Social Justice and Anti-Bias Education Action Steps for the White Educator
Photos by Sarah B. Ottow, Protecting Black Lives Protest, Providence, RI, June 5, 2020
At this time when the racial injustice that has always been woven into the United States’ culture and economic system rears up and inspires all of us to help make change, I invite you, especially White allies, to consider taking some of the following steps to use your privilege for action and social change, starting in your classroom, school or district. You don’t need to do all of these, nor put yourself out in a public protest if you don’t feel comfortable during the pandemic, but please do something. As Martin Luther King Jr said, “Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about the things that matter.”
Educate yourself
Educate your students
Listen to people of color
Talk to other white people
Donate to the cause
Protest
Featured Resources from Confianza and our Collaborators
Identifying Our Circle of Influence as Change Agents for Equity, Language and Literacy
Taking a Schoolwide Approach for Supporting English Learners
Honoring Students' Stories: Identity Texts to Write and Diverse Texts to Read
Teaching Black Lives Matter from Learning for Justice (formerly known as Teaching Tolerance)
Approaches to Equity: Towards Transformation from Equity Literacy Institute
In this video, Sarah shares key anti-bias, anti-racist resources for White educators in connection to her ongoing journey as a change agent for equity and anti-bias, anti-racist (ABAR) educator and ally.
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Joining us live, hello to you live and also in the archive. I am Sarah Ottow, the founder, owner, and director of Confianza and I'm here today to talk to you about Mindsets and Practices for Anti-Bias Education. And I come to you in the middle of a pandemic and also in the middle of extreme social unrest which I hope is just the beginning of the next chapter in the history of our country.
I'm gonna give you a moment to read the statement that we put together and then after that I'll explain to you why it's just more than a statement and hopefully you'll leave today with some real concrete ideas and resources to take with you into your practice, especially if you're a white ally educator. So go ahead and review our statement please and then we will move forward from there.
So just to be perfectly clear, we stand with our Black and Brown teachers, leaders, students, and their families and we do already pledge to the ACLU, to , and to an international arts organization.
It's not enough just to donate, but it is one step as I'll discuss and I wanna just make perfectly clear as Michelle Obama says that it's not my America or your America, it's our America. Much like when we work with English learners, it's not about my kids and your kids. It's about our kids. And so I'm hopeful at this moment in history, this very important moment of history when the systemic racist and biased underpinnings of our country are now finally exposed for more people to see and understand, I'm very hopeful that as educators we can take this moment and move beyond performative allyship into real action and change in our classrooms that directly support the outcomes and opportunities for our students and their families.
And as I'd like to talk about and as I'll discuss today, we're dealing with schools in many, if not all communities around the country and even in my work I went work in international schools and it's also very this way which is the new mainstream. We talk about mainstream as this thing of really what we're saying is status quo and I challenge you right away to think about what we're talking about when we say mainstream because really the new mainstream is reflective of all of our students. That's multinational, multiracial, multilingual, multi-abled, multi-religious, multi-gender identity, and on and on.
And so we need to start there with a message of unity and with an understanding that especially if we are part of the dominant culture, if we have benefited and lived and breathed the air of the status quo, that we as white allies, as educators, recognize that and seek to be inclusive of all those identity groups. And so let's dive into our work together today.
So this set of pictures was taken last weekend. I was able to go to my local protest down in Providence, Rhode Island and I met this teacher on the left, her name's Lauren, and I was struck by her sign which was no news to me. None of this is new. The system was designed this way to oppress and keep students of color, particularly Black communities down. And so she's right when she says on her sign, "Black students are four times more likely to receive suspensions and expulsions."
I've been following this data for quite a while. It is very well documented. It's not an opinion that we have systemic racist policies and procedures from behavioral, all the way through academic systems that really promote not just the school-to-prison pipeline but continuously perpetuate unconscious bias. And so you might be thinking, "But I'm not racist."
And if you've studied the work of some of the current theorists, especially Robin DiAngelo who I highly recommend, you'll see that it's really a symptom of white fragility is you don't have to say the N-word to be racist and you don't have to feel bad about it, but you do need to change it. So so much of bias is unconscious and in our schools, I see it all the time. As I'll share with you in a couple minutes, I've been doing this work since I started as an educator over 20 years ago and a lot of the same theories are just being updated to really bring in intersectionality and different groups, but it's the same injustices, right?
