Submitted by: Jane Belton

Submitted by: Jane Belton

In our most recent meeting on 4/5, we wanted to gather some materials for the Summer Curriculum Working Group, focusing on sharing the tools we use for evaluating and reflecting on our curriculum and pedagogy through an anti-racist lens.

In preparation for the meeting, we read “12 Questions to Ask When Designing Culturally and Historically Responsive Curriculum.”

At the meeting we reflected on the following prompts together:

• What are the questions you ask yourself in creating your spaces (physical and virtual spaces) and designing curriculum (lessons, practices, units, assessments) for equity and inclusion? 
• What questions or tools do you use to reflect on the extent to which your work serves goals of diversity, equity, and inclusion?

The conversation was generative. We will be sharing our notes with the Summer Curriculum Working Group.

Submitted by: Jane Belton

On Wednesday 2/16, the English Department held a half-day retreat at the Brooklyn Museum, facilitated by Museum Educator, Bix Archer.

The goals for the retreat were to reflect on racial blind spots: 

1. How does our positionality impact the ways in which we experience a text?
2.  How might we set up texts and experiences for students to examine their own positionality and racial blind spots?
3. How can we set up texts and experiences to prevent experiences where our blind spots (and/or student blind spots) do harm to students. 

We started the morning examining the poem “Declaration” by Tracy K. Smith. The discussion prompts included open-ended questions like, “What comes up for you when you read this?” which allowed us to first consider the individual contexts we bring to the piece based on our own experiences and positionality, and then to hear the other contexts and interpretations that colleagues bring to the text.

From 10-11:30 am,  Bix led us through an inquiry-based workshop reflecting on several pieces of art. First, we spent time discussing Blossom, by Sanford Biggers. We explored open-ended questions like, “What do you notice?” and “What do you feel?”, sharing our responses and observations together.  The museum educator then shared some further context on the art piece, which then allowed us to re-examine “Blossom,” and refine, reshape, and develop our initial ideas. 

Next, we spent independent time in The Slipstream exhibit, reflecting on pieces of our choosing. Bix provided us with a zine to collect our responses, which we shared with a partner. Prompts included:

• Find a piece that resonates with you. Pair a song with this work
• What parts of your identity or experience does it connect with?
• Find a piece you would pair with Blossom. How would the pairing change how you look at the work?
• Find an artwork you would pair with the poem “Declaration”
• Find a work you would like to display in your home
• Find a world you would like to display in your classroom. How would you contextualize it for students?

When we returned to the conference room at 11:30, we pivoted toward our own classroom practices and units. The central questions were:

1. How might this work translate into concrete classroom practices? 
2. How might we set up texts and experiences for students to examine their own positionality and racial blind spots?
3. When and how do we provide context / frame the texts we teach? 

Submitted by: Jane Belton

At the English Department meeting on 10/12, we spent time reviewing the work we did last year (particularly from the winter/spring meetings) and setting intentions and goals for what we want to work on this year in the areas of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Several department members mentioned that learning from each other in our meetings last year was a major highlight, and the group expressed interest in continuing to share and workshop practices, assessments, and units through a DEI lens, asking of ourselves what specific principles these practices, assessments, and units serve or how they might be revised to advance the work of diversity, equity, and inclusion in our classes. The principles articulated at our Professional Development Day (10/08/21) could help frame these teacher-led workshops:

• Community members have differing and overlapping needs. 
• Teachers’ and students’ social identities have implications for learning. 
• School is a place where we must address the over/under representation of certain groups in our society, as this representation is mirrored in our materials and curriculum.
• Our choices concerning classroom materials speaks to our beliefs, goals, and values.  
• Our actions as educators, including the ways we give and receive feedback, speak to our beliefs, goals, and values. 

Since several department members are new, and several folks in the MS are teaching ELA specifically for the first time in many years, there was significant in sharing resources and examining our common language/practices for teaching English across 5-12.

We are hoping to plan a half-day retreat for some of this work.

Submitted by: Jane Belton

We built on our collective work from February 24, using the following ideas and questions to guide our discussion:

Erasure and invisibility. Teachers not “seeing” Black students, not hearing or allowing for voice (as an example, not calling on Black students, not seeing individual contributions within group work)

–> How do we create structures and practices within our classrooms that ensure student voice and visibility? How do we create visibility within group work? Create opportunities for group work that necessitate plural perspectives, and can only be accomplished through that?

Silence from white teachers / white teachers not having the language (or choosing not) to name racism when it happens.

–> What are our practices around naming and reflecting on harmful power dynamics? On repair within the classroom? Around speaking up when a microagression has occurred? What practices do we have around providing trigger warnings? What language do we use?

