at the college level in this manner. However, pre-AP courses cost schools money (up to $6,500 per course), meaning that this new revision would rob many students, especially students of color in underfunded schools, of the opportunity to take an AP World History class that covers the so-called "periods 1-3" in world history.

Supporters of the move argue that the course was simply too sprawling in its current formation. Still, the revision was heavily criticized by many teachers, students, and education experts, who argued that beginning the course with period 4 (around the year 1450 A.D.) would give students a view only on a period of history dominated by Western expansion and imperialism. At a Salt Lake City forum held by Trevor Packer, the head of the AP World History program, AP World History teacher Amanda DoAmaral pointed out: "It's so cool for students to learn [the third period] because it's the one time in history that Europe wasn't the big dog-it was in the Dark Ages while the rest of the world was innovating."

DoAmaral was far from the only person criticizing the measure and emphasizing importance of students learning about the pre-colonial world. William Conway, an AP World History teacher in Janesville, Wisconsin, also admonished Parker at the meeting: "If we start the story at 1450, we lose so much of the richness of that story. [People of color] are still there in these periods. But the role they play is secondary. It's colonized. ... It's the story of what Europeans do to them." Students, too, were drawn to the issue. One particular student-organized petition on Change.org asking The College Board to rescind their decision has garnered over 11,000 signatures as of July 9. In an open letter to Packer, Mary Beth Borton and James Grossman, president and executive director of the American Historical Association, respectively, urged Packer to revise the test, citing concern over moving history as a discipline in a "Western-centric" direction.

The College Board has clearly felt the mounting criticism. In response, they are backtracking and exploring "ways to shift the start date several centuries earlier, while still ensuring that students and teachers no longer have to race through the course." However, at the writing of this piece, the College Board has not taken any steps to reverse their initial decision.

A Bigger Problem: State and Local History Standards

Part of what has made the Board's decision so disheartening is that it emerges in an educational landscape where Eurocentrism in history and social studies is already the norm. It's worth noting that The College Board offers AP World History, AP United States History, and AP European History, but offers no courses that specifically educates students on the non-white world. The changes made to the AP World History curriculum will only exacerbate the lack of diverse history curricula in state and federal standards that we currently see.

State standards for world history remain shockingly thin, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, Eurocentric. Most states do not test specifically for historical knowledge or understanding, but rather incorporate history into their standards for English language arts (ELA). This leaves less classroom instruction time for history of any kind. Even when history is taught, it's often from a skewed perspective. As pointed out by world historians Richard Drayton and David Motadel in the Journal of Global History, "the field remains driven covertly by Western priorities... returning us often by non-Western routes to the idols of the old 'Rise of the West' historiography." These two trends are evident in the standards for the Common Core, a standard for college and career readiness voluntarily adopted by forty-one states and the District of Columbia. Only one subsect of the ELA program is dedicated to "Literacy in History/Social Studies, Science, & Technical Subjects," requiring "certain critical content for all students, including classic myths and stories from around the world, America's founding documents, foundational American literature, and Shakespeare." Not only are these standards vague, but also orient the few specific suggestions they give solely toward Western literature.

A comprehensive study of individual state standards paints an equally disappointing picture. After studying the history curricula of all fifty states and the District of Columbia, researcher Walter Russell Mead of the Fordham Institute found that " states generally fail to address the non-Western world in sufficient detail." One need not look any further than Massachusetts, where state standards were revised this January for the first time in fifteen years. Despite attempts to incorporate previously silenced voices into their curriculum, only ten of the fifty suggested history readings in the new curriculum were produced by non-white writers. This set of ten is tasked with covering American writers of color as well as the voices from Black and brown people around the world.

Of course, state standards are intended to be the floor, not the ceiling, of what students learn. However, they do provide the structure for curriculum, and ultimately are a considerable part of shaping what students learn. The choices being made about what history students learn are not trivial, but rather, core to the mission of educating students in diverse and supportive environments.

"...diversity in curricula is about more than just teaching a full view of history; it is proven to empower students of color."

The Benefits of Diverse Curricula-and the Problem with its Scarcity

The importance of diverse history curricula is far from abstract. To teach history accurately, one must teach about the variety of ethnicities and cultures which make up our world. Eurocentrism is harmful first and foremost because it false. However, diversity in curricula is about more than just teaching a full view of history; it is proven to empower students of color.

Stanford University researchers looked at data from a pilot program in San Francisco where students considered at high risk for dropping out were enrolled in one of the state's ethnic studies programs. The results were striking: attendance rose by 21 percentage points, while grade-point averages rose by 1.4 points. Students enrolled in in ethnic-studies courses earned 23 more credits toward graduation, on average, than those who did not. The largest improvements in test scores were found among boys and Hispanic students in math and science.

In a comprehensive study of the benefits students of color accrue from multicultural education, Celestial Zaldana of Claremont McKenna University found overwhelming evidence for the positive social and emotional effects of diverse curricula. Reading texts written by members of the ethnic groups that are underrepresented in school curricula improves the self esteem of students of that ethnic group, and caused all students to have a greater appreciation for cultural difference.

Despite the proven benefits of a diverse history education, many students still receive Eurocentric instruction. Studies have shown that most students lack a basic understanding of such things as slavery, rudimentary world geography, or the history of indigenous peoples. In a 2015 study, the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) found that the majority of teachers considered Black history to be influential in understanding the complexity of U.S. history. Many teachers even claimed that that they, in teaching history, try to "infuse elements of Black history in every historical era, sometimes going beyond state and local standards." However, when the study looked at how time was actually being used in U.S history classrooms, it revealed a slightly different reality: on average, only one to two lessons, or 8 to 9 percent of total class time, are devoted to Black history.

"...whose history is essential, and what are we teaching students when we tell them that theirs is not?"

Responding to the Revisions

Those who care about racial justice in education can and should make their voices heard. One particular opportunity is in the window after the amendment of state history curricula where public comments are allowed. Like much of education policy, states make their own choices about when and how to revise their standards and it is unfortunately incumbent on those who care to seek out the information about their states revision process. Despite their rarity, these inflection points are critical for ensuring that public advocates make their voices heard. While the full effect of public comments for state curricula are hard to measure, there is reason to believe that sustained advocacy on behalf of diversity in history education can make a real impact. Recent changes to Illinois' history curriculum prove that while difficult, change is not impossible. Diversity in schools cannot stop at the doors of the school, or even the classroom. That students with vastly different backgrounds are still being taught that only one history is worth knowing reveals what has always been a deeper question in American education: whose history is essential, and what are we teaching students when we tell them that theirs is not? In the fight for racial equity in the classroom, we must stress the importance of students learning from a curriculum which reinforces that their own histories, and, by extension, their own identities, matter.

Tags: school diversity, desegregation, diverse curriculum

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Diversity in Schools Must Include Curriculum

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The evidence paints a clear picture: students who attend diverse public schools learn more, exhibit less racial prejudice, and report higher overall self-confidence. But to fully realize the potential of these benefits, schools must ensure diversity exists on every level by ensuring diverse enrollment, integrating classrooms, and crucially, implementing curricula which reflects the history and culture of students of all backgrounds-advocates for equitable education reform must be invested in diversifying not only classrooms, but lesson plans, too.

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Approaches to Multicultural Curriculum Reform

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Approaches to Multicultural Curriculum Reform

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Schools and policymakers are mandating new anti-bias training for teachers in an attempt to improve racial attitudes. Decades of research have shown that teachers often give racially biased evaluations of student work and that biased evaluations can affect students' future learning and course-taking decisions. However, less is known about what school leaders can do to correct this problem. Research does not show current forms of anti-bias training to be especially promising in changing behavior.

There is, though, a relatively straightforward, if often overlooked, way to diminish the impact of teachers' racial biases in student evaluation: standardizing grading rubrics. To gauge the potential impact of a standardized rubric on grading bias, I conducted an experiment comparing how teachers graded two identical second-grade writing samples: one presented as the work of a Black student, and one as the work of a white student.

My experiment found that teachers gave the white student better marks across the board-with one exception. When teachers used a grading rubric with specific criteria, racial bias all but disappeared. When teachers evaluated student writing using a general grade-level scale, they were 4.7 percentage points more likely to consider the white child's writing at or above grade level compared to the identical writing from a Black child. However, when teachers used a grading rubric with specific criteria, the grades were essentially the same.

The experiment also included a series of questions asking teachers about their background and their racial attitudes. In exploratory analyses examining bias by teachers' own race, gender, and the racial makeup of the schools where they teach, I found larger bias in grading by white and female teachers, who were less likely to rate the Black child's writing as being on grade level compared to the white child's writing. However, I didn't find any connection between my measures of teachers' implicit and explicit racial attitudes and the differences in grading the Black and white student writing samples.

This experiment suggests that racial stereotypes can influence the scores teachers assign to student work. But stereotypes seem to have less influence on teachers' evaluations when specific grading criteria are established in advance. New instructional practices and tools, such as standards-based grading rubrics and mastery-based grading with specific criteria, present potentially effective approaches to promoting racial equity in schools. Limiting opportunities for biased decisions may have more immediate impact on equitable student evaluation than current forms of anti-bias training.
Building a Grading-Bias Experiment
My experiment took the form of a web-based survey, including demographic questions, a two-part grading task, and a test to measure racial attitudes. I contracted with a private survey provider to recruit a multi-state sample of U.S. schoolteachers. Some 1,799 unique users responded to a survey invitation. Of those, 1,549 teachers working in preschool through 12th grade completed the main survey tasks and were compensated directly by the company for participating. Their responses form the basis of my analysis.

At the start of the survey, teachers were informed that the researcher was interested in learning how educators evaluate student writing. As a subject area, writing is well suited for a study of grading bias for two main reasons. Substantively, the subject area is of interest given that tools for evaluating student writing vary in their focus and specificity. Methodologically, the personal narrative lends itself well to signaling the author's racial identity in a relatively subtle way. Overt statements of a student's race in a grading experiment could arouse suspicion among research participants and affect their responses.

Respondents also answered questions about their gender, race, and number of years in the field, as well as the grade that they teach and the racial composition of their school. Overall, 69 percent were white and 54 percent taught in a predominantly white school. By comparison, about 79 percent of U.S. teachers are white and approximately 45 percent of all U.S. teachers work in schools that are less than 50 percent white, according to federal data from 2017.
Two Grading Tasks
Teachers were randomly assigned to receive one of two versions of a writing sample. The writing sample was presented in a child's handwriting and was purportedly by a male student in the fall of second grade. It took the form of a brief personal narrative in response to a prompt to write about his weekend and mentioned spending time with his brother and a friend. The versions were identical in all but one aspect: each used different names for the brother to signal either a Black or a white student author (see Figure 1). The name choices came from a list of the most racially distinct names reported by Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner in Freakonomics. In one version, the student author refers to his brother as "Dashawn," signaling a Black author; in the other, his brother is called "Connor," signaling a white author.

Teachers were first asked to rate the writing sample on a relative grade-level scale with seven options, from weak to strong performance: far below grade level, below grade level, and slightly below grade level; at grade level; or slightly above grade level, above grade level, and far above grade level. Performance criteria were not explicitly defined.

Then, they were asked to rate the writing sample again. This time, teachers were given a rubric with more clearly defined performance criteria for a personal narrative. The rubric included four possible ratings, from weak to strong: fails to recount an event, attempts to recount an event, recounts an event with some detail, or provides a well-elaborated recount of an event. The rubric appeared after the grade-level scale, on a separate screen and without the option to return to the earlier screen. This was designed to ensure that teachers' ratings on the grade-level scale were not influenced by the rubric's criteria.

Substantively, these evaluation measures differ in two important respects. The grade-level scale is general in the sense that it does not specify what dimensions the rater should consider, such as grammar, spelling, creativity, or organization. It also does not clearly specify the gradations among the seven possible ratings, or how a teacher should determine whether the writing is "slightly above grade level" versus "above grade level." In contrast, the rubric specifies which domain teachers should evaluate-in this case, how well the writer recounts an event-and provides more specific descriptors to guide teachers in their rating choices along a four-point scale.
Assessing Racial Attitudes
After the grading exercise, the survey then attempted to collect data on respondents' racial attitudes. This presented a challenge. On one hand, if questions or activities designed to reveal racial attitudes were administered before teachers see the writing sample, the act of completing the racial attitude measures could influence their grading. In particular, the experiment could produce "demand effects," in which teachers adjust their ratings to match what they view as a socially desirable response, such as being particularly careful to show no racial bias. However, if respondents complete the racial attitude measures after viewing the writing sample, the writing sample may influence their racial attitude scores. I opted for the second option, viewing this as less damaging to the experiment overall.

To measure teachers' implicit stereotypes of white and Black students, I adapted a traditional implicit association test to assess respondents' associations between race and competence. These computer-based tests ask respondents to react quickly to ideas and images by assigning them to one of two categories, such as "good" and "bad." In my test, participants identified photos of students' faces as either "African American" or "European American" by pressing a right- or left-hand key on a computer keyboard. Then, those same keys were also used to assign words like intelligent, confident, disorganized, and unskilled to one of two categories: either "Competent" or "Incompetent." The test combines the racial categories and competency categories in various combinations, with the right-hand key used for "European American" and "Incompetent" on one round, and for "African American" and "Incompetent" on the next round, for example.

Implicit association test scores are calculated by comparing response speeds by category. In this case, the relevant question is how long it takes a respondent to assign descriptive "Competence" or "Incompetence" words when those categories use the same keyboard stroke as "African American" or "European American." An implicit association result would indicate a preference for African Americans over European Americans, for example, if a participant's responses were faster when "African American" and "Competence" were assigned to the same key. In my study, just 675 teachers completed the full test and produced valid scores that are included in my analysis. The other half either abandoned the survey or responded to test items so quickly that valid scores could not be calculated.

