ensuring every student succeeds: understanding and
TRANSCRIPT
ENSURING EVERY STUDENT SUCCEEDS:UNDERSTANDING AND REDRESSING
INTERSECTING OPPRESSIONS OF RACISM, SEXISM, AND CLASSISM
February 17, 2017
TODAY’S FACILITATION TEAM
Midwest & Plains Equity Assistance Center 2017
Director o f Operations Midwest & Plains Equity Assistance &
Great
Seena M. Skelton, PhDAssociate Director of
Continuous ImprovementMidwest & Plains Equity Assistance
Center
Camille Warren, MPAAssociate Director of
Engagement & Partnerships Midwest & Plains Equity Assistance
Center
Tiffany Kyser, PhD
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Midwest & Plains Equity Assistance Center 2017
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WE ARE THE EQUITY ASSISTANCE CENTER FOR REGION III, SERVING 13 STATES
Midwest & Plains Equity Assistance Center 20174
One of the four regional EACs funded by the U.S. Department of Education under Title IV of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The Midwest & Plains Equity Assistance Center provides assistance to state education agencies and public school districts in the areas of race, gender, and national origin equity.
PARTICIPANTS WILL:
• Recognize how power and privilege are deeply connected to identity.
• Reflect on positionality as it pertains to multiple identities.
• Understand the concept of intersectionality. • Identify approaches toward recognizing and
valuing intersectionality in the classroom.
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ENSURING EVERY STUDENT SUCCEEDS MEANS CENTERING EQUITY IN EDUCATION
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M U LT I P L E I D E N T I T I E S & P O S I T I O N A L I T Y “Every human being has an assortment of diverse identities, and it greatly matters which one is triggered by social situations, which hold up different kinds of mirrors.” ~ Cass Sunstein, Legal Scholar
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FIRST LET’S UNPACK THE CONCEPTS OF PERSONAL IDENTITY AND SOCIAL IDENTITY
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Personal Identity The concept you develop
about yourself that evolves over the course of your life
(Study.com).
Social Identities How we are defined by our
group memberships.
THE ANATOMY OF OUR MULTIPLE IDENTITIES
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Female
Monolingual Native English
Speaker
Black/African
American
Dis/ability
Heterosexual
POSITIONALITY
The multiple, unique experiences that situate each of us (Takacs, 2003, p. 33).
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WHAT IS YOUR POSITIONALITY IN YOUR SOCIAL CONTEXT?
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Share an experience when you were conscious of your positionality as you interacted with a child or an adult.
I N T E R S E C T I O N A L I T Y
It is important and vital … for critical consciousness around intersectionalities, so that people are able to not focus on one thing and blame one group, but be able to look holistically at the way intersectionality informs all of us: whiteness, gender, sexual preferences, etc. Only then can we have a realistic handle on the political and cultural world we live within. ~ bell hooks
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INTERSECTIONALITY THEORY• Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989)
coining the term “Intersectionality Theory;” with origins in anti-discrimination law, illuminating the specific kinds of discrimination Black women faced due to the disregard of their unique experience of intersecting oppressions of gender and race.
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What are the intersecting oppressions, Luciana faces that may be barriers to her benefiting from the learning opportunity the dual credit program offers?
How did the gender equity initiative appear to fall sort of addressing Luciana’s intersecting oppressions?
AVOID THE PITFALLS OF INTERSECTIONAL ERASURE
Be aware of the multiple identities of your co-workers, students and families.
Understand that categories of identity and difference cannot be separated and avoid abandoning one category of analysis in favor of (over)analyzing others (Miller, 2014).
Recognize the location of structural advantage of race, sex, gender, and ability privilege (Zachary, 2011).
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A P P R O A C H E S T O W A R D R E C O G N I Z I N G A N D V A L U I N G I N T E R S E C T I O N A L I D E N T I T I E S
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Thus, [educators] have an obligation to be aware of the seemingly unrelated factors that can impact a student’s life experience and response to the [instructional environment]/service and to adapt their methods accordingly (Smith, n.d. retrieved, 2017).
APPROACHES TOWARD RECOGNIZING INTERSECTIONALITY AND VALUING INTERSECTIONAL IDENTITIES
Intersectional Analysis
Intersectional Interventions
Intersectional Advocacy
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INTERSECTIONAL ANALYSIS( C R E N S H A W & H A R R I S , N . D . )
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Locate and visualize where various forms of discrimination overlapped rather than ran parallel.
African American Policy Forum, n.d.
INTERSECTIONAL INTERVENTIONS( C R E N S H A W & H A R R I S , N . D . )
Move beyond single group or single issue-based interventions.
