January is Diversity Celebration Month - Week Three

Welcome to week three of our Diversity Celebration Month. If you have not read the January Blog, here is the link (this post will make much more sense after having read or listened to it first). And just to note, if you are already incorporating these kinds of strategies--you are amazing and are creating an inclusive and safe place for others. Inclusivity also significantly increases a student's ability to comprehend the important content in our classes. Keep at it and be encouraged that this work helps our students to be the success that we know they can be--no matter what life throws at them. You are a difference-maker.

For those who are looking for Martin Luther King, Jr. resources, here is a pretty good K-12 set from NEA.

Week Three Strategies For Creating Inclusivity In Our Schools:

Practice Self-Awareness

Who we are determines how we create and design our school environments. Looking in the “mirror” reveals what we see, how we relate, and how our perspectives impact our practice.

Why?

Shaping healthy ways that we work, learn, and live together requires us to minimize the effects of our biases and maximize our potential for non-oppressive partnerships. Practicing self-awareness increases our capacity to work with humility, curiosity, and courage.

How:

• Acknowledge and challenge our assumptions.

• To surface what we don’t know, ask: “What is unfamiliar to me in this situation? Why?”

• Ask: “How does my identity – my race, class, gender, or another identifier – position me in society relative to privilege and oppression?”

• Ask: “How might my identity impact people and the way they process?”

• Seek out new knowledge about privilege and oppression to expand our awareness and understanding of equity.

Embrace Complexity

Recognize that equity challenges are complex and messy. Stay open to possibilities. Powerful design emerges from the mess, not from avoiding it.

Why?

Equity challenges are complex; however, there is often urgent pressure to quickly “fix” them or develop “solutions” – which usually leads to ineffective results and unintended consequences.

Complex challenges don’t have ready-made or reliable solutions. So keep the “problem space” open – i.e. seek to better understand the various factors at play in the challenge while simultaneously learning about what approaches are more likely to be effective.

How:

• Acknowledge the confusion and discomfort caused by the uncertainty present in our work.

• Bring together multiple perspectives on the challenge, especially from those most harmed, to open up ways of thinking.

• Create opportunities for sense-making before decision-making.

And don't forget our "No Child Eats Alone Challenge"

Take a moment today and see how the students are doing. Are there any students eating or playing alone? Find ways to help all students participate in school and feel like they belong. Encourage other students to go make a new friend with one of the students who seem to always be on the edge of the playground, campus, or cafeteria.  

Thanks for being a part of our D7 family and creating safe spaces for everyone to belong.

We are GP! We all belong. 

Liberatory Design is the result of a collaboration between Tania Anaissie, David Clifford, Susie Wise, and the National Equity Project [Victor Cary and Tom Malarkey]. This deck is under the Creative Commons license: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0).