Finally, teachers were asked to respond to traditional "feeling thermometer" questions in which they rated their feelings toward African Americans and European Americans. A 1-10 scale was shown with 1 representing "very cold" and 10 representing "very warm." I created a measure of explicit bias by calculating the difference in the warmth of each individual teacher's feelings about white and Black Americans. A positive score indicates a preference for white Americans and a negative score indicates a preference for Black Americans. Some 1,549 teachers completed the feeling thermometer questions.
Results by Grading Tool
To compare teachers' grades using both grading tools, I sort grades into two groups based on whether their rating is above or below a cut-off point on each scale. On the vague grade-level scale, I consider how many teachers rate each sample as "at grade level" or above. On the rubric, I look at how many teachers rate the sample as "recounts an event with some detail" or better. However, results were robust to a variety of other analytic choices.

Teachers shown the "Dashawn" version of the writing sample are 4.7 percentage points less likely to rate it as being on grade-level or above compared to teachers shown the "Connor" version (see Figure 2). Some 35 percent of respondents rate the version written by a white student at grade-level or above compared with about 30 percent for the version written by a Black student. However, when those same teachers use a rubric with specific grading criteria, they give essentially identical ratings to the Black and white authors-about 37 percent rate both the "Dashawn" and "Connor" versions as "recounts an event with some detail" or better.

In exploratory analyses, I also investigate differences in grading based on the gender and race of the teacher. Prior research has found that teachers show preference for students with identities similar to their own. In particular, white teachers tend to have lower expectations for Black students than for similar white students (see " The Power of Teacher Expectations," research, Winter 2018). I see evidence of this in my experiment as well, though only when teachers apply the vague grade-level scale. In all groups, when teachers use a specific grading rubric, estimates of bias are small and not significant.

Female teachers assessing a young boy's writing sample show racial bias in their grading, but male teachers do not. Whereas females are 7 percentage points less likely to rate the "Dashawn" sample as being on grade level than the "Connor" sample, the difference for male teachers is small and not statistically significant (see Figure 3).

In looking at teachers by race, I find white teachers are approximately 8 percentage points less likely to rate the Black student's writing as being at grade-level or above compared to the white student's writing. By contrast, teachers of color do not show evidence of evaluation bias.

I also estimate grading bias among teachers who work in more and less racially diverse schools. As in my other analyses, bias is evident when teachers applied vague grade-level standards but not when they used specific criteria on a rubric. Teachers working in schools where no one particular race or ethnic group makes up a clear majority of enrolled students show the most bias in applying the grade-level scale. They are 13 percentage points less likely to rate the writing sample as on or above grade level if it was written by a Black student. There are no significant differences in the ratings assigned by teachers working in predominantly Black, Latinx, or white schools.

Some of these results raise important questions about student-teacher race and gender matching. Given that my teacher subgroup analyses are exploratory, and that this sample is not nationally representative (though it is national in scope), we cannot know whether these findings reflect patterns in the broader population. But they should inspire new hypotheses for further research. Female teachers showed racial bias in grading a Black male student compared to a white male student, whereas male teachers did not. Is a teacher less likely to exhibit racial bias against a student if the student shares the teacher's gender?
Results by Racial Attitudes
I also look at the relationships between teachers' grading bias and racial attitudes as measured by the implicit association test and explicit "warmth" questions.

Both tests showed attitudes that favor whites. The implicit attitudes test found that teachers had a significant association of white students as being more competent than Black students, by 41 percent of a standard deviation. The explicit "thermometer" questions measure showed a small and not significant preference for European Americans compared to Black Americans.

It stands to reason that teachers with higher measured levels of bias could show more bias on the grade-level evaluation measure. However, I find no relationship between teachers' measured attitudes and levels of grading bias, either on the vague grade-level scale or the specific rubric. In no case does the magnitude of the bias differ significantly by teachers' implicit or explicit racial attitudes.

There are several possible explanations for this. First, tests of implicit bias have limitations, and the implicit association test's validity as a test of individual attitudes has been questioned. Second, it may be that my sample size was too small to detect the true influence of implicit attitudes on grading bias.

Indeed, this study did find some divergence in explicit and implicit attitudes. While the implicit attitudes test showed, on average, that teachers had a significant implicit association of white students as being more competent than Black students, the explicit measure showed a much smaller, and not significant, preference for whites. However, if in fact teachers were summoning explicit attitudes to override an initial implicit instinct to rate the "Dashawn" writing prompt lower on the grade-level scale, the experimentally observed grading bias suggests they were not entirely successful. Teachers may have been able to summon their explicit attitudes to dampen, but not entirely eliminate, the influence of implicit attitudes on their grading.
Implications
Scholars and decisionmakers have focused on two distinct approaches for mitigating the effects of negative implicit racial attitudes: training programs that aim to reduce people's general implicit associations and efforts that engineer circumstances to reduce the impact that implicit stereotypes can have on a person's behaviors or judgments. My study shows strong potential from the latter approach when it comes to teacher grading. When teachers use a rubric that orients grading decisions to a limited number of specific, demonstrable criteria, they show no bias in their grading decisions. When teachers are asked to rate student work along a vaguer spectrum of performance, based on meeting "grade-level" standards, their grading favored the white student.

These findings raise a number of questions for future research. There may be something unique about the elements of this experiment that contribute to my results, whether the rubric, the writing sample, or the combination of the two. I can't rule out the possibility that the different sizes of each scale-seven points on the grade-level scale and four on the rubric-affected the amount of bias detected. We also should consider whether the impact of bias on grading could differ depending on the academic subject or the nature of the work being evaluated. The evaluation of student writing is likely more subjective than determining whether a student arrived at the correct answer to a math problem, for example. Additional experiments with other rating scales or other kinds of student work would be helpful.

The generalizability of these findings to the classroom is unknown. How might grading bias differ when teachers are grading their own students? Teachers' bias regarding students that they personally know may differ from the bias we find in this experimental setting, though past research has found some evidence of teachers' racial and gender-based bias being directed toward their own, familiar students. There may therefore be reason to recommend grading rubrics as a means to mitigate bias.

The present study does not offer direct evidence on whether rubrics would produce bias-reducing effects in school classrooms. It is possible that teachers hold strong student-specific biases that rubrics are less effective at overcoming. The findings in this study may be more generalizable to settings where raters are conducting anonymous reviews of essays in which the authors' identities may be signaled through context clues, such as state writing exams or SAT and GRE scoring.

I also note that, in this study, teachers were presented with a rubric without any training or examples on how it is appropriately applied. While using the rubric reduced bias, the grading task was simple and did not have any time constraints, unlike the complex evaluations of student work that teachers make as part of their day-to-day jobs. Previous research has suggested that rubrics do not improve grading reliability unless teachers are trained in how to use them. And in general, any efforts to reform or standardize teachers' classroom practices are less likely to succeed in the absence of aligned coaching and training.

Finally, policies that establish predetermined and clearly defined grading criteria may prove powerful in light of another finding from this study: that the overall bias was driven by white teachers and this bias seems to have been driven by an in-group preference among white teachers for white students. This finding aligns with calls to diversify the teaching force. Nationwide, 79 percent of teachers are white compared to 48 percent of students. Recent research has shown that although the share of teachers of color has grown in recent years, this growth has not kept pace with the increase in the share of students of color, which suggests an ongoing disadvantage for students of color. Insofar as this imbalance powers biased evaluations of student work, it may lead to a vicious cycle in which initial racially biased evaluations from a teacher cause lower future performance from students, which reinforces stereotypes held by teachers, which in turn leads to future bias in evaluations.

There are a great many ways in which racism, past and present, affects the educational opportunities of Black students. One proximate cause of inequality that school and district leaders have an opportunity to address is teachers' racially biased evaluations of students. A relatively simple tool may help start to mitigate the effects of teachers' racial biases on students.
David Quinn is assistant professor of education at the University of Southern California Rossier School of Education.

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New research supports a simple, low-cost teaching tool

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TIE BLOG : Teaching Your Way Around the World - Sharing stories, expertise, and experiences from international educators around the world

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Follow Me on Twitter @EmilyMeadowsorg
Formal Curriculum
How does a school decide what to teach? International schools often have the choice of splitting, at least in part, from the local or national curriculum of their host country, and may select from a variety of alternatives and supplements. Generally, schools will adopt a program from the country they represent (i.e. the Canadian school follows Canadian standards, the French school follows French), but even there they may have options as to which province or regional directives to adopt. In addition, there is the decision whether to offer International Baccalaureate or Advanced Placement courses as a supplement. Many schools will select - or be required - to include some element of the host country's academic priorities as well. The resulting curricular package tends to be somewhat transparent and articulated for stakeholders of the school. This constitutes a school's formal, explicit curriculum.

The Hidden Curriculum
Every school also imparts an informal, implicit, or "hidden" curriculum. A school's hidden curriculum is made up of the values and social norms that are taught and learned through the process of schooling. The teaching of a hidden curriculum is generally not intentional, and not even done consciously. Hidden curricula are, "Tacit in so far as their presence is implied and often taken-for-granted rather than directly acknowledged and examined"[1]. Why, then, bother with it?

The hidden hidden curriculum in international schools is worth examining because it can perpetuate social structures that privilege certain groups over others, legitimizing their dominant status. A 'textbook example' (sorry) from history class is the disproportionate portrayal of white, heterosexual, cisgender men in positions of leadership. Another example is the lack of representation of LGBTQ+ characters in literature selected for study. These types of subtle assertions about what is worth learning institutionalize social hierarchies. Acknowledging this problem, unpacking why it may be so, and taking steps to change it can be a powerful learning experience for students. It can be argued that it is the ethical responsibility of educators to make hidden curriculum visible and explicit[2].

Capitalizing on Hidden Curriculum
Hidden curriculum, once identified, can be discussed and possibly maintained as part of a formal curriculum. For example, while teaching parenting classes in Hong Kong, my co-facilitator and I realized that our program implicitly emphasized democratic values. We discouraged parents from taking an authoritarian, dictatorial approach; instead we worked on tools to help children become active participants in their family and community structures. This underlying value, while initially unnamed, was something we agreed was desirable, and aligned with the goals of our parenting course and the mission of the school. The participants in our program came from countries with a variety of political systems, so we did preserve our democratic slant, but addressed this for the groups, making it explicit so that parents knew our angle.

Revealing and Resisting Institutionalized Inequality
Norms, customs, and beliefs in international schools are diverse. Each community member contributes their own opinions and assumptions of how the world should operate, which may not necessarily be compatible with one another. No school will be able to satisfy all stakeholders' demands, but making clear what is being taught (or omitted) and why can at least allow for open discussion, and provides a valuable critical thinking experience if done in the classroom. Understanding our own values, as well as those of the school as a whole, prepares us not only to engage in meaningful conversation with people who may hold differing views from our own, but also to expose and resist perpetuation of systemic inequality.
What values are transmitted through the hidden curriculum at your school? How have you made hidden curriculum explicit and visible in your work as an educator?
[1] Cornbleth, C. (1984). Beyond hidden curriculum? Journal of Curriculum Studies, 16(1), p. 29-36.

[2] Portelli, J. P. (1993). Exposing the hidden curriculum. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 25(3), p. 343-358.

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The Hidden Curriculum: Revealing and Resisting Institutionalized Inequality - TIE BLOG : Teaching Your Way Around the World

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Follow Me on Twitter @EmilyMeadowsorg Formal Curriculum How does a school decide what to teach? International schools often have the choice of splitting, at least in part, from the local or national curriculum of their host country, and may select from a variety of alternatives and supplements.

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Diversity & Inclusion Read ALouds & Resources

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Diversity & Inclusion Read ALouds & Resources

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Diversity and Inclusion Read Alouds and Resources | SELspace

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Social Emotional Learning read alouds related to Diversity and Inclusion. Many have the YouTube links to videos where the book is read.

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Confronting Inequity/Seeing the Curriculum with Fresh Eyes

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Confronting Inequity/Seeing the Curriculum with Fresh Eyes

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My sophomore classes open the school year reading and discussing Lord of the Flies, a canonical text that is, on its surface, exceedingly white. It was written by a white man, William Golding, who uses a group of little white boys to prove a thesis steeped in Eurocentric, Hobbesian philosophy. This book would fail any racial Bechdel test, and not by a close margin. And yet, some of the richest race conversations in my classes have popped off while discussing Lord of the Flies.

In the process of exploring the individual symbols that make up Golding's allegory, students reliably notice his central strategy: As the boys on the island "lose their humanity" and "become more savage," they take on the caricatured behaviors associated with indigenous peoples around the world. At the beginning, characters say things like, "We've got to have rules and obey them. After all, we're not savages. We're English, and the English are best at everything." Then they paint their faces. They do rain dances. They hunt. They walk around in various stages of undress. As the boys become more evil, they become less "white." Finally, for good measure, Golding has Piggy-the story's intellectual compass-shout, "Which is better-to be a pack of painted Indians like you are, or to be sensible?" His classmates, apparently choosing the former, kill him seconds later.

My students have an absolute field day with this. Just who does William Golding think he is? How dare he use BIPOC folx to symbolize the innate evil that lies within each of our hearts, held tenuously at bay by Society? C'mon! We have a good time comparing Golding's racist fever dream with a recent news story that describes a real-life example of Tongan boys being stranded on an island for 15 months-with no murders at all.

