Lorne Balmer, Jada Phelps, James Kigamwa, Erin Macey, This edition of the Equity Dispatch explores how to create democratic and responsive school communities

This edition of the Equity Dispatch states that on their own, students often fail to realize the systemic nature of school problems and internalize the belief that they are to blame for school failures. Without the guidance and support of advocates to transform the system, they may engage in self-defeating resistance—the behaviors we typically see, interpret, and track before labeling them as dropouts, including defiance, failure to complete assignments, and truancy. These are symptoms of a systemic problem that will only be resolved when we stop pushing out and subtracting and begin inviting our young adults to the table to chart a course for their high school experience and determine for themselves the symbolic value of their high school diploma.

In this talk, Dorinda Carter Andrews challenges us to consider how gaps in critical consciousness and mindsets for adults and students in schools prevent us from providing equitable schooling experiences for all students. Specifically, Carter Andrews urges educators to consider how increased critical consciousness about the role of race and culture in teaching and learning can be fostered through educator professional development and student curriculum and can ultimately strengthen teacher-student relationships. A shifted focus on closing consciousness gaps can address the equity imperative embedded in the larger discourse about achievement gaps.

David E. Kirkland, December 2019 

M. Nickie Coomer, Robin G. Jackson, Tiffany S. Kyser, Seena M. Skelton, Kathleen King Thorius

In this issue of Equity Dispatch, we rethink how the “achievement gap” is conceptualized. We can begin moving away from describing the achievement gap as a persistent disparity of educational measures between groups of students defined by race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status (SES) and gender (Hidden Curriculum, 2014), to understanding it as the outcome of historical and intergenerational marginalization of students of color and students living in disinvested communities.

  

In this edition of Equity Dispatch, we seek to emphasize the criticality of intersectionality, or the ways in which social, economic, and political identity-based systems of oppression and privilege connect, overlap, and influence one another, as a powerful construct and tool for strengthening culturally responsive and sustaining practices in the educational environment. We offer its importance because when we collapse students’ identities into separate categories (e.g. English Language Learners, LGBTQ+, Black/African American), we run the risk of not attending to the complexities and oppressions that exist at the nexus of these diverse student groups.

This presentations objectives were to help participants explain their own identity(ies), connect how those identity(ies) provide power and privilege, examine the concept of intersectionality, and identify intersectionality in school based examples.

 

In this issue of Equity Digest, we explore why it is important for educators to understand the concept of intersectionality. Educators must understand the myriad ways in which their students experience the world in order to inform culturally responsive and sustaining practices in the classroom. In this manner, they can better serve their students and ensure an equitable, responsive education for all. 

Our keynote speaker, Django Paris, who pushes against the status quo respect for standardized English—and goes a lot further. Apparently there’s a broad continuum between teaching informed by deficit views and ... Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies. What does it really mean to honor what our students bring with them, their languages, world views, ways of interacting with others?

In this video, Equity Fellow Dr. David Hernandez Saca provides a critical lens to the field of learning disability studies, including situating learning disabilities as impairments situated "in the individual," the importance of centering student voice, and intersectionality in making meaning of learning disabilities.

In this webinar concepts related to identity, positionality, and intersectionality are defined and unpacked. Extending these constructs, the webinar addresses how intersecting oppressions play out for various student groups, and provides strategies for engaging in conversations about race, class, and sex without erasing or privileging one identity over another. 

Dr. Sharon Radd talks about the importance of critical consciousness for transformative professional learning.

Critical consciousness, defined as an active state of seeking to identify the beliefs and language that obscure systemic inequities, is a central component of transformative professional learning. Practitioners can use the two tools described in the brief - reflection journals or blogs and critical communities of practice - to create psychologically safe spaces in which to examine assumptions and alter practices.