Each episode begins with hosts Jenna Chandler-Ward and Elizabeth Denevi reminding listeners that: "Over 80% of teachers in the U.S. are white. But most don’t know that their whiteness matters. TWW seeks to move the conversation forward on how to be consciously, intentionally, anti-racist in the classroom. Because "white" does not mean a blank slate. It is a set of assumptions that is the baseline from which everything is judged; it is what passes for normal. This means if you are not white or don’t adhere to those assumptions, you are abnormal or less than. TWW wants to have conversations about those assumptions: what they are, how they impact our students, and how we can confront our assumptions to promote racial literacy."
There are 10 episodes total, the first of which, To Teach or To Kill a Mockingbird, is from April 2017, and the most recent, Recovering the Voice of Native Americans in the Classroom, was released this past November. It seems like a new episode appears when they have content rather than adhering to some regular schedule. Whether you're just beginning to think about the impact of race in the classroom or you've been doing so for years, I think you'll hear something new and/or valuable in this podcast. Happy listening!
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By Scott Barkett
Special Education/Social Studies Co-Teacher This year the Social Studies department at BHS launched a new heterogeneous ninth grade course entitled World History: Identity, Status, and Power. Throughout the second quarter, students will learn about pre-modern India with a particular focus on the Mughal Empire. This empire preceded the British Raj and was primarily Muslim in its beliefs. Of particular interest to us will be the ways in which Hinduism and Islam have intersected in India and the impact that has had on community. When teaching and discussing world religions, it can feel like an identity minefield. Part of our charge with FYC is to ensure that students see themselves “in the picture” of their curriculum and that their identity is shown in a positive light. However, when it comes to teaching about religion, it can be difficult to separate the beauty and power of a religion’s beliefs and rituals from the controversial political decisions and fights throughout history occuring in its name. But, this tangle of politics and religious identity is precisely why it is so important to work with students through divisive topics, as these pre-modern community divisions often remain unhealed in ways that deeply impact our modern world. Take, for example, the latest news out of India regarding a supreme court decision over a disputed religious site. In northern India just south of Nepal, there is a city called Ayodhya where Hindus believe that the god Ram was born. Many Hindus believe that a temple in the city was destroyed in the 1500s by the Mughal Empire in order to build a mosque on the site. Tensions boiled over in the early 1990’s with Hindu believers destroying the mosque, seeking to reclaim a sacred site they believed was rightfully theirs. Court cases preceded this destruction, but it is only now that the Indian supreme court has weighed in. The decision has gone in favor of Hindus, and has provided Prime Minister Modi and his Hindu nationalist party with an empowering political victory. While the legal question may now be closed, the division between the Muslim and Hindu communities in India is not. The complexities of this situation are immense, and the history is far more vast than is reasonable to properly contextualize in one blog post. For the purposes of our classroom identity work, we are less concerned with figuring out who, if anyone, is “right.” We are far more interested in examining the power of shared memory in either dividing or uniting a community. As a culminating project for our unit, students will design a community museum that will honor the two religious communities that existed side by side in Mughal India. The ways in which communities commemorate, memorialize, celebrate, and mourn carry great power. In diverse societies, these practices are not always broadly agreed upon, and as time passes attitudes about a shared history may change. We hope that our work with students through this unit will help them to more deeply grasp the power that religion plays in peoples’ identities. Likewise, we hope to give them space to consider how communities, including their own, remember the past and the weight that different forms of remembrance carry. Students may not initially be familiar with the situation in Ayodhya, but they are likely familiar with controversial remembrance issues in America such as renaming Columbus Day in Brookline, or the fight to remove Confederate monuments across the country. In his speech announcing the removal of Confederate statues across New Orleans, former mayor Mitch Landrieu said, "Centuries-old wounds are still raw because they never healed right in the first place. Here is the essential truth. We are better together than we are apart." We will be keeping that in mind as we lead our ninth grade class communities through this important work. By Julia Rocco, English teacher
My mom forwarded me this Washington Post article about the racial achievement gap in Shaker Heights, Ohio, the town where I grew up and where my parents lived for over thirty years. The article centers around a "tense exchange" between an African American student and her AP English teacher, which has led to a debate about the school system's struggles to achieve greater racial equity. The article addresses the larger context of the debate -- the Cleveland suburb's perceived identity as an "American dream town" that values diversity -- and includes author Laura Meckler's personal experiences as a white child growing up there. It is the product of over two years of interviews with "nearly 100 people — parents, students, teachers, administrators and community leaders, both black and white, and with [her] own high school teachers and classmates." I found a lot I could relate to on a personal level in this article. I attended Shaker schools through sixth grade, and my sister and many of my childhood friends graduated from Shaker Heights High School. My early perceptions of race were shaped by frank discussions led by the high school students who visited my elementary school from the Student Group on Race Relations, but also by the stark lack of racial diversity in the honors-track classes I began attending in fifth grade. As a teacher, I found myself making comparisons to our own struggle to navigate issues of race in Brookline. The two towns have a lot in common: both are wealthy, inner-ring suburbs that see themselves as special for their liberal values. Both school districts emphasize excellence and equity, and yet both struggle to close persistent racial achievement gaps. On the other hand, the racial demographics of Shaker are very different from Brookline -- the student population is nearly half white and just over half black -- which I think makes the problems in Shaker stand out more starkly. The title of the article -- "This trail-blazing suburb has tried for 60 years to tackle race. What if trying isn't enough?" -- makes it sound like it might have a tone of hopelessness, but that is not the message I got from it at all. What I took away was that good intentions and lofty ideals are not enough. Grappling with race in our schools is messy and difficult, and there is a lot that teachers and schools cannot control, but we have to keep doing the work. |
OverviewThis blog is a place for BHS faculty to share thoughts with each other about what we are reading, watching, listening to, and working on related to the topic of identity. ArchivesCategories |