We explore the consequences of Golding's "British are best at everything" stance as much as we explore its origins. For instance, as freshmen, many of my students explored the previous year how, thousands of years before Golding, the folks in ancient Greece were using stories about Odysseus to feel good about themselves. In particular, students were eager to discuss the moment in Homer's The Odyssey where the hero, fresh from raping and pillaging his way through multiple towns, has the gall to call the Cyclops "lawless brutes" simply because, in his myopic opinion, they "never plant with their own hands" and because they "have no meeting place for council ... and each is a law unto himself." The spectacular cognitive dissonance on display here is a spot-on introduction to the ideologies that undergird colonialism. Students, in fact, refer to it all year long.

It is no doubt important for us, in the view of the peerless #DisruptTexts team, to "center the authentic voices and lived experiences of people of color." (Be sure to check out their website at https://disrupttexts.org .) Our students deserve not only to see themselves in their curriculum, but to explore these important issues patiently and thoroughly. We should never stop curating not just our texts, but also our instructional practices, to make sure that antiracism is at the forefront of all that our students experience in our classrooms.

And yet, some of us might have understandable reasons for sticking with traditional texts. In some cases, we might not be allowed to change the books that we teach. In other cases, we can select our own books but there is no money in the budget, and we don't want to ask friends and family to contribute to another Donors Choose project. For these and many other reasons rooted in the inequities baked into our education systems, we find ourselves stuck teaching books by white men, featuring white men, and originally meant for an audience of white men. The question then becomes, do we let this hamstring our ability to discuss race thoughtfully in the classroom?

The answer, I'd argue, is an emphatic no. The Lord of the Flies and The Odyssey examples from my classroom illustrate one of the most important takeaways from the professional development sessions I lead: We must think of race not as a subject that begins and ends with any particular unit of study, but as one of the most important lenses that can be applied to any unit of study. (This is true also of gender, sexuality, class, and other discourses that are ordinarily corralled into silos.)

A book doesn't need to try to be a race book to be a race book. When a race lens is applied to Lord of the Flies, it acts like a prism, generating many meaningful classroom conversations. When applied to The Odyssey, it might only add one or two more (so far, but who knows!). In both cases, students are not only challenged by the unanticipated demand of exploring a text from unique angles, but in my experience, they just flat-out enjoy the units more.

Respecting race as one of the most powerful critical lenses not only has the potential to breathe life into our driest units of study, but it also takes the pressure off of any one magic unit to get the job done. Say, for example, a student doesn't like The Hate U Give for some strange reason. No worries. They haven't missed the year's only opportunity to discuss race! We'll try again with Macbeth, and this time they might not see it coming.

Teachers who respect race as a lens don't have to hit equity-talk home runs. We unleash a barrage of singles over the course of the entire school year. Furthermore, leaders who respect race as a lens are quicker to critique not just the more obvious of their school's systems and procedures that are linked to racial inequity (such as discipline), but also those that without deliberate attention, would never receive a race-conscious analysis. This might help them notice previously unexamined legacy practices, like policies on late homework, that might actually be a clear detriment to students of color.

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Confronting Inequity / Seeing the Curriculum with Fresh Eyes - ASCD

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My sophomore classes open the school year reading and discussing Lord of the Flies, a canonical text that is, on its surface, exceedingly white. It was written by a white man, William Golding, who uses a group of little white boys to prove a thesis steeped in Eurocentric, Hobbesian philosophy.

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6 Steps for Creating Authentic Conversations That Center on Race

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6 Steps for Creating Authentic Conversations That Center on Race

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Co-Authored by Neith Sankofa
Since the tragic lynchings of Ahmaud Arberry , George Floyd , Breonna Taylor , and, most recently in Atlanta, Rayshard Brooks , there has been a heightened awareness of racism and white supremacy, and its impact on the well-being of Black, Indigenous and other People of Color. As a consistent voice for racial equity and Healing Justice, we have received inquiries from organizations about facilitating conversations that center racial equity. These inquiries are almost always fueled by a realization that 'we need to have a session' (checkbox focus) versus mapping out a thoughtful learning journey to help their organization confront their internal systemic racism in order to shift to a new paradigm that disrupts institutional racism. We continuously educate these organizations that centering racial equity requires a long term intentional commitment since we have been steeped in a culture of white supremacy for 400 years. Any conversations or initiatives that seek to help participants understand, embrace and embody racial equity and justice requires a prerequisite 'unmasking process' to allow participants to show up fully and share their authentic selves and experiences.

CommunityBuild Ventures supports communities in unmasking using our Brave Space Building™ protocol*. Brave Space Building™ is a 6-step process that is structured to allow participants to be their most authentic selves and lean more deeply into conversations that center racial equity. It creates a supportive "container" where participants feel connected to each other, the work ahead, and themselves. We have witnessed the powerful impact that this framework creates for and with organizations across diverse spectrums. We believe that Brave Space Building™ is a necessary framework to create a foundation for transformational work.

Brave Space Building™ Protocol for Centering Racial Equity

Coming into a new team or any group of people in a meeting can be difficult for everyone. Beginning any engagement with an invitation for each person to share the gratitude that is present in their lives helps a new, growing, or well established team bond and serves as an invitation to the group to operate from a place of curiosity, empathy, and trust.

Setting and living your intentions allows you to focus on who you are in the moment, to recognize and live your values, and to raise your emotional energy, which in turn raises your physical energy. Creating individual and group intentions guide the process and progress of the work. Intentions provide a road map and reminder for how you want to show up to live out each day. They concretize your purpose, and provide inspiration, grounding, and motivation along the journey.

Some emotions present an extra challenge when we encounter them in environments that have been shaped by ideals of professionalism that often negate the necessity and wisdom of human emotional response... Becoming more aware of the presence of emotions is essential self-care, self-worth and communal equity work. Identifying your feelings, and recognizing how they can assist in navigating towards solutions positions you to better understand triggers and learn to manage and articulate them more effectively.

Assumptions are used for centering or grounding around the approach to the work of racial equity. They are an intentional call-out of the inherent biases that are present within all individuals who have been exposed to a white supremacist culture. They are all taken as facts, which are brought to light in order to further participants' abilities to show up fully, willing to not only see other's potential for growth, but their own.

Community agreements provide a common framework for how people should work together as they take part in transformational action. Developing community agreements is a powerful strategy for coalescing a group into a team.

Shared language refers to people developing understanding amongst themselves based on language (e.g. spoken, contextual) to help them communicate more effectively. Developing a shared language is an ongoing process that requires intention and time, and results in deeper understanding and more effective solutions.
*This protocol is most powerful and effective when used within an ongoing professional learning community and facilitated by skilled facilitators.

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Co-Authored by Neith Sankofa Since the tragic lynchings of Ahmaud Arberry, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and, most recently in Atlanta, Rayshard Brooks, there has been a heightened awareness of racism and white supremacy, and its impact on the well-being of [...]

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Does Your Definition of Leadership Exclude Women of Color?

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Does Your Definition of Leadership Exclude Women of Color?

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This week, Kamala Harris will take the oath of vice president and step into one of the most powerful jobs in the world, marking a historic moment in our nation's conception of leadership. As the face and style of leadership changes on the national stage, the pressure for corporate leadership to follow suit will only continue to mount. Although organizations have promised to "do better," many have also struggled to identify where to begin. It's an understandable problem. Dismantling systemic racism and sexism can feel like a daunting, overwhelming endeavor - these issues are deep and pervasive, and they're much bigger than any one organization.

Still, companies have no choice but to reconsider the policies, processes, and cultural norms that have perpetuated systemic inequalities. If you want to change who ends up at the top of your org chart, reevaluating the skills and values that shape your hiring and promotion process is an essential first step.

As practitioners and consultants of diversity and inclusion, we've seen first-hand how narrow perceptions of leadership and "fit" can reinforce the status quo. As women of color, we've also experienced first-hand how these systemic inequalities can take a toll. But we've also learned how leaders can be proactive in ensuring that how they define leadership doesn't circumvent marginalized groups. In this piece, we discuss: (1) how our current ideas of leadership often ignore the value underrepresented groups bring to business, (2) how to adjust our systems to recognize those contributions, and (3) tactical steps to make progress towards systemic change. This doesn't mean getting rid of what works - it just means expanding our definition of who "fits."

Traditional leadership criteria leave qualified people behind.

The first step is to recognize that our systems - how we hire, why we promote - are optimized to value and advance a certain archetype. While the generic image of a leader can vary based on the level of management we're discussing, the industry in question, and the demographic distribution of the field, models of leadership in the U.S. tend to be Eurocentric, favor Western thought, and center on straight, white men. More to the point, the attributes companies often look for in leaders, such as competitive, dominant, objective, self-confident, aggressive, ambitious, are overwhelmingly masculine. This leaves women of color (WOC) at a double disadvantage: They often don't fit companies' measures for leadership, because those measures were developed for someone else.

This status quo in business culture has real and tangible effects on WOC: Native American women suffer from one of the largest pay gaps, Black candidates are more likely to be rated as unprofessional when they don Afrocentric versus Eurocentric hair, employers are less likely to hire a Middle Eastern woman who wears a headscarf, Latina women are twice as likely (compared to non-Hispanic white women) to say they must work twice as hard as their co-workers because of their cultural background, and Asian-American women are often considered less fit for leadership than white women.

Changing how your organization thinks about hiring and promoting doesn't mean reinventing the wheel, however. There's a wealth of academic scholarship to lean on. As scholars and practitioners of this work, for instance, we often lean on Dr. Tara J. Yosso's model of community cultural wealth, which highlights the cultural capital, or "array of cultural knowledge, skills, abilities and contacts possessed by socially marginalized groups that often go unrecognized and unacknowledged." While the model was developed around students of color in higher education, organizations can apply it to WOC in the workplace to recognize how the various forms of cultural capital (resistance, social, linguistic, navigational, familial, aspirational) WOC bring directly affect the bottom line. Here's how companies can consider these strengths in hiring, advancement, and leadership decisions.

Recruiting & Hiring

Resistance capital refers to the skills communities of color acquire through actively challenging inequality and oppressive systems. Coming from a legacy of opposition gives WOC the fortitude to shake up the status quo and improve conventional processes that may be hindering a company's growth.

For example, Minoo Ayat, vice president of talent at the membership-based primary care practice One Medical, says her resistance capital has been critical in helping her scale high-growth teams at companies like Amazon and Yahoo. As an immigrant who lived through the Iranian Revolution, Minoo has a history of questioning existing systems. Because of her experience, she feels comfortable expressing when she notices conventional models aren't working.

Resistance capital allows employees to combat conventional methods that can ultimately hinder business goals, including key areas like hiring. "I combat conventional ideas of what we need to find strong talent - including looking beyond the Ivy League and recognizing how bias might be affecting talent evaluations," she said. Through training and directly working with department leads, she helped create processes that opened up the talent pipeline and allowed the organizations to use more accurate proxies for skills than educational background or culture fit. "Sometimes we have to feel comfortable reassessing what we've been doing for years in organizations," she explains. "My comfort in doing that - and fighting barriers - has been critical to my leadership career and ability to make an impact in my roles."

Minoo also models through her own experiences (Iranian woman, immigrant, accent, non-Ivy League background) that people who don't fit the typical leader model can be successful. "Coming from a culture where I had to fight against expectations of what women could do, I am well-equipped to combat conventional ideals that may be problematic for an organization's long-term growth."

She applies that social justice framework to her work, pushing back on structures where 43% of C-Suite executives believe the best performers graduated from highly reputable institutions, and decision-makers tie candidates' intelligence, competence, and socio-economic status to their accent and speech pattern. Given factors like institution type are uncorrelated with workplace engagement and wellbeing, it's time we question the proxies many companies have used to measure success.

Promotions & Advancement

Navigational capital refers to the skills acquired through maneuvering social institutions that "weren't built with communities of color in mind." This form of cultural capital translates well into WOC's ability to navigate tough corporate environments, and relay that information to the next generation - increasing the retention of underrepresented talent.

As one of the few Black women executives in tech, Dara Treseder, senior vice president and head of marketing at Peloton, works to actively challenge structural barriers, and pay it forward by helping the next generation of WOC navigate the unspoken rules. Dara applies the navigational capital she gained when immigrating to the U.S. from Nigeria to navigating corporate boards, opening the door for more WOC. In doing so, she has advanced the R2P2 method - a organizational philosophy focused on not only recruiting diverse talent, but putting in measures to retain them.

For many WOC, navigating corporate spaces is challenging, especially as it relates to promotions and advancement. Whether it be a result of double standards, microaggressions, and/or stereotypes, research has shown that women of color get less support at work, and Black women in particular are less likely to be promoted. As Dara explains, "Companies need to take a more systemic approach to anti-racism work; there are serious challenges for promotion and advancement, which affect Black women more acutely."

Dara's ability to navigate these institutions and pay it forward is an under-valued asset in organizations. The mentorship she provides is an example of " invisible labor" - the unrecognized and uncompensated " cultural taxation " that often results in the increased retention and advancement of underrepresented talent. For Dara, knowing how to navigate the power structures built for people who don't look like her is an important skill she wants to pass on. "Because I had to struggle through navigating these systems, I have a different richness in my ability to lead."

Interpersonal Relationships & Culture

Linguistic capital refers to the intellectual and communication skills one gains from communicating in various languages and cultures. Employees who leverage their linguistic capital in the workplace are a huge value add, as research shows that thinking in a foreign language reduces decision biases. Furthermore, linguistic diversity enhances companies' ability to market to diverse communities and conduct international business.

For Gaby Velázquez, office and programs administrator for Stanford University's School of Engineering, growing up translating information to her immigrant parents led her to be "unafraid to ask the questions I needed to position myself for success in the workplace." This has proven useful to Gaby, whose work requires her to be a conduit through which different functional groups communicate.