And the same lack of opportunity and access and underachievement that is not a within-child issue that faces our students but is a within-system issue, and it's on us.
Again, especially as white educators as I will share with you my own story to unpack our own personal bias and privilege and to walk the walk as much as we can to understand what our students are going through and more importantly identity groups as a whole that have been historically disenfranchised in public education in our country. What's happening right now is really, again disrupting the status quo which again, it's another way of saying mainstream.
So what we're experiencing now in the streets and what we're seeing with the protests is we're being asked to look at what's underneath and what has always been underneath.
And we might not have always experienced that ourselves and we're all experiencing what I hope you see as a call-to-action to try to experience it and try to, as this other sign says that I loved from another friend I met at the protest, "I understand that I will never understand. However I still stand," and that's really the call-to-action for us.
And I do have a blog that I wrote about this that goes into a little more detail and definitely shares with you the resources that I'll be sharing in just a couple moments if you'd like to look at that more deeply. But the first step in really the call-to-action for us as white allies, as educators, is to educate ourselves and to say I don't know what I don't know, and that's okay but I'm willing to go through the process of acknowledging that demographics are unfortunately destiny in this country and skin color and language minority status and so on.
There's a major imbalance of power structures and again, I see it every day, and those of us that consider ourselves woke or are considering ourselves as change agents, we see that and it's not enough just to see it. We have to act on it. So let's talk a little bit more about what we can do as role models, as change agents, as people that interact with numerous students who look up to us for guidance, who look up to us as an example, and also to the colleagues that we work with with whom we can have an impact on, with whom we can really share our experiences and help nudge their thinking forward to be less biased, to be less racist.
And so with that, I'd like to share with you a little bit about me. So I have a personal mission statement and in the work that I do at Confianza in change agent's work. This is where we start, what's your why? For me, my why is I do this for the experiences that I'll share in a moment that have taught me so much. And my mission statement therefore is I recognize and redistribute power of relations.
As I mentioned before, we're living in an imbalanced power structure. The United States was built around great power imbalances and we have not corrected those. And so in my work supporting language minority students and educators, I look for those power imbalances and I aim to redistribute them through education, through support, and through continuous improvement.
So for me, I'd like to just share where that started. First of all, I'm very lucky to be born to activist parents. My mother marched on Washington. She's been here before again, as a white ally, but she's seen this and I've been taught so much by my family who is always supporting those whose voices aren't heard. And that connects to my siblings. So I'm the oldest of four and some of you know this about me already 'cause I do speak about it in my work, but the youngest in my family has severe physical and learning disabilities and was not only I would say debilitating, at times, bullied and disenfranchised by the school system and the greater society. She has most importantly taught me so much about what it is like for someone who's born different and that is something that I take with me every day.
And also in this picture you have our friends who lived with us every summer for many years as a newcomer from Nepal. And living with a newcomer who is just learning English of course, helped me enjoy all that is there around learning language, and culture, and working with, and learning from, of course, people from different spaces.
And so next, I took it upon myself to realize that when I was teaching in the worst place to live, documented in many studies, in Milwaukee public schools in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the worst city in the United States for Black populations, I was teaching in those schools and I realized pretty early on, I don't look like my students. I don't have African-American roots and I don't have Hispanic roots. I don't have Spanish proficiency. I don't have the kind of street knowledge and the kind of experiences with violence that my students and trauma that my students were experiencing. Had different trauma and I had a different experience, but not the same.
And so I took it upon myself to say you know what? I'm gonna leave the United States mainland and I'm gonna live and teach in Latin America for a couple years, and I'm going to understand what it means to be a voluntary language learner, and I think that's where a lot of this work begins and ends. If you're not putting yourself in a position of being in someone else's shoes, it's hard to build bridges. So I definitely encourage people to try to get out of their comfort zone and learn another language, go to different racial communities.
