1. Please share a bit about your professional and personal journey to the world of education.
In college as a sociology major, I was looking for a way to study social justice issues, to learn more about racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression. A friend recommended a multicultural education class in the school of education. I took it as an elective. The professor had a team of graduate student teaching assistants who traveled around central Virginia doing community education on all sorts of social justice issues. I was lucky that two of those graduate students saw something in me and took me under their wing. I was sort of a doofus suburban white young person who had a lot to work through. They were both 40-something and Black, both community activists. I’m still confused about why they trusted me or invested in me, but they did. I wanted to continue working with them, so I applied to a Master's program in the college of education, then a doctorate. It wasn’t the most traditional way into education, but I was following my passion where it led.
2. What do you see as primary concerns and/or celebrations in education right now?
The primary concern right now is that a lot of the supposed progress that was made on racial equity when public sentiment forced a lot of school and districts to grapple with racism more seriously following the murder of George Floyd is evaporating because of well-organized blowback and resistance. Progress is always fleeting because too many leaders tend to ride winds of public sentiment to avoid controversy. The celebration is that there are leaders who are doing what’s right despite the blowback and, of course, loads of teachers, counselors, and others doing what’s right, often despite their school’s leadership.
3. What message, in sum, would you share with teachers from your work at present?
I encourage equity- and justice-committed educators to find ways to organize and support one another. Be strategic. And never stop learning. A lot of what passes for “progress” on equity and justice is more optics than real change. It’s hard, because we’re often rewarded for the optics of equity, for the high-visibility, low-impact approaches to equity and justice. Avoid the temptation to grasp onto whatever is popular just because it’s popular. The popular stuff is almost always low-impact. That’s why it’s popular. Embrace what will lead to real change.
4. Please tell us about the Equity Literacy Institute, Reaching and Teaching Students in Poverty: Strategies for Erasing the Opportunity Gap, and any other links to texts and projects you'd like to share about.
The Equity Literacy Institute is an organization that works primarily with schools, districts, and higher education institutions, supporting their efforts to be more equitable and just. We lead professional development, conduct equity assessments, do policy analysis, and provide other services and supports. We’re also very active in providing the scholarship that drives this kind of work across the US and Canada. I wrote Reaching and Teaching Students in Poverty to help shift the conversation about poverty and equity away from the damaging “mindset of poverty” approach and toward a more institutional, transformative perspective. That’s the root of our work: institutional, transformative.
5. What do you envision on the horizon for the future of equity in education?
It’s hard to say. Things always feel kind of fleeting. But I find hope in the fact that I see more institutions embracing more transformative models for equity and justice. And it feels like the conversation is becoming more intersectional, which I think is important, as long as it doesn’t mean losing depth in our approaches to addressing racism and other specific oppressions.
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