Business leaders often need to work cross-functionally, ensuring mutual understanding between different departments and employees. Whether its translating goals of engineering to product management or C-suite objectives to direct reports, there is a consistent need to build mutual understanding between different worlds. In this way, multilingual WOC's ability to leverage their linguistic capital to bridge cross-functional communications makes them especially valuable leaders. For companies to harness this skill-set, however, they need to create work cultures where multilingual employees can be their full, authentic selves - which includes environments where they are unafraid to communicate in multiple languages.

As DE&I practitioners and consultants, we often mediate disputes or conduct cultural competency and agility training on multi-language use in the workplace. Though linguistic capital can be viewed positively when serving as a bridge to diverse cultures and foreign markets, it can also be viewed negatively when serving as a bridge to connect colleagues. Employees have reportedly been admonished for simply engaging in casual conversation, told to "speak English, [as] this is America." This level of othering and xenophobia can trigger illegal "English Only" policies and create cultures that reinforce systems of discrimination. Despite the booming market for bilingual speakers, monolingual workers are more likely to hold higher ranking j obs than bilingual workers with similar education and experience. Examples like these underscore the need for companies to rethink their leadership criteria, and reevaluate the use of foreign languages in international business and domestic boardrooms.

How to expand the criteria you're looking for when hiring and promoting.

Cultural capital Value-add in the workplace Sample questions for leadership rubric

Resistance capital

The ability and comfort in challenging conventional methods that may be problematic

What policies, practices, or team-level processes has this person implemented to reduce bias, enhance inclusion, and drive greater team outcomes? How does this leader apply social justice principles when challenging institutional norms?

Navigational capital

The ability to successfully navigate tense workplace situations

How has this leader transformed barriers into bridges, and paid it forward? How does this leader help underrepresented talent navigate workplace barriers?

Linguistic capital

The ability to bridge varied, competing goals and viewpoints

How open is this person to understanding nuances and varied viewpoints when bringing in perspectives from different teams, people, and roles? How well do they manage cross-functional units? Does this person support different types of communication styles?

Strategies: Operationalizing A New Model of Leadership

Redefining leadership requires expanding the archetypes that organizations value. The assets WOC bring to managing teams, projects and cultures is rich, and by shifting the paradigm of leadership to include WOC, we can reward the WOC driving productivity and innovation. Here's how we can start:

Adjust Evaluation Criteria for Hiring and Promotions: Consider adding these forms of capital when assessing candidates for hiring and promotions.

Provide Resources for a Wider Variety of Leadership Development: Just like we provide leadership development resources to improve technical or communication skills, we need to support the development of leadership qualities that value non-traditional, more inclusive leadership archetypes. For example, provide employees sponsorships to attend conferences on advancing corporate social justice, paid time off to engage in diversity outreach, and a budget to advance inclusive communication skills.

Expanding our notion of leadership is a critical part of seeing greater representation in senior positions. Adjusting our systems to reflect the cultural capital of broader groups is an essential first step in dismantling racism and sexism at the top - and bringing in the cultural capital that businesses need to remain competitive. This work requires structural change, cultural shifts, and rewarding the brilliance and resilience of women of color.

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Does Your Definition of Leadership Exclude Women of Color?

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This week, Kamala Harris will take the oath of vice president and step into one of the most powerful jobs in the world, marking a historic moment in our nation's conception of leadership. As the face and style of leadership changes on the national stage, the pressure for corporate leadership to follow suit will only continue to mount.

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The Seven Steps To Complete Your Curriculum Scorecard

1. Get your child's/school's curriculum.
Go to your teacher, principal, or district office, and ask to see your child's or school's curriculum. In many districts, there is a Parent Bill of Rights that gives parents the right to access their child's curriculum. If the school is using a commercial curriculum, ask for a copy or the name and publisher so you can look it up online. (If you need to purchase it, NYU Metro Center can help). If the school is using a homemade curriculum, ask for a copy, or at least a sample of a few months of lesson materials. If they refuse to give you the curriculum, take your request to a higher level in the district, or discuss with your team to decide next steps.

2. Select your curriculum evaluation team.
The curriculum scorecard will work best if you have a team of at least 3 people with diverse identities (racial, gender, age, sexuality, class, national origin) and roles (parent, student, teacher, administrator, community member) who work together to evaluate the curriculum. These people do not have to be education professionals or have prior experience with evaluation. The more people, the better!

3. Choose the grades, units, and lessons to analyze.
Curricula can be thousands of pages, so you will need to select one or a few grades, units, and lessons to focus on (a sample of the larger curricula). The units you choose should not focus specifically on diversity and multiculturalism; they should be typical units. If you are able to cover more than one grade, select at least one lower and one upper grade.

4. Pull out keywords that represent each statement that the evaluation team can look for.
Once you have your curriculum and the scorecard in hand, review the statements for the scorecard you will begin with (Representation, Social Justice or Teachers Materials). Make sure the team understands each statement, and refer to the Glossary and Explanations with any questions. Chart key words, ideas and qualities from the statements that you will be looking for as you read the curriculum. This will help ensure that as you read, you are focused on the information you'll need in order to effectively score.

5. Conduct the evaluation.
The scorecard asks for your level of satisfaction with the curriculum on various measures. There is no right answer; this is just your opinion as someone who cares about culturally responsive education. As you answer each statement, use the Scoring Guidelines to help you decide your ratings.

6. Score the evaluation.
Tally your score for each section of the scorecard. A curriculum may excel in one area and fall short in another, and it is important to record those differences. You should come out with one score for each of the following sections: + Character Tally + Author Tally + Representation + Social Justice + Teachers Materials

7. Discuss with your team.
Discuss the process with your team: Did anything new come up? What was easy and what was hard? Did some items seem more important than others? This is also an opportunity to strategize about next steps: Do you think this evaluation provides an accurate picture of the curriculum? Does additional information need to be collected? Is there anyone you want to meet with to discuss the results?

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Please share the results of your scorecard through
This Link

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Culturally Responsive Curriculum Scorecard - EJ-ROC

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The Culturally Responsive Curriculum Scorecard was designed to help parents, teachers, students, and community members determine the extent to which their schools' English Language Arts curricula are culturally responsive.

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February 25, 2021|academic discourse, access, application, classroom community, coaching, culturally relevant teaching, culturally responsive teaching, diversity, empowerment, equity, leadership, math coaching, Math identity, math leadership, mathematics education, mentorship, power, problem-based instruction, rigor, safety, voice

by Lachanda Garrison

Recently, I had the opportunity to work with high school students who were considering becoming future educators.  The workshop that I hosted was titled “How They See Me, When I Don’t See Them.”  The title of this workshop resonates with me personally as I have struggled with those in leadership positions in the past.  The struggle and adversity I faced led me down a path of trying to understand the impacts of not being seen, heard, and/or valued as a woman of color in the field of education.

A hard truth that keeps coming back to me is the idea that when one overlooks those in their sphere of influence, the ones who have been overlooked see it, feel it, and experience it. Think about this for a moment, just because we look past someone (because of a bias, lack of connection, level of care, etc.) does not mean that that person looks past us.  This is where I believe the power of stories can be used as a tool to lead.

Over the past few years, I have become very passionate about storytelling and the power of storytelling as a tool for instruction and leadership.  Specifically, I have had tremendous success with using the stories of my students to help them build a deeper conceptual understanding of mathematics.  (Find examples of how this can be done here.)

I did not anticipate how this would impact my students not only academically but also socially and emotionally.  “As the leader in my classroom, I take time to actively listen to my students, discern their stories, and genuinely connect with them.”  As I focus on learning more about their family, traditions, and culture, I found that I am better able to see my students as complete individuals.

I discovered that by intentionally weaving my students’ lives into my daily instruction, it made them feel seen, heard, and valued.  As students begin to see and hear elements of their individual stories embedded within the mathematics in the classroom, they see a direct correlation to the role mathematics plays in their everyday lives.  The more their stories were shared, the more they believed they were ALL truly mathematicians.  They thrived because of this sense of belonging, not only as learners but as human beings.

Harvard professor Marshall Ganz suggests that, “Leadership is accepting responsibility for enabling and interacting with others to achieve a shared purpose.”  I believe that leadership through storytelling is an intentional and empathetic way of engaging, connecting, and being concerned for those around us in order to accomplish a shared objective.  Whether one is leading from the classroom or a boardroom, leaders are all trying to accomplish something that is important and necessary to meeting the objectives with those in their charge.

In the classroom, I use the stories of my students to accomplish the shared purpose between my students and me. The key word is “shared.”  Something that is shared cannot be done alone.  Some of these shared purposes include my students being able to solve word problems, apply specific math content when solving problems, and to solve for various unknowns.  My students are able to master learning targets because of our shared partnership.

This partnership, through storytelling leadership, allows us to achieve common goals as the instruction is centered around the students, their experiences, their identities, and their stories.  I am choosing to lead them on this journey, without harm by making the learning about who they are.  I make an intentional choice in every interaction to include the stories of my students in the equation of learning.  As a leader, I am choosing to say, “How can I engage and connect with you so that you see yourself in this work?”

The most powerful outcome of using students’ stories in mathematics instruction is how students see me, themselves, and one another.  My students see me as an ally as they see themselves in the learning.  This empowers them to take charge of their learning.  I remember Chris asking to learn more math strategies and Mark stating that he loved our estimation activities and when could we do another.  Our common goal was learning mathematics, but my students are able to confidently advocate for themselves in how they learn it.

I also have students with behavior and emotional diversities. I created a math task that included a picture of one of my diverse students and his family celebrating his brother’s birthday. A couple of things that stood out to me about this lesson was his classmates seeing him as a person who was loved and cared for, and how proud he was to share about his family. I cannot help but to believe that his classmates’ view of him changed as they began to empathize and humanize him.

This is the power of leading using stories.  Storytelling leadership allows those you lead to see you, themselves, and others through a lens of humanity. This raises their level of care for one another and the work to be accomplished.

Let’s go back to that workshop that I led for high school students who will one day become our future educators.  My ultimate goal was to empower them as future leaders.  Leaders who are aware of the stories of those around them and careful not to overlook those in their care.  I want these future leaders to understand that overlooking stories can cause harm to those they will one day lead.  It will also delay the accomplishments of goals, objectives, and purposes we hope to meet through instruction.

I also warned of the danger of authoring stories that do not belong to us, and how this often leads to believing single story narratives that continue to cause even more harm.  At the end of our session, I left these rising educators with the message that we all play a role in the stories of those around us.  I asked them to consider the stories that will be told by the individuals they encounter every day and students they will teach in the future.  When those stories are told, how will our character in their stories be shared; as a hero or villain?

As a leader in your classroom or school, what do you want your role to be in the stories of those you lead?  I challenge all of us to take 3 intentional steps of action:

1. Be curious and take time to get to know the stories of the people you interact with on a daily basis.

2. Leverage the humanity that exists in the stories of those in your care to help you help them find success and thrive in accomplishing a shared purpose.

3. Raise your level of care through empathy.  Empathy requires one to intentionally engage, connect, and concern yourself with those around you.

Lachanda Garrison is the recipient of the 2021 Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA) Teacher of the Year Award. As the daughter of a U.S. Marine, she grew up in Okinawa, Japan, where she attended DoDEA schools and ultimately graduated from Kubasaki High School.

Lachanda began her career at DoDEA schools more than 13 years ago, teaching first, third and multi-age grades and working as an instructional coach in elementary mathematics and literacy. Today she teaches second grade at Bahrain Elementary School, and partners with fellow educators and other community stakeholders to embolden her students along their academic journey.

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Keep current on topics in math education, and learn from the perspectives and expertise of Black women.

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Profiles & Lessons

WHAT HAVE THE CHOOSE Champions DONE?

CollaborateD with like-minded educators

We’re here to learn from and support each other. Throughout the school year, we discussed ideas in both large and small teams.

CreateD (and TAUGHT) Racial Literacy Lessons

Every educator wrote and implemented racial literacy curriculum for their own classroom, incorporating Tell Me Who You Are and other resources.

TestED the book: Tell Me Who You Are

Via conversations and surveys over the phone, we wanted to know how teachers and students are responding to this racial literacy toolkit.

Published their work for free download

Above are the racial literacy lesson plans the CHOOSE Champs made, now free to download for classrooms everywhere. Please credit fairly if you use this work in any way!

Have a lesson plan you'd like us to feature?

Email your racial literacy lesson plans to team@chooseorg.org

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We are looking for plans of any size and for any subject, especially but not limited to the use of Tell Me Who You Are.

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Selected lesson plans will be featured on the CHOOSE website later this year.

EDUCATOR GUIDE

Created in collaboration with

In addition to the extensive work that the CHOOSE Champions have done, we created a smaller Tell Me Who You Are "Educator's Companion Guide," specifically for educators who care about bringing social justice to their classroom. We envision the toolkit for educators of all subjects and age levels, though we think the book's content makes it most suitable for students in middle school and up.

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View our guide on Issuu here.

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developing racial literacy curriculum throughout all K-12 subject areas. Click below to view educators' profiles and lesson plans!

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Email your racial literacy lesson plans to team@chooseorg.org

​

We are looking for plans of any size and for any subject, especially but not limited to the use of Tell Me Who You Are.

​

Selected lesson plans will be featured on the CHOOSE website later this year.

In addition to the extensive work that the CHOOSE Champions have done, we created a smaller Tell Me Who You Are "Educator's Companion Guide," specifically for educators who care about bringing social justice to their classroom. We envision the toolkit for educators of all subjects and age levels, though we think the book's content makes it most suitable for students in middle school and up.

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Email your racial literacy lesson plans to team@chooseorg.org ​ We are looking for plans of any size and for any subject, especially but not limited to the use of Tell Me Who You Are. ​ Selected lesson plans will be featured on the CHOOSE website later this year.