Of course, listen is the most important thing and really understand as much as we can. We'll never understand, but try to understand what we can to move forward which just brings me into my work of being a change agent and everything that Confianza has come to be. My family is really a very typical new mainstream family. I have a husband who's immigrant origin, first generation who's definitely discriminated against in some ways although he is white. There are different discriminations that he comes against.
Not only that, I have Jewish in my family. I have Jewish folks in my family. I have Black Haitian folks in my family and of course, I have my disabled sister. And so those different statuses are all under attack right now. They've always been under attack, but particularly in the last several years it's been documented that bullying around all these identity groups has been on the rise, and has been on the rise in our schools and has been on the rise in the greater community, and hate crimes have been increased.
So it's very personal for me to see the next generation have to come come across the same kinds of prejudice, and hate, and unconscious bias that has been going on for far too long. And so with that, just some of the things that have been really useful for me in my journey is taking part intentionally in networks for social justice educators, for getting my master's degree in social justice and urban education, and trying to understand critical race theory, and feminist theory, and queer theory, and all of those things that have brought us to this place today where we can now draw on the works of those scholars. We can now draw on the works of those pioneers and bring that work with us hopefully into this new mainstream.
I won't get into it in too much detail today, but I did train and work on the Obama campaign in 2008 and that taught me more lessons than I can ever really fully explain. But just in and of itself, being targeted as a person, myself, who was working and supporting a man of color in a very conservative community by the way, in Wisconsin. It was something that I'll never forget and really helped me understand a little bit more about the prejudice that's up against us.
So where does that bring me today? Well, it brings me to you and it brings me to my daily work as a professional development provider, as a change agent supporting schools. I'm so lucky to partner with Teaching Tolerance is an organization that if you don't know about it, I'll be sharing with you some resources from there. And other great organizations like Reimagining Migration, as well as having been able to learn and partner with some of the organizations that you see here including some more initiatives around the intersectionality between language and race and special education needs. And then finally, as I am learning through my last course in my leadership certificate in diversity and inclusion at eCornell, I keep thinking how do we take what we're learning about what's happening in the corporate space to disrupt and address these power imbalances and how do we bring them into schools? I have so much to learn and I'm really excited about continuing to bring that work to you at Confianza. Again, that's really my mission and so all of this brings me to where we can go and what potentially I could offer you.
And again, I do not have all the answers by any means. I am on this journey as well. I do consider myself pre-educated on it, but constantly checking my own privilege and constantly checking what I need to learn and where my blind spots are. So I actually pulled some of my favorite books off my personal bookshelf and my cat, Toby, is helping out with that. So I'll give you a moment to take a look at that. Some of these are classic oldies but goodies. So Rethinking Schools is an organization that I was heavily involved with in the Milwaukee area and they are alive and well. They have great publications that are super teacher-friendly, that how to teach about "Rethinking Columbus," for example. How to bring in multicultural texts from Black communities if you're a white educator, really important stuff.
I don't have time to go through all of these today but I'm excited to share with you, these are some of my favorites. They're not all of them, but they're some of my favorites. The one that I mentioned before about "White Fragility" I cannot recommend enough for white self-identifying liberals. It's very, very important to question some of the beliefs that we've held fast too. And then finally, the piece that I really love is if you can't get your hands on it, you can get a digital copy of it and it's "The 1619 Project" from "New York Times." It really helps us relearn the true story of slavery and looking at primary sources and looking at this idea of America holds onto an undemocratic assumption, right? Some people deserve more power than others. And so it really goes through that, as well as their podcast series. So that's a great resource that I love as well.
And finally, I wanna talk about all of them, but I'm just gonna bring up one more which is the "Beyond Heroes and Holidays." That's a classic text and I use that term all the time when I do audits with schools and when I help them look at their culturally responsive environments. I say you got to go beyond culturally responsive. You got to go to transformative. You got to go beyond it's Black Lives History Month. We did it, we touched on it. No, you got to make sure that the curriculum reflects the identity and diversity and again, the point of views of the people like the "People's History for the Classroom" and the "People's History of the United States" is a great way to bring in primary sources and kind of reverse that dominant culture that is so pervasive and everywhere for us. So what do we have for you at Confianza that you can take with you?
