Anti-racism institute for educators:
This institute prompts participants to examine how their race impacts how they teach, engage, and relate to students. They will examine the ways that their curriculum, pedagogy, and classroom practices either confirm or confront racial inequities.
Anti-racism institute for families and our children: Shifting our conversation around the table to meaningful actions in our communities
This institute affords families and their children the space to navigate the complexities of naming and confronting racism at the individual and systemic levels. Participants will leave with ways to discuss how to disrupt and dismantle anti-Black racism within their own spheres of influence.
Anti-racism institute for students: Centering commitments to fighting anti-Black racism within and around us
[For 6th graders and up]
Our youth must be at the center of the conversation.This institute affords youth a space to build shared language and understandings to name, acknowledge, and confront systemic inequities and design ways of revolutionizing change.
After we say their names: Beyond performative activism
[For white folx and NBIPOC]
So you read White Fragility, now what? "Once you are aware, you are responsible." (McRae, 2020) This session explores how critical consciousness demands centering the history, voices, and lived experiences of People of the Global Majority. Participants will interrogate ways to decenter whiteness in their everyday lives.
Beyond your strongly worded statement: How to lead systems committed to promoting anti-racism in policy and practice
[For school and district leaders, BOE members]
Now that you have taken a public stance against anti-Black racism, how will you honor your expressed commitment to the community by shifting policies and practices that are serving to dehumanize Black and Brown children? How will you use your various privileges and resources to advocate for more just policy in your local area? This session will afford a space for education leaders to examine the steps needed to foster or recharge an explicit commitment to racial equity, CR-SE, and humanizing education.
Restorative Practices + Racial Justice (2 session series minimum)
This series affords participants the opportunity to: (1) Gain fluency in the shared language around race, power and privilege in implementing a restorative justice model in school settings, (2) Develop understanding of how to decenter whiteness and privilege in restorative justice work, and (3) Engage in how we decolonize education and reimagine what a restorative justice model can contribute to the decolonization of schools.
For educators
Dismantling racism series for educators:
This will be a 6 module learning series offered in July and August for educators who want to deepen their understanding of liberatory and humanizing practices in schools. In addition to the modules, there will be discussion opportunities for participants, resource sharing, and special events with guest speakers offered in both live and recorded formats so that participants can pace their own learning and engagement.
Module descriptions:
- Anti-racist history: Whose stories are told in your classroom? Participants will examine the impact of chattel slavery on our schools and interrogate how the legacy + the evolution of chattel slavery perpetuates racial trauma in our schools.
- Disrupting white supremacy culture in our schools: What does it take? Participants will investigate the ways that whiteness affects teaching and learning, and promotes the myth of black inferiority and fuels white supremacy.
- Socio-Emotional Learning: How to situate it in a racially just context: Participants will examine the ways the critically conscious educator navigates their positionality in both historical and contemporary racial oppression as it relates to that of the young people they serve. How are critical pedagogy + decolonized education mechanisms to mitigate racial trauma? Participants will be invited to explore an understanding and application of an anti-racst SEL approach.
- Impact versus Intent: Redefining how we understand harm: A focus on impact versus intent challenges folx to acknowledge that despite being well-intentioned and expressing commitments to equity and racial justice, they can still be perpetuating harm. When there is harm, there must be repair. Participants will be invited to explore the centering of impact in resolving conflicts, especially in instances of racial harm.
- Healing-centered spaces, trauma informed and trauma responsive teaching: the demand for anti-racist informed practices: In this moment of fighting a global health pandemic while continuing to battle the system of anti-Black racism and white supremacy in this country, intentionality is imperative with how we reopen physical school and classroom spaces that center the humanity of Black and Brown children. Participants will navigate concrete practices and unpack the questions that have to be asked of any curriculum, program, or policy.
- How am I fostering anti-racism in my students? The critically conscious educator is one who is also building and fostering the racial consciousness of their students. Participants will examine ways they can ignite the activist within their students and leverage the wisdom of youth.
DecolonizingEd panels and interviews with special guests
- Addressing anti-Blackness in Latinidad (Summer Panel): NMZ hosts with other Metro folx, possibly Dr. Maria H, David Lopez, Matt G, Paloma
- #DecolonizingED Conversation with Dr. Dena Simmons on how to be an antiracist teacher (September)
- #DecolonizingED Conversation with Dr. Jose Medina (September)
College and university offerings: Capacity building at various levels
A sampling of topics is offered below. Sessions named here can be one-time or a series, depending on the level of depth sought. This is by no means an exclusive list of all offerings. Session content is tailored to the stakeholder participants and previous levels of exposure and capacity.