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Hardcover, Illustrated Edition
(Released June 2019)

In this deeply inspiring book, Priya Vulchi and Winona Guo recount their experiences talking to people from all walks of life about race and identity on a cross-country tour of America. Spurred by the realization that they had nearly completed high school without hearing any substantive discussion about racism in school, the two young women deferred college admission for a year to collect first-person accounts of how racism plays out in this country every day-and often in unexpected ways.

​

100% of the book profits that Guo and Vulchi receive go to their non-profit, CHOOSE.

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In this book, Guo and Vulchi reveal the lines that separate us based on race or other perceived differences and how telling our stories--and listening deeply to the stories of others--are the first and most crucial steps we can take towards negating racial inequity in our culture.

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7 Books that Give Students an Inclusive Look at US History

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7 Books that Give Students an Inclusive Look at US History

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History is often conceptualized as a series of objective facts that are sequenced in chronological order to reveal an objective and apolitical understanding of the past. However, this understanding of the discipline fails to account for the ways in which historical narratives and understandings are impacted by cultural assumptions about power and agency, current forces that shape the author's understanding and perspective, and the selective inclusion or exclusion of materials and perspectives within the story.

This tension between history as fact and as a constructed interpretation is evident in the debate regarding Confederate Civil War monuments. Proponents of such monuments often argue that they celebrate Southern heritage and that to remove the markers of the past is to "erase history" and "forget the past."

Individuals advocating for removal, on the other hand, correctly point out that the majority of the monuments were erected during the Jim Crow era and as a backlash against the expansion of civil rights. Confederate monuments are not objective, impartial markers of the past but instead were erected to promote a political and social agenda that excluded individuals from American citizenship and society.

Resources That Challenge the Traditional Historical Narrative and Support Antibias Instruction

Historical narratives found in history textbooks, like monuments, are selectively constructed depictions and understandings of the past that often exclude, silence, or minimize the experience of historically marginalized groups.

Teachers not only should design experiences for students to interrogate and challenge the traditional textbook narrative but also must utilize resources that (1) are written by authors from diverse and representative backgrounds; (2) offer a more sophisticated, nuanced, and inclusive narrative; and (3) adopt an explicitly antibias perspective.

There are a number of excellent books for adult audiences that present more inclusive historical narratives and support antibias instruction, but the density of ideas, volume of reading, and text complexity undermine their utility in the middle and high school history classroom. Fortunately, many outstanding historians and academic writers have partnered with experienced authors for adolescents to adapt their work for young adult audiences.

7 High-Quality History Books for Adolescents

1. Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, by Jason Reynolds (author) and Ibram X. Kendi (author). The authors maintain that this is not a history book but instead is a book about the present that uses history to understand America, the construction of race, and the development of racist and antiracist ideas. Based on the award-winning book Stamped From the Beginning, this remix version is intended for middle and high school readers and traces the construction of race from the Age of Exploration to the modern era. It is an outstanding resource that connects the past and present. While it does not avoid challenging or difficult history, the book is ultimately optimistic and provides a powerful framework to help students make positive changes in the world. (In May 2021, the authors will release another adaptation for elementary school students.)

2. A Different Mirror for Young People: A History of Multicultural America, by Rebecca Stefoff (adapter) and Ronald Takaki (author). Adapted from Ronald Takaki's 2008 edition of A Different Mirror, the remix version for middle and high school students uses diaries, letters, and poems to present a multicultural, multiethnic, and inclusive depiction of American history, culture, and identity.

3. 1493 for Young People: From Columbus's Voyage to Globalization, by Rebecca Stefoff (adapter) and Charles C. Mann (author). Columbus's voyages to the Americas initiated the exchange of people, plants, animals, microbes, viruses, and cultures. While historical narratives often place great people, generally great white European men, at the center of the story, this adaptation of 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created focuses on the ecological and social convulsions that resulted from the Columbian Exchange and uses this understanding to make sense of contemporary globalization. Of particular note, the book stresses the significance of interactions between the Americas and Africa and Asia. This is an important book for middle and high school world history classes.

4. An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States for Young People, by Jean Mendoza (adapter), Debbie Reese (adapter), and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz (author). This adaptation of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's writing places Indigenous nations and peoples in the center of American history and adroitly challenges the traditional narrative presented in history textbooks.

5. A Queer History of the United States for Young People, by Richie Chevat (adapter) and Michael Bronski (author). Except for brief mention during study of the Stonewall Riots, LGBTQ individuals are generally invisible in history texts. However, this adaptation of Michael Bronski's A Queer History of the United States utilizes letters, diaries, and biographies to trace the 500-plus years of their contributions to history, culture, and the construction of American identity. The book stresses the importance of activism to effect social change and the contributions of adolescents and young adults.

6. A Young People's History of the United States: Columbus to the War on Terror, by Rebecca Stefoff (adapter) and Howard Zinn (author). Based upon Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States, Rebecca Stefoff's adaptation for adolescents presents history from the perspective of workers, women, enslaved individuals, Native Americans, and other groups that are habitually silenced in classroom resources. Particular attention is given to labor movements and social justice protests.

7. Freedom Summer for Young People: The Violent Season That Made Mississippi Burn and Made America a Democracy, by Rebecca Stefoff (adapter) and Bruce Watson (author). This work presents a stunning and gripping historical narrative that highlights the importance of grassroots community activism in the civil rights movement of 1964. The book presents the violence and intimidation of the period, but it also celebrates the bravery of community leaders and disenfranchised citizens intent on securing voting rights. The book highlights the contributions of outside allies, particularly those of young college students. The companion book Freedom Summer, by Bruce Watson, is an outstanding resource for teachers to delve deeper into this compelling period in the fight for civil rights.

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7 Books That Give Students an Inclusive Look at United States History

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History is often conceptualized as a series of objective facts that are sequenced in chronological order to reveal an objective and apolitical understanding of the past.

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Eight Competencies for Culturally Responsive Teaching

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Eight Competencies for Culturally Responsive Teaching

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An analysis of teaching standards in all 50 states to better understand whether states incorporate culturally responsive teaching.

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Diversity in Int'l Schools Data Dashboard

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Diversity in Int'l Schools Data Dashboard

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The @VYL team has put together research done on diversity in international schools, compiling the data into an interactive dashboard. We believe we first need to Learn about our present, so we can Disrupt and Rebuild stronger.

Watch the short video for an introduction and access the dashboard below. Current research in the visualizations comes from Dr. Alan Phan and the ISS Diversity Collaborative – Data Committee.

View the Diversity in International Schools Dashboard

Data this important needs time. Loading will take a minute or two.

Click Here

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Diversity in International Schools Dashboard

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Connecting with learning data. Beautifully.

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An open letter from women scientists. We declare our support to each other and resolve to take action towards a more inclusive society.

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500 Queer Scientists Visibility Campaign

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A visibility campaign to highlight the accomplishments and lives of LGBTQAI+ people working in science, technology, engineering, and math.

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From Resistance to Sustainability: Cultivating Diverse Leaders in Int'l Schools

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From Resistance to Sustainability: Cultivating Diverse Leaders in Int'l Schools

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Schools have failed our individual needs, supporting false and misleading notions of 'progress' and development fostered by the belief that ever-increasing production, consumption and profit are proper yardsticks for measuring the quality of human life. Our universities have become recruiting centers for the personnel of the consumer society, certifying citizens for service, while at the same time disposing of those judged unfit for the competitive rat race. In this bold and provocative book, Illich suggest some radical and exciting reforms for the education system.

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Schools have failed our individual needs, supporting false and misleading notions of 'progress' and development fostered by the belief that ever-increasing production, consumption and profit are proper yardsticks for measuring the quality of human life. Our universities have become recruiting ce...

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At Inspire Citizens, we believe the future of the world is in our classrooms. We believe educators and learners can and will shape a better future through transformative learning that centers on compassion, connection, understanding, sustainability, and action.

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Inspire Citizens are international leaders and designers of student-centered learning experiences for global citizenship, sustainable development, and peace. Through compassion, connection, and understanding, we aim to equip schools, educators, and students towards taking meaningful action and demonstrating engaged global citizenship in a complex world.

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Diversity as the bedrock of peace: Implications for education

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Diversity as the bedrock of peace: Implications for education

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Ecolint | International School of Geneva

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La Grande Boissière Campus and Secondary Principal Conrad Hughes wrote and delivered this speech in front of staff at the start of the 2021-2022 academic year.

In 1924, when the world’s first international school was established, then known as the League School, and later as the International School of Geneva, the vision was an education for peace.

But what did peace mean in 1924, and what does it mean today? And how do we educate for peace?

1924 saw the end of World War I. The violence of extreme nationalism had drenched Europe and its colonies in blood.

The tensions that led to WWI were around the suppression of multiple ethnic identities: Serbians could no longer celebrate who they were, children would no longer learn Hungarian at school, the ambitions of world dominion by colonial powers would drown out the hopes and aspirations of others. The violence of WWI was caused by the tension when the will of a few is thrust upon the diverse aims of many.

Colonisation also aimed to destroy diversity: to take continents with thousands of languages and impose one or two, to destroy ancient customs and belief systems and replace them with one or two religions, to destroy ancient narratives, as priests did in Mexico, smashing Inca tablets containing sacred coda, or Macauley did in India, designing an education system that would try to make Vedic culture vanish from students’ minds and memories.

Unlike these attacks on diversity, from the start, Ecolint sought diversity and not uniformity: different national dresses and not one uniform, an international history and geography course, not the study of one nation only, bilingualism and not monolingualism.

But the dark power of homogeneity, of monochromatism, of violent dogmatism continued: Hitler was against diversity: no Jews, no homosexuals, no anarchists, no people of colour, no freemasons, no handicapped people. The idea of the Third Reich was one race, one language, one Empire. Other dictators through history have wanted the same thing: Mussolini, Stalin, Franco, Salazar, Pinochet, Videla, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Bocassa, Mobuto: a desire for a morbid standardisation, a single party state.

And to destroy diversity, books must be burnt, art must be censored, freedom of speech curtailed, powers restrained, people killed. Above all, an anti-diverse education must allow no space for critical thinking whatsoever: people must think one way only.

Marie-Therese Maurette, the most striking and visionary leader of our school’s early history, an outspoken feminist who smuggled Jewish asylum seekers across the border at the Gare des Eaux Vives to save them from occupied France, was deeply disillusioned by WW2. But the dream of peace, of a place where a thousand flowers can bloom, where we can live in respect of one another, where diversity is a strength, remained.

The Cold War brought more violent homogeneity with it: of a symbolic kind, with an iron curtain across Europe, brainwashing on either side, but also real violence: wars in Angola and Congo, Iran and Iraq for example, were driven by Eastern bloc, Western bloc imperatives; the forced repression of millions of people under one monolithic idea on either side of the fence.

In the 1960s, the IB was a creation driven by many different partners: Ecolint’s International History course, started in the 1920s was shared with universities in England, the United Nations International School in New York and The United World Colleges movements joined. The IB Diploma was born out of diverse views of education: Kurt Hahn’s vision of a strong extracurricular dimension, Ruth Dreifuss’ belief in the centrality of philosophy, and the deep-seated idea of a broad and balanced, not a narrow, curriculum, came from a coalition of diverse views working together. Ecolint alone did not design the IB. Little of worth can be designed alone, by one person, as the propaganda of Great Man history would have us believe. In fact, nothing can be designed in total isolation.

With the fall of the Berlin Wall, we entered modern history, even more concentrated: a globalised economy built on consumerist values, driven by a handful of rich men and companies. This structural violence is destroying the planet, just as the Brazilian rainforests are burnt, coral reefs destroyed and wild animals become extinct, choking and wallowing in the wake of a carbon footprint that is destroying all life.

For diversity is life: biodiversity, the reciprocity of the ecosystem and, at an individual level, a balanced diet, a varied lifestyle. If we live monotonous lives, the body sickens and we die. The enemy of diversity is the enemy of life itself.

Ecolint has grown since our origins: we have over 4000 students, eight schools, eight different curriculum structures, 140 nationalities, over 90 languages. We must cherish and be thankful for such extraordinary diversity.

And to see the best political and historical example of diversity, and more precisely, how diversity leads to peace, we need look no further than Switzerland. In 1291, when the three original cantons of Uri, Schwyz and Unterwald pledged to support one another under the homogenising and oppressive yoke of the Habsburg empire, they were creating a country devoted to diversity: today, that’s 26 cantons, four national languages, seven leaders in a governing confederation , representing different political parties, the courage to let the people decide through referenda and national initiatives. Diverse cantons and communes.

But peace and diversity mean making compromises, being pragmatic, being prepared to disagree and then seek consensus. The road to peace through diversity is not the romanticised and artificial mythology of national hegemony, it is not the rose tinted, propaganda-saturated history textbook that tells only half the story, it is not the comfort of bias and thoughtless monocultural reproduction. Embracing diversity means embracing complexity. It takes hard work.

As our understanding of the history of ideas deepens, as the La Grande Boissière departments showed us last year in the decolonising the curriculum series, what we used to attribute to the few, in fact belongs to the many: Lafontaine’s fables were adapted from Aesop’s fables, and Aesop’s fables were ancient communal African tales – in fact much evidence suggests that Aesop himself was an African. There probably was no author called Homer – Homer simply means the blind one: The Illiad and The Odyssey are a congregation of ancient myths from diverse origins; Pythagoras’ theories came from India and Babylon, not from Greece; Thales’ principles came from Egypt, Pascal's triangle was not invented by Pascal but is much earlier and probably from Mesoamerica; there was a female biologist hidden beneath Cricks and Watson’s so-called discovery of DNA, and she was never accredited and never received a Nobel prize. Her name was Rosalind Franklin. Many of Rodin’s sculptures were actually made by Camille Claudel; European cubism was actually unacknowledged cultural appropriation of millennia of African art. History and culture are the work of many, not the one.