Harmful power dynamics in the classroom and perpetuation of White Supremacy Culture.

–> What practices work to dismantle those dynamics?

Deficit model / thinking.

–> What practices do we employ that dismantle this deficit oriented thinking? What practices do we have around academic support and learning plans to support students of color with learning differences? What are our policies and practices around around late work/revision/extensions?

We each shared a variety of classroom practices that we feel help to dismantle White Supremacy Culture, disrupt harm, and address some of the larger issues expressed in the Black@LREI posts. These fell into multiple categories, including Class Discussion Practices, Group Work Practices, Feedback / Assessment / Grading Practices, and Teacher Lexicon, among others. Here is the jamboard we created.

We plan on exploring some reading around multimodal writing practices in advance of our next meeting.

Submitted by: Jane Belton

We began the English Department meeting by examining several Black@LREI posts for recurring themes, then used this work to frame our reflection on individual classroom practices. In particular, we responded to the following prompts:

• What are the practices in your classroom that might contribute to issues identified in the Black@LREI posts?
• What practices might perpetuate racial inequities / elements of White Supremacy Culture and harmful power dynamics?
•  What practices do you want to question, trouble, or stay curious about? 

Some areas we discussed:

• Discussion practices
• Group work – how to make individual work more visible
• Writing Practices 
• Teaching multiple writing conventions for different purposes
• Intersection of race, class, and learning support needs
• Feedback/assessment/grading and policies around late work
• Teacher language/lexicon 

At the next meeting, we will share some of the classroom practices we feel disrupt harmful power dynamics and racial inequalities.

Submitted by: Jane Belton

The goal of this meeting was to decide on a particular focus for our work together this year and actions steps for undertaking that work.

1. We reviewed our notes from the October 21 meeting
2. We brainstormed ideas about the direction we wanted to take, deciding to focus our attention on classroom practices. The following is a set of guiding questions for that work:
   • How do power & white supremacy show up in our classrooms & practices, in peer & teacher-student interactions. How might we disrupt harmful dynamics/power systems?
   • We also acknowledged the intersection between this area of focus and other areas, including text selection and communication/transparency with students and families.
3. We then generated ideas about what examining classroom practices might look like through a shared jamboard.
4. First Step: 
   • Our first step will be to examine several Black@LREI instagram posts for thematic threads. What are BIPOC students, alums, and faculty communicating to us about what they need and are experiencing in the classroom? How can looking at the posts hold up a mirror to our work in the classroom?
5. Subsequent Steps:
   • Making a list of “common” classroom practices and language that we want to investigate, trouble, or rethink from an anti-racist stance.  
   • Examining discussion protocols, norms, and habits.
   • Engaging in readings that help us examine classroom practices.
   • Auditing student groupings and student-student dynamics within our classrooms
   • Working with white students on greater self-awareness and self-reflection around ways they perpetuate harmful systems of white supremacy.
   • Inviting students to engage in naming the values that the class seems to hold; connecting these values to anti-racist practices, or troubleshooting if the values students identify do not align with the values we hope are clear.
   • Examining our physical spaces through an anti-racist lens.
   • Workshopping lesson-plans

Submitted by: Jane Belton

In our meeting on October 21, we discussed some of the DEI work that has already been done, focusing in particular on changes we have individually made to our curriculum and practices in response to the BLM movement. We then identified several potential strands for our focus this year:

Ideas / opportunities / questions / next steps:

1. Reframing texts by white authors — How might we reframe certain texts to decenter whiteness?
   • Jekyll and Hyde in 9th grade reframed by Titus Kaphar Ted Talk and subsequent discussions of how Stevenson constructs whiteness through erasure.  Additional framing texts could highlight the experiences of Black people in Victorian times. Final project could involve some purposeful re-imagining or adaptation of the text. 
2. Text selection: What are we choosing to include or omit and how are we teaching the texts we do include by white authors?
   • Questions about “problematic” texts/authors or genres that have been historically male-dominated. Do we bail on texts or help students reread/re-see them?
3. Practices:  How do power and white supremacy show up in our classrooms and in our in teaching practices. How does white supremacy manifest itself in peer-to-peer interactions and teacher-student interactions? How might we disrupt/shift that?
   • Questions about biases in assessing participation

1. Writing: When and how do our writing assignments expect our students to code-switch?  How can we encourage students to do deep and authentic writing where their own voices are welcome and celebrated?
2. Communication: How can we be more transparent and clear with students (and families) about choices that are being made to disrupt systems of oppression and white supremacy.

Click to see the full meeting notes!