Well, we have a lot and we're always producing more resources because we're never done learning. I always have so much more to learn and I wanna make sure that I'm reflecting that in my contributor team to bring you high quality, relevant resources. And all of these are linked on the blog that I shared today and they will be available and we'll continue to add to them. So we have several articles from our contributors, some of which go into the Teaching Tolerance resources. As you can see here, responding to hate and bias at school. Some really great tips about that and of course, further resources because it's not just something you can check off like oh, we've responded to hate and bias. No, it's got to be a cultural shift. It's got to be an ongoing change.
And then also the piece in the green is about culturally responsive texts and then again, going deeper into how do you involve students in the creation of texts? Because students really do need them to be at the center and that's what it's all about. We have an article on microaggressions and the pieces to look for again, around that unconscious bias which is really where a lot of it comes from.
It's not just the hate and the explicit racism. It's a lot of the overt and subvert kinds of moves. And then finally, this is really what I'm super excited to talk to you about today which is what are some deeper professional learning experiences that you can engage in or your school can engage in to help you move the needle? So your own needle to become more anti-biased, your own school, your own district, your own team and I'm just gonna start at the top. The top is really our framework. As you can see, anti-bias education is there. It's literally an essential part of what we do. We talk about equity, language, and literacy as our underpinnings. An equity-based mindset is where it begins and ends. It's not enough just to have practices and we have these standards and all these great strategies. All the research says strategy education alone doesn't help teachers, doesn't help leaders improve practice. It's got to be the mindsets to go along with it. So that's just a little bit about our framework and then I'll just go around the circle. So the book is a book that I wrote, "The Language Lens for Content Classrooms." It's a great starter level for content teachers who are learning to work with language teachers and throughout the book but particularly in chapter two, it goes very deep into the idea of identity, and how to invest in students' identities, and help them invest in their own identities off the work of Jim Commons.
And then next is the change agent's work. That is the most important work that I do and what I've committed my career to which is finding like-minded change agents who are already thinking about these things and how to change the systems and the cultures to be more responsive to race, to language, to class, to ableism, and to disrupt that and to do it in ways that work within the system which by the way, is not easy. I said I've been spending my whole career doing this and I still haven't figured it out, but I do have the recipe. There are certain tools and there are certain practices, and there are certain conversations that we can have that really do help again, define that mission statement for you and then how do you live and breathe that mission statement?
So the change agents program is customized. It's really meant for cohorts, but we do have a group of individual change agents from across the country who've been working with us for the last year and beyond. We also do this work directly with districts. I've worked now with three different districts including very diverse group of teachers and leaders in the New York City schools and helping them address their whole toolkit, right? And their whole practices around change agents. And we do call that "Change Agents for Equity with Language and Literacy." That's the whole title.
Our really popular offering right now that we're featuring and we've had it for some time is our Social Justice course. The Social Justice course is again, CRT plus. Culturally responsive teaching is amazing and we need to go there, and then what's next? What's next is what I like to talk about in terms of curriculum design, transformative curriculum. My research base is all about transformative multicultural literacy, transformative systems, and so that gets into some of the deeper changes around critical practices for anti-bias education. The Social Justice Standards, both of which are tremendously helpful and practical teacher-friendly, leader-friendly resources from Teaching Tolerance. We help teams and individual folks operationalize that.
That is an exciting course that we're redesigning right now just to be as up to date as possible with what's going on after the death of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd and of course, the others at this time. So that's something that I'm really excited about and that's there for you as well, and then finally, our ELL Summer Institute which is our online PD. It's our core course, but it's adding on some very discounted synchronous sessions with me to do Q&A and even get into some of these issues around how do we really address the root causes? How do we really improve our practice for our English learners? And as part of our mission of course, is for all kids.
So I hope this has been useful for you. I got to say I've really been reflecting a lot and I hope that you all are, but reflection is the first step to action. So let's not forget to keep this going. This is not something that is a fad. This is not something that is a trend. This is something that we've always needed to address and we should always keep in our fore which is attention to identity groups, particular attention to race and the historical underpinnings of inequity in our country and of course, in our schools.
I look forward to hearing from you. If this was useful for you or if you have any questions, don't hesitate to stay in touch and I wish everyone health and your own kind of activism, thank you.