And with time, as we find out who the many were. May we teach our student the truth and not the fable: who can stand in front of children today and talk of Columbus discovering America, or omit the Senegalese and Moroccan soldiers who were put on the front line of trenches in WWI and not treated by nurses; who can still pretend that the origins of philosophy are with Socrates and Plato. To get to the core of diversity means removing the simplistic veneer of the single story, the one that’s easier to swallow, it means grappling with complexity. Formulas are easy to remember, but they are often oversimplifications and sometimes, they are simply not true.

The Universal Learning Programme (ULP) allows us to generate our own universal understandings and questions, it is not a straightjacket of imposition and repression. Because no one can be happy and truly reach potential when they are simply told what to do. Diversity and peace mean freedom, in fact multiple freedoms that co-exist.

However, multiple freedoms do not mean cynical self-centeredness. There is a danger that the world we have created creates societies where each person looks after themselves more than the collective whole. What does it mean to be a global citizen? No person is an island. We are diverse and free, but we must support each other. We need each other. We are connected, and despite our diversity, we are one, like a mosaic made up of millions of beautiful shards of precious metals and glass, shimmering under the broad rays of the sun.

Peace and diversity mean systems that are not structurally repressive but multilateral. La paix du travail: another vital Swiss institution, means that management must work peacefully and respectfully with employees, we must work together, in our diverse structural organisation, with the dream of peace in our minds, not petty conflict and fear. Ecolint is a great school because there are checks and balances for all of us, to which we must all be made accountable. This makes us stronger and more responsible. It protects us.

And each of us has several identities: our passports, our languages, our cultures, our beliefs, orientations. Which do you bring to work and why? Which of your multiple identities do you celebrate as a teacher. May this school, La Grande Boissière, be a place where we all bring out the beauty of our multiple identities, where we celebrate our diversity and where each student feels safe and happy to do so.

Peace and diversity mean active listening, not distracted or competitive listening, active, whole person listening, restorative practice, feedback, believing in each other’s capacity, having the courage to speak up, but to do so with respect in our hearts.

In the final analysis, peace implies diversity. An education for peace is an education for diversity. With the challenges we are facing at many levels, an education for diversity and peace is an education for life. Let’s make it happen, together.

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Diversity as the bedrock of peace: Implications for education

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La Grande Boissière Campus and Secondary Principal Conrad Hughes wrote and delivered this speech in front of staff at the start of the 2021-2022 academic year.In 1924, when the world’s first international school was established, then known as the League School, and later as the International School…

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Exploring the Teacher Salary Gap Due to Ethnicity & Race in Int'l Schools

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Exploring the Teacher Salary Gap Due to Ethnicity & Race in Int'l Schools

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Dr. Liam Hammer recently shared his doctoral research in an article in TIE Online, Exploring the Teacher Salary Gap Due to Ethnicity & Race in International Schools

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Figure 1: Internal research from the Academy of International School Heads (AISH)
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Since the term expatriate has different meanings and connotations around the world, for purposes of this article and research, the definitions intended are as follows: Expatriate: Employees who have transferred or self-initiated a move from one country to another for a specific period (Chen et al., 2002) and Expatriate teacher: Teachers who work in a country other than their own (Aydin et al., 2019) - which does not differentiate between Anglo-American countries and the Global South, though my study was really only looking at the expatriate compensation difference in international schools in the Global South.

"'If we know better, we do better' [Maya Angelou]. The question is, do schools want to do better and change this business model?" -Raya, Study Participant 2021

When I first moved overseas twenty-five years ago, I was vaguely aware that expatriates were paid more than their local host country national (HCN) colleagues. For a long time, I quietly accepted this inequity as normal, as legitimate and as justified, which was how Bunnell and Atkinson (2020) described this phenomenon. For instance, expatriate teachers have to pay for their student loans, mortgages back home, and the foreign exchanges on savings! But it did not sit right with me, and my disquiet grew. Once I moved into leadership of international schools, I became much more aware of just how significant this difference is.
Method
The past two decades have seen an explosion in the growth of international schools, and schools calling themselves international. As the global international school industry grows, more HCN teachers are being employed alongside expatriate teachers in international schools. Internal research from the Academy of International School Heads (AISH) as seen in figure 1 indicates that in up to 32% of international schools surveyed, expatriate teachers are paid more than the local teaching staff for the same work (Parr, 2021). This is known as a split salary. Despite this prevalence, very little research on split salaries in international schools from the perspective of the HCN teachers has been conducted. My dissertation titled "Exploring the Ethnic Gap in Teacher Salaries in International Schools" set out to fill this research gap using Rawls' (1991) theory of justice as fairness as a theoretical lens in which to examine this topic.

I interviewed 10 HCN participants from different schools around the world using a semi-structured interview style. The participants represented Colombia, China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Malaysia, Lebanon, a central African country, and the Philippines. They had a variety of educational experiences and qualifications. Nine of the 10 participants held a Bachelor of Education, a Master of Teaching, a teaching license, or equivalent. Six held a Master's degree. Nine of the 10 participants had travelled to and resided in countries outside of their country of origin, and eight had attended higher education institutions in Australia, the UK, or the USA. Two of the participants could be described as third culture kids (TCK) having attended international schools in Austria and Switzerland during their youth. Figure 2 shows a map of their countries of origin.
Findings
Figure 2: Countries represented in Hammers 2021 study

"This idea that we've kind of all internalized that everything Western is better and more valuable" and "the marketing [of international schools pushes this narrative], because how do we sell ourselves as an international school if we don't?" -Soha, Study Participant 2021

Data collected from the interviews were transcribed by software and then analyzed by hand for standard codes and themes as they emerged from the data, and the themes and subthemes were generated inductively. I had anticipated that I would find that the phenomenon was not fair. What I had not realized was that the key themes that emerged were much deeper and included: 1. Power - which tends to belong to the Anglo-Western teachers, school administrators and school boards; 2. Othering - which is what these schools do in order to brand themselves and justify the differences in salaries between different teacher nationalities; and 3. the Cost of Compromise - as the HCN teachers internally battle with reconciling themselves working in an environment that implicitly says they will never be good enough. As Soha, one of my study participants told me, "I left the country [Lebanon] because I knew there was no future for me." Figure 3 indicates the factors of the inequities in international schools.
Reflection on the study
Figure 3: Systematic inequality factors in International Schools

"...basically offered it to a new teacher, he was English and got it. He had no experience at all, but he was, he had the right passport." -Carmen, Study Participant, 2021

In the process of this study, I was contacted by several expatriate teachers who did not want me to publish a study like this, perhaps because they saw it as a threat to their salaries and benefits. One expatriate teacher wrote to me that my research would be "biased and not support reality" another two both complained that I was neglecting the injustice of locally hired expatriate teachers not receiving the same benefits as overseas hired expatriates. Figure 4 shows the different levels or hierarchy of teacher salaries that can exist in some international schools. I was also contacted by an owner of a school who claimed to have information showing why he had to employ split salaries to keep his school profitable. As these people did not fit into my eligibility criteria for the study, I politely declined their assistance. But I found this pushback disturbing.
Conclusion
Figure 4: Hierarchy of teacher salaries

"...and I remember walking into the room, you know, showing me around and I walked into the staff room and everybody like just stopped and looked at me, and everybody was white in the room, and I remember feeling, "Oh, interesting, where are all the other people?" -Raya, Study Participant, 2021

References
Using a purely competitive business approach to staffing does not align with international school missions. If international schools want to adhere to their missions and be truly diverse, equitable, inclusive, and just, they must examine the current economic models that justify split salaries and find alternatives or mitigations. This research can inform administrators and school owners that international schools should no longer be bastions of privilege.

Bunnell, T. & Atkinson C. (2020). Exploring enduring employment discrimination in favour of British and American teachers in 'traditional international schools.' Journal of Research in International Education 2020, Vol. 19(3) 251-267

Hammer, L. L. (2021). Exploring the Ethnic Gap in Teacher Salaries in International Schools (Doctoral dissertation, Wilkes University).

Parr, M. (2021) Academy International School Heads Survey: Overseas and Local Hire (Unpublished). Retrieved from https://www.academyish.org/.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------Liam is Campus Principal at Tenby Schools Johor (Setia Eco Gardens) in Malaysia.

Twitter @Pak_Liam
LinkedIn: Liam Hammer

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Exploring the Teacher Salary Gap Due to Ethnicity and Race in International Schools | The International Educator (TIE Online)

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Figure 1: Internal research from the Academy of International School Heads (AISH) --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Since the term expatriate has different meanings and connotations around the world, for purposes of this article and research, the definitions intended are as follows: Expatriate: Employees who have transferred or self-initiated a move from one country

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What the data tells us about diversity in int'l school teaching staff & leadership

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What the data tells us about diversity in int'l school teaching staff & leadership

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In the article, What the data tells us about diversity in international school teaching staff and leadership Alejandra Neyra shares current research (2021) conducted by CIS, ISS, and the Diversity Collaborative

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What the data tells us about diversity in international school teaching staff and leadership

By Alejandra Neyra, CIS Data Analyst and BI Manager

We're always looking for ways to use data to help solve challenges facing our membership community. And our work to foster greater inclusion across our global community via diversity, equity and anti-racism (I-DEA) continues at pace. One way we are linking these two priorities is to share our data analysis expertise via strategic partnerships, most recently to determine diversity baseline data in international schools.
Our objective was to answer these questions:
Together with the Diversity Collaborative, International School Services, and George Mason University, we set out to survey international schools worldwide, collecting data on gender, nationality, and ethnicity of board members, heads of schools, leadership teams, and teachers.
Who was included in the survey?

Are international school boards, heads of schools, leadership teams and teachers balanced in terms of gender?

How culturally diverse are international school boards, heads of schools, leadership teams and teachers?

Which groups are represented? Which groups are underrepresented?

What did we find?
The survey was distributed to CIS member schools and via a broad range of accreditation agencies and international school professional associations in April and May this year. We received 175 responses.
Other key findings: Gender
High level findings: Significantly more teachers in international schools are female than male. However, three times as many heads of international schools are male than female. And leadership teams are overrepresented by white people from Western countries (US, Canada, UK). (In this analysis, a person is considered 'white' if they have origins in any of the original people of Europe.)

Analysis of this survey sample shows that females are underrepresented in governing boards of international schools. Board members are on average 60% male and 40% female. Furthermore, 75% of the schools have a male head, leading to a gender ratio three times more male than female in this role. Leadership team composition is on average 52% male and 48% female. And, 29% of teachers are male and 61% are female on average.

Summarising, women are underrepresented in governing boards and as heads of international schools while they are overrepresented as teachers. Women and men are equally represented witin leadership teams.
Primary nationality
The difference between male and female is statistically significant (p < 0.001) for board members, heads of schools and teachers. The difference is not statistically significant for leadership teams.

Nationalities were identified and grouped as Western and Non-Western countries. Here, a 'Western country' is defined as a developed country that has a predominently Western culture. This includes Western Europe, North America, Australia, and New Zealand.

Within all stakeholder groups, the most highly represented nationalities are those of the United States of America, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Among governing board members, Western and Non-Western countries are equally represented. For all other stakeholders groups, Western countries have a higher representation. Only 11% of heads of schools are from Non-Western countries. Within leadership teams, only 26% are from Non-Western countries.

63% of participating schools indicated that their leadership team included educators from the country where the school is located. This percentage is highest for schools located in Europe (at 71%) and lowest in Latin America (57%).
Ethnicities
In this sample, on average three to four nationalities are represented in leadership teams. On average, 10 nationalities are represented among teachers, and 31% of these nationalities are from Non-Western countries.

Members from a white ethnic group have a higher representation among heads of school and leadership teams. The analysis shows that 84% of heads of school and 74% of those on leadership teams are white. The ethnicity of board members is dependent on where the schools is located. For example, schools located in Asia have mainly Asian board members with the next highest representation being white board members, while for schools located in other regions, white board members are the most highly represented. Findings show that white and non-white teachers tend to be equally represented.

Summarizing, people having ethnic origins in Europe are the most highly represented among board members, heads of school, leadership teams and teachers. Heads of schools and leadership teams evidence the least ethnic diversity.
What can you do to help?

No time to read? Listen to this podcast Related content:
Analysis from this project provides significant insights into gender equality and cultural diversity in international schools, showing us that considerable effort is required to foster gender equality and cultural diversity. The more people who participate in these surveys, the more trends we will be able to identify and the more solutions we can unearth and pathways we can forge for greater equity across our community.

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What the data tells us about diversity in international school teaching staff and leadership

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We're always looking for ways to use data to help solve challenges facing our membership community. And our work to foster greater inclusion across our global community via diversity, equity and anti-racism (I-DEA) continues at pace.

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Description

In education, where interest in social and emotional learning (SEL), mindfulness, and systems thinking is growing, we find both an opportunity and a need to develop models of thinking and teaching that prepare students to better understand and respond to the systems to which these issues belong. We draw from established SEL models, together with developments in the emerging field of complexity science and the study of systems, to establish a framework-what we call a "compassionate systems" framework-for building a cognitive and affective foundation for global citizenship. This framework conceptualizes compassion as an essentially systemic property of mind: to cultivate compassion is to be able to appreciate the systemic forces that influence people's feelings, thoughts and actions.

Topics: Learning Organizations Curriculum Design

Licensing Information: All Rights Reserved

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Introduction to the Compassionate Systems Framework in Schools

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In education, where interest in social and emotional learning (SEL), mindfulness, and systems thinking is growing, we find both an opportunity and a need to develop models of thinking and teaching that prepare students to better understand and respond to the systems to which these issues belong.

