Abolitionist Teaching and The Future of Our Schools. Discussion with members of the Abolitionist Teaching Network staff and Brian Jones of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, a part of the New York Public Library.
The “Structural Racism Explained” video draws upon many varied sources in formulating specific definitions for different types of racism. The video and prompts provided in this video and teaching guide (download here: https://belonging.berkeley.edu/struct...) are designed primarily for teachers to help students clarify and sharpen their understanding of the material, spur and support classroom discussion of the video and ideas, and provide ideas and leads for further research. But the materials are also useful for people who work in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) spaces and local governments.
Teachers should feel encouraged to prod students to read and engage with source materials. The video and prompts provided here are designed and developed primarily for high school students, but can also be used by upper-level middle school systems or undergraduate university students, with tailoring.
The USM Libraries offers access to a wide collection of films through the AVON (Academic Video Online) database. the list below is only a sample of the various DEI video titles that would be applicable for the USM curriculum.
Gender Studies: 600+ videos including Brave Girls, Ballerina Boys, Winnie, and Grey is the New Blonde, as well as CNN's Leading Women series featuring Sheryl Sandberg, titles like On Her Shoulders, featuring Nobel Prize-winner Nadia Murad, and documentaries such as Picture a Scientist, and Girl Rising.
Black Studies: 1,700+ videos. Key titles include Black Like Me, BOSS: The Black Experience in Business, John Lewis: Good Trouble, MLK/FBI, Talking Black in America, and Bringin’ in Da Spirit.
LGBTQ+: 550+ videos on LGBTQ+ topics. Publishers include Frameline, Breaking Glass Pictures, and the Cinema Guild. Key titles include How to Survive a Plague, The Trans List, Tove, Ahead of the Curve, The Freedom to Marry, Kumu Hina, Game Face, and Transmilitary.
Disability Studies: 130+ videos, focusing on both the history of disability studies as well as first-person narratives. Documentaries include When I Stutter, Swimming with Skyscrapers, Pushing the Limits, Voices from El Sayed, Sound and Fury, Enter the Faun, Off the Rails, and Swim Team.
Beyond the Master's Tools? : Decolonizing Knowledge Orders, Research Methods, and Teaching (E-book) by
This book provides a compendium of strategies for decolonizing global knowledge orders, research methodology and teaching in the social sciences. The volume presents recent work on epistemological critique informed by postcolonial thought, and outlines strategies for actively decolonizing social science methodology and learning/teaching environments that will be of great utility to IR and other academic fields that examine global order. The volume focuses on the decolonization of intellectual history in the social sciences, followed by contributions on social science methodology and lastly more practical suggestions for educational/didactical approaches in academic teaching. The book is not confined to the classical format of research articles but moves beyond such boundaries by bringing in spoken word and interviews with scholar-activists. Overall this volume enables researchers to practice a reflexive and situated knowledge production more suitable to confronting present-day global predicaments. The perspectives mobilise a constructive critique, but also allow for a reconstruction of methodologies and methods in ways that open up new lenses, new archives of knowledges and reconsider the who, the how and the what of the craft of social science research into global order.
Digital Divisions by
In the digital age, schools are a central part of a nationwide effort to make access to technology more equitable, so that all young people, regardless of identity or background, have the opportunity to engage with the technologies that are essential to modern life. Most students, however, come to school with digital knowledge they've already acquired from the range of activities they participate in with peers online. Yet, teachers, as Matthew H. Rafalow reveals in Digital Divisions, interpret these technological skills very differently based on the race and class of their student body. While teachers praise affluent White students for being "innovative" when they bring preexisting and sometimes disruptive tech skills into their classrooms, less affluent students of color do not receive such recognition for the same behavior. Digital skills exhibited by middle class, Asian American students render them "hackers," while the creative digital skills of working-class, Latinx students are either ignored or earn them labels troublemakers. Rafalow finds in his study of three California middle schools that students of all backgrounds use digital technology with sophistication and creativity, but only the teachers in the school serving predominantly White, affluent students help translate the digital skills students develop through their digital play into educational capital. Digital Divisions provides an in-depth look at how teachers operate as gatekeepers for students' potential, reacting differently according to the race and class of their student body. As a result, Rafalow shows us that the digital divide is much more than a matter of access: it's about how schools perceive the value of digital technology and then use them day-to-day.
Self-Taught: African American education in slavery and freedom by
In this previously untold story of African American self-education, Heather Andrea Williams moves across time to examine African Americans' relationship to literacy during slavery, during the Civil War, and in the first decades of freedom. Self-Taught traces the historical antecedents to freedpeople's intense desire to become literate and demonstrates how the visions of enslaved African Americans emerged into plans and action once slavery ended. Enslaved people, Williams contends, placed great value in the practical power of literacy, whether it was to enable them to read the Bible for themselves or to keep informed of the abolition movement and later the progress of the Civil War. Some slaves devised creative and subversive means to acquire literacy, and when slavery ended, they became the first teachers of other freedpeople. Soon overwhelmed by the demands for education, they called on northern missionaries to come to their aid. Williams argues that by teaching, building schools, supporting teachers, resisting violence, and claiming education as a civil right, African Americans transformed the face of education in the South to the great benefit of both black and white southerners.
We Are an African People: Independent Education, Black Power, and the Radical Imagination by
By 1970, more than 60 "Pan African nationalist" schools, from preschools to post-secondary ventures, had appeared in urban settings across the United States. The small, independent enterprises were often accused of teaching hate and were routinely harassed by authorities. Yet theseinstitutions served as critical mechanisms for transmitting black consciousness. Founded by activist-intellectuals, the schools strove not simply to bolster the academic skills and self-esteem of inner-city African-American youth but also to decolonize minds and embody the principles ofself-determination and African identity.In We Are An African People, historian Russell Rickford traces the brief lives of these autonomous black institutions created to claim some of the self-determination that the integrationist civil rights movement had failed to provide. Influenced by Third World theorists and anticolonial movements,organizers of the schools saw formal education as a means of creating a vanguard of young activists devoted to the struggle for black political sovereignty throughout the world. Most of the schools were short-lived, but their stories have much to tell us about Pan Africanism as a social andintellectual movement and as a key part of an indigenous black nationalism.A former journalist, Rickford uses a virtually unknown movement to explore black nationhood and a particularly fertile period of political, cultural, and social revitalization that envisioned an alternate society.
Rethinking Columbus by
Provides resources for teaching elementary and secondary school students about Christopher Columbus and the discovery of America.