Teacher Professional Development

A meaningful, deep, rich culturally relevant curriculum will engage and inspire young people to want to learn. Joy will be sparked and a level of interest and agency will propel students to gain a myriad of skills beyond the content. In this training, educators will learn that teaching culturally relevant curriculum is an imperative building block and a critical skill in serving youth. This training will start by emphasizing the critical importance of teaching culturally relevant curriculum. Participants will gain an understanding of the necessary components of a culturally relevant curriculum and will be able to modify, supplement, and eventually create their own lessons/units. Follow-up for lesson and unit creation as well as individual or small group coaching can be arranged.

A classroom community built on a foundation of culturally responsive pedagogy is one where all students are physically, emotionally, academically, and psychologically safe. It is a place where community means belonging, respect, and love, not merely acceptance. Culturally responsive teaching means that students and their families, and their cultural backgrounds and traditions, are at the heart of the classroom and teaching practices. In this training, school staff will learn how to be a culturally responsive educator. They will learn how to build a positive and trusting foundation built on community, where relationships are at the heart of the classroom and school. Staff will learn strategies, systems, and structures that center Black, Brown, and Indigenous communities (specifics will be tailored to each school community). Follow-up for individual or small group coaching can be arranged.

It is important to understand that race is an arbitrary social construct that divides us, while racism is systemic and interpersonal, harming Black people, people of color, and ultimately all of us. How do our racial and personal identities influence who we are, and how do they impact how we show up in our working relationships? In this workshop, we examine our own racial identity journey and development. We will look at various racial identity models, discussing how we have been socialized by our environment and lived experiences to create our subjective perspectives on race, equity and justice.

Whiteness is the default cultural setting in the U.S. In order to work together for racial justice it is important to understand the historical roots of whiteness and anti-blackness, and how in many ways they are two sides of the same coin. We will examine history from John Punch and the Virginia Slave Codes, to the Tulsa Race Massacre, to the forced cultural assimilation in places such as the Carlisle boarding school. Watching a clip from the film Ethnic Notions will enable us to make connections to how anti-blackness is pervasive in mass media and in this country presently. We will read James Baldwin, looking at how whiteness is othering, before discussing how it manifests organizationally and interpersonally in these times.

“Anti-racist pedagogy is not a prescribed method that can simply be applied to our teaching, nor does it end with incorporating racial content into courses.” -Kyoko Kishimoto. Anti-racist pedagogy focuses on connecting the classroom with both personal and institutional contexts. While this pedagogy requires educators to continuously engage in critical self-reflection around what they teach and how they teach it, the purpose is to disrupt white supremacy in and through formal education. In this training we will examine the elements of anti-racist education and how educators can engage in this continual process of self-reflection and education.

Teju Cole has written about the White Savior Industrial Complex and it is essential to understand how this psychology, consciousness, and deficit perspective is embedded within the nonprofit industry and the U.S. Education system in particular. The facilitators will draw from their own personal experience participating in white savioring, as well as witnessing the damage it does. We will examine content including The Blind Side, No White Saviors and the case of Renee Bach, helping white teachers to interrogate their own whiteness, conditioning, motives, and practices.

We all have implicit bias and we are more likely to do harm when we deny our racial biases. Developing an understanding of the power of implicit bias enables us to develop practices to minimize the impact of our unconscious tendencies to categorize, generalize, stereotype and discriminate. We will examine common microaggressions, and interpersonal racism, and discuss steps for addressing and working to repair harm when it occurs.