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Decolonise IB: How international school alumni are mobilizing to diversify the ex-pat curriculum

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Decolonise IB: How international school alumni are mobilizing to diversify the ex-pat curriculum

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Third culture kid (TCK) residing in Paris, David Xoài reflects on the impact of the IB in this article: Decolonise IB: How international school alumni are mobilizing to diversify the ex-pat curriculum

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10/8/2020 Update: Decolonise IB has changed its name to Organisation to Decolonise International Schools (ODIS) to include international schools that teach programs besides International Baccalaureate. Our provides links to our latest , and .
International schools - the postcard of an idealised education. Well-lit classrooms with smartboards; readily available equipment still fresh in its packaging; selected teachers with frequent professional training and stimulating salaries; students of all colours from across the globe, children of the world's elite.

Or something like tha. As someone who's attended seven international schools over the course of her childhood all over the Global South, I can affirm with some amusement that I am indoctrinated in the ways of the international baccalaureate, one of the most renowned programs in the expat-kid world (though also widely offered in local public schools in countries such as the US). I non-ironically hail to the glossy terms highlighted in the IB framework - global-mindedness, critical thinking.
"We realize that [our school] is not unique at all - this apathetic response to anti-racism is actually a widespread issue across many international schools"
But I am young, and only beginning to understand how this schooling often results in a kind of intellectual navel-gazing. Many of us have studied the textbook-standard topics of the Western world: the French Revolution, the Enlightenment, World War II.

But how is it that my friend Ochieng grew up in an international school in Kenya, and never learned any Kenyan history? How often have I learned something vital about a country I lived in, years after I had left it? How often did we as international students feel unrepresented in the course topics that were assigned to us? And how many of us, upon the death of George Floyd, felt the jolt of realisation that we know nothing about systemic racism, colonialism and its undiscussed modern successor?

The issue is a complex one. Our recent investigations have made this apparent. As our newsfeed and consciousness flooded with news of the Black Lives Matter protests in the U.S., my friend Clara suggested we create a petition to require more diversity in the International Baccalaureate syllabus.

We created surveys for educators and students. We made social media accounts. We started getting responses, lots of them. Decolonise IB emerged, with similar initiatives springing up simultaneously around the expat world and forming a growing network. In the two weeks since we've launched the petition, our views on the international education system have shifted drastically.

- Tiffany Shi, International School of Beijing Alumni for Anti-Racism.
"Black teachers feel undermined, especially the [Teacher Assistants], many of whom are highly qualified but see no future in the school,"
With over 400 responses our student survey results are clear: for a baccalaureate that calls itself 'international', many pupils and alumni felt that their education was highly Western and White. Class content left the majority feeling uneducated on Black history, White privilege, systemic oppression, and generally any affairs pertaining to Black/Indigenous/People Of Colour. Not to mention matters concerning women, disabled people, refugees and the LGBTQIA+ community. International students are not exempt from feeling their education has often centred on the contributions of able-bodied cisgender straight White men. Our own culture and race often has little place in formal class discussions. " We are very much a flag, food and festivals administration, " one teacher wrote, but outside special events schools might provide little opportunity for the student body to celebrate its diversity.

What a waste, when our students' voices are such a powerful tool, especially at a time where the world needs to see solidarity among typically divided cultures. We need just as much to expose ourselves to the 'real world'- having been (though I can't speak for all of us) raised in our "Colour Blind" bubbles, as Rachel Engels astutely points out.

I cannot speak for international schools teaching British or US programs. But the IB, which we focused on given our experience and access to it, is a very loosely defined curriculum. Schools are essentially autonomous and the syllabus design mainly comes down to the teachers. Most of whom are White and North-American or West-European, raised by the systems that movements like Black Lives Matter are trying to dismantle.
"It's not enough for it to pay lip service through using carefully placed "buzz words" and the arbitrary provision of tick boxes that schools use to appear "inclusive." The systemic racism at international schools needs to be stamped down and rooted out."
The fact that the IB is so flexible is what makes it so wonderfully adaptable to each school, and that freedom is not used to its full advantage. There are excellent teachers in the IB, many of whom want to diversify the syllabus. Some schools may have an expanded curriculum that properly reflects the student body, but a completely segregated staff. One teacher told us about such a school that provided ongoing Professional Development on inclusivity, international literature in English class and a strong Mother Tongue module in the Primary Years Program. Yet in this African country the school board and staff (including Heads of Department and counselors) were predominantly White, with White teachers having meals under the "White tree" and mostly excluding BIPOC teachers from communal out-of-school activities.

- Anonymous response to teacher survey

Trends of racism in the recruitment system are increasingly being discussed. Many teachers described their school board as passive, or open and encouraging towards framework diversity but never proactive. This needs to be a collective effort, from teachers to administration, to the client - parents.

Our families have skewed the business that way. There is such adulation of the Western world across the Global South; international schools need a conspicuous number of Western teachers to be deemed desirable by the local elite. Parents dream of sending their children to Ivy League schools, to Oxford and Cambridge. They want their kids to internalise Whiteness as a standard. The denigration of our own cultures has been going on for so long, and enforces the narrative of Western superiority.

- Anonymous response to teacher survey

Aside from lack of action there is also the issue of censorship - that of very relevant political conflicts in the host country, for one (China evidently comes to mind first). But also deliberate censorship by schools themselves; why would Ochieng's school teach Kenya's history of colonisation by the English, when the school itself was founded by and still caters to English diplomats? Why would a school in Turkmenistan discuss American involvement in the Iraq War, when children of the U.S. military are in that very classroom, directly because of similar interests in the region? Even schools with more diverse teaching programs skirt around such topics. And why wouldn't they? Admitting that international schools serve a colonial function? That's just bad publicity.

The best course of action for students and alumni now is to act on a local level, petitioning your school boards for change. Schools in China, Singapore, and the Philippines have formed teams with the hashtag #decolonise[school name] and tagging us so we may broadcast their efforts to the expat student community. We've had a number of thought-provoking Zoom conferences. Apart from promoting this work, further expanding our network and in the near future creating examples of lesson proposals, we're hoping to contact the IB directly. Change will likely not come just from the top down; we must work from the bottom up and push them to meet us in the middle.

International schools concern only a privileged minority. We are the 7% globally mobile international students, rubbing elbows if not intersecting with the infamous 1% wealthiest people on the planet. Changing expat education may not affect a large percentage of the population, but it will condition future CEOs, diplomats and politicians who might someday make important decisions.

My education challenged me to do more than memorise and regurgitate facts. So I maintain that the IB taught me to research critically, question common biases and formulate my own opinions. What's ironic is that this has backfired on the international education system as a generation of students looks back and notices the gaping holes in our not-so-global curriculum. We have not been equipped, intellectually or emotionally, to understand this world and its current crises, and more importantly, our position in upholding global racial capitalism. Our maps are distorted. Our education makes us complicit. If we want to use the platform of international schools to its full potential, to truly advance justice, equity, and global-mindedness, our community needs to recast its long outdated mould.

By Xoài David

Sign the Decolonise IB Petition, take our Student and Educator surveys, and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

Decolonise IB is currently affiliated with KDSL Global, theAssociation of International Educators and Leaders of Colour (AIELOC) and Linden Global Learning Support as well as alumni from the following schools: Shanghai American School, Shanghai United International School, Hong Kong International School, International School Beijing, International School Manila, Brent International School, Tashkent International School, Singapore American School, International School Bangkok, Jakarta International School, Sekolah Ciputra, American International School of Bucharest, American Community School Athens, Tashkent International School, Lincoln Community School (Ghana) and Bilkent Laboratory International School, Berlin Brandenburg International School.

Thanks to Clara Reynolds, Kelindah Schuster and B. Kim for edits.

Disclaimer: Decolonise IB in no way seeks to appropriate Black Lives Matter nor divert urgent attention from causes that require immediate social and material support.

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Decolonise IB: How international school alumni are mobilising to diversify the expat curriculum

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10/8/2020 Update: Decolonise IB has changed its name to Organisation to Decolonise International Schools (ODIS) to include international schools that teach programs besides International Baccalaureate. Our provides links to our latest , and . International schools - the postcard of an idealised education.

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International Education and the Pursuit of Peace: Decolonizing international education

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International Education and the Pursuit of Peace: Decolonizing international education

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In International Education and the Pursuit of Peace: Decolonizing international education, Dan Shaw postulates that international education should be fully and continually focused on the principles of environmental sustainability, equality, and equity. In order to do thiS international education must eradicate the underlying attitudes inherent in a colonizing mindset

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International education and the pursuit of peace: decolonizing international education

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In this article, I question the purpose of international schools. In an attempt to answer this question, I start by revisiting the original aim of what we call 'international education'. Remembering its shared origins with those of the United Nations, and that its original purpose nearly a century ago was 'Education for Peace', I explore whether 'Education for Peace' might mean something different today.

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Elite International Schools Have a Racism Problem

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Elite International Schools Have a Racism Problem

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If you haven’t had a chance to read this, we highly recommend this article by Bloomberg News titled, Elite International Schools Have a Racism Problem. The reporter, Natalie Obiko Pearson will join us this week as a guest speaker to discuss the after-effects of this investigation

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Elite International Schools Have a Racism Problem

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Around the world, finishing schools for the Davos class teach excellence—as long as the excellence is White, Western, and English-speaking.

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Feminism & the Mastery of Nature by Val Plumwood

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Feminism & the Mastery of Nature by Val Plumwood

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Two of the most important political movements of the late twentieth century are environmentalism and feminism. In the book, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, Val Plumwood argues that feminist theory has an important opportunity to make a major contribution to the debates in political ecology and environmental philosophy.

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feminism and the mastery of nature (opening out: feminism for today)

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environmental conservation & protection - general

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social science / feminism & feminist theory

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Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (Opening Out: Feminism for Today)

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Two of the most important political movements of the late twentieth century are those of environmentalism and feminism. In this book, Val Plumwood argues that feminist theory has an important opportunity to make a major contribution to the debates in political ecology and environmental philosophy...

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The primary objective of IUCN’s publication entitled Forest and Gender is to emphasize the importance of integrating gender equality principles in forest conservation and sustainability.

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The primary objective of IUCN's publication entitled "Forest and Gender" is to emphasize the importance of integrating gender equality principles in forest conservation and sustainability. Released in 2011 (International Year of the Forest), this publication brings together case studies drawn from around the world, demonstrating the benefits of enhancing women's participation in forest management and restoration. The book also covers current issues, progress and future challenges of gender equity or resource management, for the inclusion of women in forest development programs and securing women's property rights at international and global levels.

In developed countries, despite the progress in women's access to education and employment opportunities, there is still gender disparity in forest education, employment and career perspectives in forestry and land ownership. As for developing countries, women continue to be excluded from training programmes, official-decision making process as well as property rights of forests. And yet women play an important role in forest resource management and conservation due to their close dependence on forest resources for subsistence (fuelwood, fodder, herbal medicine among others) and income.

Men and women have different yet complementary knowledge, use and management of the forests. Therefore, in order to achieve sustainable use of forest and land resources, both women's and men's needs, knowledge and experience must be valued and considered.

Gender and Forest features an exclusive interview with the late Wangari Maathai, Kenyan Nobel Peace Prize Laureate (in recognition for her work conserving the environment and empowering women) and founder of the Green Belt. In this interview with IUCN's Daniel Shaw, Wangari Maathai shared her views and experience about integrating gender issues in natural resources management and conservation.

If you are interested in why gender analysis in equitable use and control over forest resources is important - download this publication for your perusal.

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Publication of Forests and Gender - available for download

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The primary objective of IUCN's publication entitled "Forest and Gender" is to emphasize the importance of integrating gender equality principles in forest conservation and sustainability. Released in 2011 (International Year of the Forest), this publication brings together case studies drawn from around the world, demonstrating the benefits of enhancing women's participation in forest management and restoration.

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Both ex-imperial states and post-colonial regimes have promoted a selective and sanitized version of decolonization that casts their own conduct in a positive light, characterizing the process as negotiated and the outcome as inevitable. Dane Kennedy’s book, Decolonization, draws on recent scholarship to challenge that view, demonstrating that considerable violence and instability accompanied the end of the empire and that the outcome was often up for grabs.

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Top reviews from the United States

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Reviewed in the United States on May 27, 2019

Reviewed in the United States on July 14, 2016

There is always room for improvement.

Reviewed in the United States on May 26, 2018

This short book is a very good background reading on the subject of decolonization. To begin with, one must be aware of the fact that ‘all of the imperial powers were determined to maintain their colonial empires as long as they could do so and that all of them were prepared to use force to serve that end.’ (P.66) Thus, the process of decolonization, contrary to public propaganda, ‘was a violent, fiercely contested process that pitted imperial rulers against colonial subjects. It also pitted anticolonial nationalists against one another.’ (P.2) The power vacuum left by the leaving imperial powers always led to the outbreak of civil wars, ethnic cleansing, and other forms of political violence as competing regional, religious, linguistic, and other groups sought to shape the territorial dimensions and ethnic composition of new nation-states while they were still up for grabs. Therefore, the nation-state was both in the end, the triumph and the tragedy of decolonization.
Does decolonization mean the end of empires? The phenomenon of global political awakening of national self-determination following the end of the Second World War was making the traditional European imperialism increasingly outmoded. However, decolonization did not make empires obsolete; it merely modified their methods. Today, powerful states try to build empires not by relying on colonial rule but by creating dependencies in order to project power on others. ‘The United States and the Soviet Union developed new modes of power that provided their dependencies at least the pretense of national sovereignty.’ (P.92)

All in all, the author directs our attention to earlier crises of empires and reveals certain patterns in their collapse. Particular attention was drawn to the crucial role that global wars between empires played in these events, creating the economic and political crises that gave colonized people the motives and opportunities to seek independence.