- Exploring ways to mitigate or exacerbate inequity in the workplace
Given the power dynamics at play in the workplace, it is incumbent upon each of us to be hyper-aware of where we are situated in historical and contemporary oppressions based on our diverse and intersectional identities. Once an individual develops this awareness, they must enact workplace climates and behaviors that manifest a commitment to understanding how who they are impacts how they relate to, interact and engage with colleagues, supervisors, and students. This session will afford participants the space to consider how their course structure, instructional frameworks, content, and policies, and relationships mitigate or exacerbate vulnerabilities.
- The Impact of Race, Power and Privilege on our Campus Climate
In order to facilitate positive cross-racial, cross-ethnic, and cross-cultural relationships, we have to acknowledge the dynamics of power and privilege. We must begin by investigating societal power structures that impact our campus community and then develop solutions for breaking down barriers to equity and racial justice. Part of this investigation requires each of us to personally reflect on the salience of race in our own lives, including a loss or gain of societal privileges based on our individual identities. Participants will leave with expanded awareness of the existing inequities in our racial climate on campus and beginning understandings of ways to continue expanding their own commitment to dismantling injustice.
- Developing a Critical Consciousness
An inclusive, anti-bias culture creates the conditions for culturally and linguistically diverse students, staff, and colleagues to be their authentic selves and thrive as members of the campus community. In addition to exploring foundational concepts such as inclusivity, implicit bias, and stereotyping, this session will offer participants an opportunity to investigate the possibilities for confronting the infiltration of bias, misconception, and the inequities that can result, within their individual roles on campus. Participants will leave with expanded awareness of the impact of unconscious bias and beginning understandings of ways to employ a critical consciousness in unpacking and disrupting stereotyping and misconception.
- Fostering an anti-bias workplace climate
This session will center on ways to foster a workplace climate that attends to race, ethnicity, language, culture, religion, gender, sexuality, dis/ability, and socioeconomic status. Participants will navigate discussions around workplace case studies to determine how they would handle conflict that might come up but also how they can proactively foster racial equity and inclusivity.
College and University Senior Leadership and Department Coaching/Consultation
CSS facilitates various coaching and consultative frameworks across campuses. Coaching series are 3+ sessions. A sample coaching framework unpacks the following and more:
- How are you promoting racial equity in your work with students?
How are you elevating the voices of the most marginalized and under-represented students? How are you leveraging students as problem-solvers and community-builders in thinking through how to promote equity? How are you assessing whether students feel they belong? How are you assessing whether students feel included?
- How are you promoting racial equity in your work with department leaders?
How are you consciously uplifting and empowering leadership of color who you supervise? How are you holding white colleagues accountable for promoting equity and racial justice and asking the above questions of themselves?
- How are you promoting racial equity in your work with your supervisors/managers?
How are you setting goals for your own capacity-building and seeking support and guidance from your supervisors? Are you sharing points of tension, areas of discomfort, and areas where you don’t have the answers?
- How are you promoting racial equity in your work with staff you supervise?
How do you hear, receive, and process feedback from staff about harms they feel you have caused them? How are you calling out coded language, microaggressions, and opportunities for educating privileged white staff and staff of higher socioeconomic status? How are you recognizing and challenging common patterns of inequities that lead to harming Black students and non-Black students of color? How are you guiding faculty in having courageous conversations where they interrogate their assumptions about race and culture and their impact on the classroom?
- How are you promoting racial equity by continuing to build your own capacity?
Whose work are you studying? What texts are you engaged with? What do you identify as your areas of growth and strength?
1-1 Coaching, consultation, and course content audit for college and university professors
Coaching series are 3+ sessions and focus on:
- Individual development
- What is your relationship with your race and how it impacts your teaching? How does who you are impact how you teach? How might affinity bias be limiting your exposure? How might the scholarship, research, voices, and lived experiences you are exposed to inform your ability to be an inclusive professor? How might the identities of the folx you engage with personally and professionally inform your view of the world?
- What is your relationship with your race and how it impacts your teaching? How does who you are impact how you teach? How might affinity bias be limiting your exposure? How might the scholarship, research, voices, and lived experiences you are exposed to inform your ability to be an inclusive professor? How might the identities of the folx you engage with personally and professionally inform your view of the world?
- Relationship with the content taught
- How does your positionality inform the content of the courses you teach? Is this content static? Where you are evolving some of your content, whether as a result of a student or colleague’s suggestion, is your critical reflection evident? Or do counter theories seem like drop-ins with no merit that can be easily dismissed? If students are challenged to do closer readings of texts and deeper learning, how might that increase engagement and communicate that you hold high expectations for them? Where are the opportunities for critical thinking in a survey course? A seminar course? How might these opportunities demonstrate inclusivity on the part of the professor? What structures are in place to engage with counter-arguments, counter-theories, and viewpoints that rely on a differing set of underlying assumptions about course topics than the ones you hold to be true? How will students know that you regularly reflect on how equitable and inclusive your teaching is? What concrete evidence of your ongoing learning will be present in your courses?
