Submitted by: Kelly O’Shea

We continued our work using the math equity toolkit and workbook.

We completed the 5th step of the cycle that we started in October by reflecting on our plans from last month and how we have begun to implement them.

Then we started on the November work. The theme for November is “How am I authentically including Black, Latinx, and multilingual students?”

The Engage prompts for this month started with:

• White supremacy culture shows up in classrooms when… “Good” teaching is considered an antidote for inequity for Black, Latinx, multilingual students.
• White supremacy culture shows up in classrooms when… Superficial curriculum changes are offered to address culturally relevant pedagogy and practice.

We spent time writing in response to the reflection prompts for these topics, and then had another good discussion about what we had written and what it had raised for us. We talked about the tensions between competing goals of our work and the steps toward progress in equity work in science.  For example, important steps (like “good” progressive teaching practices that help all students or incorporating scientific role models of diverse backgrounds into our curriculum) on their own are not enough to achieve equity in our classes or to view the work of science itself differently. For another example, we talked about how making moves toward anti-racist science teaching might mean eliminating some content to open up time for different kinds of discussions, but also might leave students less prepared for eventual college work in the subject (which would obviously have its own negative equity effects). (I’m not sure if I’m capturing everything about this discussion well enough, but this is a taste of some things that came up!)

Then we worked on updating our personal plans and action steps to incorporate what we thought about and discussed this week.

Here is the slide deck that we used: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/156qpEbmxa-fTieSZtZsZxQxHvJqz8YZy0mfV1HJ-9mQ/edit?usp=sharing