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EXAMPLE INTERSECTIONAL INTERVENTION:CSP AND UDL CROSS POLLINATION
“race and disability as a social construction based
on relational system”“whiteness and smartness as
property” (Leonardo & Broderick, 2011)
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(Waitoller & Thorius, 2016, p. 372)
Scholars, Waitoller and Thorius present a framework for an inclusive education agenda, which suggests a cross-pollination between culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP) and universal design for learning (UDL) as a means to building emancipatory pedagogies that attend to intersecting markers of difference e.g., dis/ability, class, gender, race, language, and ethnicity (Waitoller & Thorius, 2016).
Midwest & Plains Equity Assistance Center 2017
INTERSECTIONAL ADVOCACY( C R E N S H A W & H A R R I S , N . D . )
Ensure advocacy approaches address
and engage members who are constituents of multiple social groups.
Attend to how debates across constituencies sound different when it is recognized that each
community contains members of the other.
Work towards the broadest articulation of a problem that would
embrace more than the interests of the most
advantaged
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EXAMPLE OF INTERSECTIONAL ADVOCACY:LGBTQ+ STUDENTS OF COLOR
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Talk About It
Affirm Complex Identities
Support Students’ Resilience
Intervene and Prevent
Partner with External Resources
GLSEN, n.d.
Intersectional Analysis
Intersectional Interventions
Intersectional Advocacy
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ONLINE TOOLS AND RESOURCES
ONLINE EQUITY LIBRARY
EQUITY PUBS
EQUITY TOOLS
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PLEASE PROVIDE YOUR FEEDBACK
Post-Session Questionnaire
THANK YOU FOR YOUR PARTICIPATION!!
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317-278-3493
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Copyright © 2017 by Great Lakes Equity Center.The contents of this document were developed under a grant from the U.S. Department of Education (Grant S004D110021). However, the content does not necessarily represent the policy of the Department of Education, and endorsement by the Federal Government should not be assumed.
Midwest & Plains Equity Assistance Center 2017
REFERENCESThomas, A. (2014, April 8). My positionality. [Video File]. Retrieved from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sz3RPZeqGFk
African American Policy Forum. (n.d.). A primer on intersectionality. Retrieved fromhttp://static.squarespace.com/static/53f20d90e4b0b80451158d8c/53f399a5e4b029c2ffbe26cc/53f3 9c8e4b029c2ffbe2b28/1408473544947/59819079-Intersectionality-Primer.pdf?format=original
Annamma, S.A., Connor, D.J., & Ferri, B.A. (2016). Dis/ability critical race studies (DisCrit): Theorizing at the intersections of race and dis/ability. In D.J. Connor, B.A. Ferri, & S.A. Annamma (Eds.), DisCrit: Disability studies and critical race theory in education (pp. 9-32). Teachers College Press: New York.
Casey, Z.A. (2011). The fight in my classroom: A story of intersectionality in practitioner research. Inquiry inEducation, 2(1), 1-13.
Crenshaw, K. (1989). Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics. University of Chicago Legal Forum,139, 139-167.
Fraser, N. (1998). Social justice in the age of identity politics: Redistribution, recognition and participation. The Tanner Lectures on Human Values, 19, 1-67.
Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: Continuum.Gee, J.P. (2005). Semiotic social spaces and affinity spaces: From the age of mythology to today’s schools. In
D. Barton & K. Tusting (Eds.), Beyond communities of practice: Language, power and social context(pp. 214-232). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Ladson-Billings, G. (1992). Culturally relevant teaching: The key to making multicultural education work. In C. Grant (Ed.), Research and multicultural education (pp. 106-121). London: Falmer Press.
Maher, F.A. (1993). Frames of positionality: Constructing meaningful dialogues about gender and race. Anthropological Quarterly, 66(3), 118-126.
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REFERENCES CONT…Omega Institute for Holistic Studies. (2016, February 19). Kimberle Williams Crenshaw: Intersectional erasure.
[Video File]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EwERW_7JOw0
Tajfel, H. (1982). Social psychology of intergroup relations. Annual Review of Psychology, 33(1), 1-39.
Takacs, D. (2003). How does your positionality bias your epistemology? Thought & Action, 19(1), 27-38.
U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Right. (2014). Civil rights data collection: Data snapshot (college andcareer readiness). Retrieved from: http://ocrdata.ed.gov/Downloads/CRDC-College-and-Career-
Readiness-Snapshot.pdf
Waitoller, F. R., & Thorius, K. A. K. (2016). Cross-pollinating Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy and Universal Designfor Learning: Toward an inclusive pedagogy that accounts for dis/ability. Harvard Educational Review,
86, (3), 366-389.
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