- How does your positionality inform the content of the courses you teach? Is this content static? Where you are evolving some of your content, whether as a result of a student or colleague’s suggestion, is your critical reflection evident? Or do counter theories seem like drop-ins with no merit that can be easily dismissed? If students are challenged to do closer readings of texts and deeper learning, how might that increase engagement and communicate that you hold high expectations for them? Where are the opportunities for critical thinking in a survey course? A seminar course? How might these opportunities demonstrate inclusivity on the part of the professor? What structures are in place to engage with counter-arguments, counter-theories, and viewpoints that rely on a differing set of underlying assumptions about course topics than the ones you hold to be true? How will students know that you regularly reflect on how equitable and inclusive your teaching is? What concrete evidence of your ongoing learning will be present in your courses?
- Relationships with students
- How do you make students feel welcome? Which students haven’t you heard from? Which students have engaged in informal and formal ways with the content and with you? With which students have you established relationships and with which have you not been able to connect? How are these answers impacted by your identity and theirs? How might generalizations about students impact the way you teach, engage, and relate to students differently and how you may attribute positive or negative automatic assumptions to some students and not others? How do you encounter students who lean counter to your underlying assumption? Do they challenge you to be reflective? If so, how would students know that? What evidence is there that you are open to counterarguments? That you welcome them? How do you personally demonstrate you are open to be challenged and receive critical feedback?
Open to all
Dismantling racism series (Folx can drop in to one or get a discounted price to attend all 3)
- 3-Part Series: This series invites participants to build capacity and community to dismantle systemic racism with intentionality that anti-racism efforts must center intersectionality to approach a space where ALL Black lives matter.
- (1) Anti-racist history: whose stories do you know? Participants will be invited to unpack the dominant narratives about the history of racial injustice, interrogating the silencing of Black voices, lived experiences, and stories.
- (2) Critical media digestion: filtering out the white noise: In the age of information at our fingertips, participants will investigate how whiteness heavily influences news coverage and explore ways to navigate the news and social media platforms with a critically conscious anti-racist lens.
- (3) Policy and practice transformation as a means to liberation: Dismantling anti-black racism involves fighting for racially just policy and practices not only on the federal level, but in the state and local arena as well. Participants will gain a deeper understanding of that fight in their own spheres of influence.
Organizational offerings: Staff training series
Part 1: Building Self-Awareness and Foundational Understandings of Racial Equity in the Workplace and Beyond
Before organizations can begin to enact meaningful change around anti-racist policy and practice, there must be space and time to understand our implicit biases and develop shared language about race and other identities.
- The focus on self-awareness allows for staff members to gain a better understanding of their beliefs, assumptions, values and behaviors. (Berthoud and Greene 2001)
- Participants have the opportunity to define and/or refine their understanding of anti-racism and equity and how they matter to the vision and mission of the organization.
Part 2: Framework for Our Learning to Positively Impact Organizational Culture
Promoting racial equity and inclusion requires a focus on transformational learning rather than informational learning. Therefore staff need opportunities to not only explore how they are situated in historical + contemporary oppressions, but also how they can then operationalize a commitment to racial equity.
- Bringing attention to our ways of knowing and learning to help support everyone’s growth and development in this work.
- Interrogating the formal structures, policies, informal habits and norms of our work environment.
- Examining how formal and informal ways of managing + executing our work is in either in alignment with, or counter to, the values of racial equity and inclusivity.
Part 3: Building and Sustaining a Culture of Commitment to Racial Equity in the Workplace and Beyond
Ongoing learning and professional development is crucial to the success of this work and commitment to racial equity. Leadership must set realistic expectations in order to:
- Support this ongoing process and create a supportive environment for meaningful challenge and change;
- Focus on how their micro-decisions enacted daily either promote or disrupt their expressed commitment to, and vision for racial equity and inclusivity;
- Learn from successes, mistakes, and challenges in this work, modeling for their staff that assessing and addressing identity-informed climate issues is complex and messy work.
Sessions will leave participants with tools + strategies to set + approach goals within each of these major areas: attracting/hiring/developing/retaining diverse staff, fostering equitable + inclusive rituals + practices, continuously assessing + addressing office climate issues, executing transparency in decision-making protocols, and evaluating how the internal organizational commitment to racial equity and inclusivity is visible + noteworthy to external partners.