Top reviews from other countries

4.0 out of 5 stars An important introduction

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 31, 2019

Just finished this important book. I must say, without the need for apology, that white pastors and leaders should be reading material like this. That’s true if you’re leading diverse congregations or businesses anywhere, but certainly if you’re leading, living, and on mission in a postcolonial context. We need to educate ourselves on the context, understand the history, and thus be better equipped for works of service. Books aren't everything, relationships are critically important. But we mustn't ignore history and context. This isn’t necessarily a comfortable read but that’s why you should read it. Not only colonisation itself but also decolonisation (and the multiple local wars that followed) was marked by self-serving greed and bloodshed. As I say, in my opinion this is necessary reading particularly for church leaders who want to help build a better future. And it is, of course, yet more depressing proof of the doctrine of sin and our need for grace.

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Decolonization: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

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Decolonization: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions) [Kennedy, Dane] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. Decolonization: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

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antiracist-ELA-educators-actions-Nov-2019.jpg

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The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its final report Monday. The Frontline explores the significance of the sixth report finally naming "colonialism" as a historical and ongoing driver of the climate crisis.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ( IPCC ) released its first report in 1990. Over 30 years later, the word " colonialism " finally made its way into the IPCC's sixth assessment report. The panel's working group two report , which looks at the impacts of climate change on people, listed colonialism not only as a driver of the climate crisis but also as an ongoing issue that is exacerbating communities' vulnerability to it.

The addition of one word may not seem like a big deal-but don't be fooled. This is major. The IPCC publishes a summary for policymakers alongside every report. This is the document world leaders look to when they're in the thick of negotiations at COP , the annual U.N. climate meeting. The summary's final language is meticulously scrutinized and discussed line by line-and not just by the world's top scientists, but also by officials representing 195 governments. That means that officials and scientists from around the globe now recognize the significant role colonialism has played in heating up our planet and destroying its many gifts.

Welcome to The Frontline , where we're celebrating the climate justice movement that helped make this happen. I'm Yessenia Funes, climate director of Atmos . On Monday, the IPCC released its final section in its sixth assessment. The working group three report is focused on mitigation, or how leaders can reduce greenhouse gas emissions. And guess what? There's plenty of time to prevent climate catastrophe if leaders just listen to the science.

"It's about time."

Now, the world's top scientists are acknowledging that de colonization must be central to the global response to climate change. This has tremendous potential for how world leaders shape future climate policy. Many advocates are worried about false climate solutions that promise to decrease carbon emissions (and may do so) but risk harming people along the way.

Many communities on the ground are still living through the remnants of colonialism-and fighting the forms into which it has evolved. We only have to look at the Russian occupation of Ukraine to remember that colonialism is still alive and well. Or to fossil fuel tycoons who desecrate Indigenous lands in chase of profit. Or the U.S. military-industrial complex whose tanks and fighter jets make it among the world's top carbon polluters.

"Our country [the U.S.] was born out of colonialism and slavery," Salazar said. "That has been reinforced over generations by policy."

"What I'd like to see, then, is for countries like the U.S. to create mechanisms where those communities that are negatively impacted have the resources they need to heal their communities."

OZAWA BINESHI ALBERT
CLIMATE JUSTICE ALLIANCE

The planet still carries the scars of that trauma today-in the form of extinction, deforestation , and pollution. The communities that survived this genocide from Africa to North America have had to mend their own wounds while surviving generations later in a world run by white supremacy and structural racism. A world that barely acknowledges their existence or the historical harms they've faced. That must change if we are all to survive climate change. A response that doesn't take this history into account risks the lives of people who have already lost too much.

"If we want to make sure that there is a livable planet for all , the window for that is tiny," said Lisa Schipper, an environmental social science research fellow at the University of Oxford who was a coordinating lead author on the IPCC's working group two report. "If we want to have a livable planet for some , which seems to be what some politicians are thinking, then the window of opportunity might be bigger, but then we're making a conscious decision to sacrifice people."

So, how did this happen? Well, thanks to organizers like Salazar-but also thanks to scientists.

In the eight years since the last IPCC assessment report, there has been an explosion in literature drawing links between climate change and colonialism. The IPCC reports compile findings from thousands of papers that already exist. Authors don't make original conclusions-they put all the pieces together and present a full picture to the public.

"There is a mechanism now in place that enables Indigenous and local communities directly to inform the panel, for the first time, of the ways they see history, justice, and climate impacts," Mustonen said. "That was a game changer."

And that paper wasn't the only game changer. The IPCC featured more social scientists, scientists of color, and women scientists than previous reports, too. Involving researchers who deal with more history and society rather than models and data goes a long way.

This time around, the IPCC engaged more Indigenous authors, in particular, explained Sherilee Harper, a lead author on the report who is the Canada research chair in climate change and health at the University of Alberta. Every single chapter in the working group two report covered Indigenous topics. And Indigenous authors were the ones writing many of these sections on traditional knowledge and colonialism.

"That is really important because Indigenous self-determination in climate change assessment processes is really, really critical," Harper said. "There's definitely still room for improvement, and it's just a small step forward-but a critical and important step forward."

"What I'd like to see, then, is for countries like the U.S. to create mechanisms where those communities that are negatively impacted have the resources they need to heal their communities," said Albert, who is Yuchi and Anishinaabe.

Correction, April 4, 2022 11:50 am ET
Ozawa Bineshi Albert's name was previously misspelled. We regret the error.

60SecondsOnEarth,AnthropoceneNow,ArtWorld,BeyondBorders,BlackFuturity,ClimateChampions,DemocracyEarth,EarthEquity,Earthscapes,EchoSphere,EarthTones,HolisticNature,Indigeneity,QueerEcology,ReFashion,RisingTides,TEKToTech,TheFrontline,TheOverview,WildLife,

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Yes, Colonialism Caused Climate Change, IPCC Reports

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The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its final report Monday. The Frontline explores the significance of the sixth report finally naming "colonialism" as a historical and ongoing driver of the climate crisis. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ( IPCC ) released its first report in 1990.

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What are the good life goals?

The Sustainable Development Goals are the blueprint for a better future, and together we can reach them.

By following the good life goals we can all help make tomorrow better than today. Let's do this!

Best Lifehacks of 2022

Our curated list of the best lifehacks from this year that you definitely don't want to miss.

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The Sustainable Development Goals are the blueprint for a better future, and together we can reach them. By following the good life goals we can all help make tomorrow better than today. Let's do this! Our curated list of the best lifehacks from this year that you definitely don't want to miss.

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"[R]ecommended to anyone interested in multiculturalism and migration....[and] food for thought also for scholars studying migration in less privileged contexts."- Social Anthropology

In this compelling study of the children of serial migrants, Danau Tanu argues that the international schools they attend promote an ideology of being "international" that is Eurocentric. Despite the cosmopolitan rhetoric, hierarchies of race, culture and class shape popularity, friendships, and romance on campus.

By going back to high school for a year, Tanu befriended transnational youth, often called "Third Culture Kids", to present their struggles with identity, belonging and internalized racism in their own words. The result is the first engaging, anthropological critique of the way Western-style cosmopolitanism is institutionalized as cultural capital to reproduce global socio-cultural inequalities.

From the introduction:

When I first went back to high school at thirty-something, I wanted to write a book about people who live in multiple countries as children and grow up into adults addicted to migrating. I wanted to write about people like Anne-Sophie Bolon who are popularly referred to as "Third Culture Kids" or "global nomads." ... I wanted to probe the contradiction between the celebrated image of "global citizens" and the economic privilege that makes their mobile lifestyle possible. From a personal angle, I was interested in exploring the voices among this population that had yet to be heard (particularly the voices of those of Asian descent) by documenting the persistence of culture, race, and language in defining social relations even among self-proclaimed cosmopolitan youth.

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Growing Up in Transit: The Politics of Belonging at an International School

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Buy Growing Up in Transit: The Politics of Belonging at an International School: Read Kindle Store Reviews - Amazon.com

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This is why we are co-creating the Inner Development Goals (IDG) - a non-profit, open-source initiative committed to fostering inner development towards more sustainable futures. We research, collect, and communicate science-based skills and qualities that help us to live purposeful, sustainable, and productive lives.

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Jamboard: What is the point of an int'l education?

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Jamboard: What is the point of an int'l education?

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Allow the wealthy
access to
educational
opportunities
outside the limits of
national systems.

. . . hopefully to help
connect the world
so we stop seeing
borders and start
seeing similarities
within our souls

To create a
more peaceful
and
sustainable
planet

In its current form, to
spread colonialism.
However, educators &
students are speaking
up to help make
lasting effects to the
system we are all in.
There is hope but it
will take a lot of work.

International
education is most
needed in this time
where we break the
borders and think our
country to the whole
nation, where we can
collaborate our
thought uniting all
the nation. It helps to
have higher education
in abroad countries
and thereby think of
unity and peace of the
whole nation.

To share our
knowledge and
experience with the
global community
and make our
learners as lifelong
learners for the
future.

Jordan/To develop the
universal human
citizen.A global citizen
that understands the
world and has the
required tools.The
global citizen that
realizes that we are all
connected and
responsible for the
prosperity of this
world.

There's a huge
mismatch between
international
schools' missions
and behaviour.

The
connections
made
between
cultures amd
people

To reflect our own
identity, authenticity
and perspective in a
global community and
be aware of cultural
differences and
tolerate them, and
collaborate with
others for a better
world

To celebrate
diversity and
multicultural
learning
environment

To gain different
and new
perspectives on
topics and allows
students, and
teachers, to become
globally minded.

In practice many
international schools
are preparing
students to be the
next generation of
global elites. I don't
necessarily mean that
in a bad way, we
should hope to
prepare them to be
wise and emphatic
elites.

Each one may have a
particular founding
purpose, but
ultimately all serve a
role to educate those
who do not feel local
education
opportunities suit
their needs

To serve an
internationally
mobile
clientele.

To educate
responsible
and caring
global citizens

One function is to
provide transferable
curricula to
students who are
relatively nomadic.

Be exposed to
different
perspectives and
opinions.
Understand that
there is no "one
way" or "right way"
to be, think, act

To provide
consistently high
quality education
that empowers
learners to become
global citizens

To develop
mindful
citizen and
responsible
leaders

Student-centered
learning to shape a
more peaceful and
sustainable future
through compassion,
connection,
understanding, and
action. "Peace in
oneself, peace in the
world"

To develop global and
internationally-minde
d citizens to be
successful in an
international
community.

To provide a
cosmopolitan
environment and
education for local
and international
students and their
families.

International schools
are ones that espouse
global citizenship and
promote cultural
intelligence. As Kurt
Hahn said, they help
to "build the bedrock
of goodwill as a
foundation of the
society to be"

To develop an
understanding of
being a global
citizen

Originally to provide
education for mobile
families, which is still
relevant but less so.
It's about bridging
cultural divides,
educating for peace
and diverse
perspectives.

The purpose of
international
education is to
either reinforce or
give access to social
and cultural capital
to access the global
market.

to learn
more
about
cultures

I don't think there is
one final answer to
this question. It is
dependent on the
context of the school
and needs of the
community. Overall,
the goal of educating
globally-minded
individuals should be
overarching.

If "world" or
"international"
education can be
made equitable, there
is tremendous value
in developing and
educating global
citizens who can
engage in socially just
ways on the planet,
and can be a part of
developing peaceful
solutions to the
world's most pressing
problems.

To educate students
to an internationally
recognized standard
that should ensure
acceptance to any
university abroad.
To develop global
citizens.

Providing education
for globally mobile
families - less
pertinent now that
more local students
than expats are
enrolled around the
world. Should be
about educating for
diversity, inclusion
and social justice.

Provide broader
educational options
for families who
may not want
traditional
education paths.

cultural awareness
and mutual
understanding

There is no
single 'point' -
it depends on
the mission
and purpose
of the school

To create global
citizens, truly
immersed in
experiences varied
global experiences.

For some,
access to
privilege and
power.

Depends on whose
perspective you are
asking the question
from? Schools,
students, parents
and teachers will
have different
perspectives.

Reality:
Maintain
status quo of
colonialism
and white
supremacy.

Give opportunities
to
students...language
access.

I would love to see a
world where all
education is
considered an
international
education.

How much of
what we do is
"missionary"
vs. "teacher"?

To actively seek for
our privileged
learners to gain
diverse experiences
and ultimately for
them to want to
make a positive and
impactful difference
to our world.

Hi. I have always been
uneasy about the
colonial/imperial
undertones
associated with
international
education and schools
and hope that by
digging deeper into
this topic I can better
understand how
others are dealing
with this and how I
can create effective
change as an
international school
leader.

to develop globally
aware students who
have a sense of
resonvibility and
social justice

Enable a broader
perspective
connecting the local
environnement and
the global world for
an equitable and
sustainable planet
for all.

To respect and
understand that
international
includes the
EASTern part of the
world too & they are
just as capable and
amazing as the
west.

The point of
international schools
is to provide
continuity in
education for families
who move to
countries outside
their origin, usually for
foreign service or
business. It has
evolved as dominant
cultures influence
globalization, and
local families send
their children to
international schools
as a gateway to
international
universities. The ripple
effects include issues
of inequity that are
important to reflect
on for restoration and
justice.

cultures influence
globalization, and
local families send
their children to
international schools
as a gateway to
international
universities. The ripple
effects include issues
of inequity that are
important to reflect
on for restoration and
justice.

To allow students
such as myself (in
the 1990s) to receive
an English-based
education
regardless of the
country my father's
company moved us
to.

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#ISSedu Educators 4 Peace - Google Jamboard

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