Pedagogical Considerations
Engaging in anti-racist pedagogy will differ for each of us based on our power and privilege. This is an iterative process that begins with self-reflection. For example, educators should ask critical questions, including:
- How do I understand myself as a raced person?
- How am I replicating ideas that perpetuate racism?
- How am I disrupting and interrupting them?
- How do I move beyond inclusive teaching strategies to redistribute power more equitably in my classroom?
- Which voices are heard? Who or what counts as an authority? What kinds of discourses are valued in my classrooms?
How Do I Practice Anti-Racist Pedagogy in My Courses?
- Acknowledge uneasy solidarities (Upadhyay, 2019).
- Recognize relational racialization.
- Recognize power asymmetries.
- Historicize and contextualize racial injustices.
- Emphasize contributions of Black, Indigenous, and racialized peoples.
- Focus on intersectionality and challenge essentialist characterizations of any group.
- Teach about global and local resistance movements.
- Create spaces for cross-racial solidarities for racial justice.
- Engage in conversation about complexities, complicities, and divergences.
- Challenge normative ways of knowing and center multiple and diverse knowledges and ways of being.
- Question what counts as scholarship and research and what has been normalized and naturalized under codes of whiteness.
- Review our syllabus to see how many Black, Indigenous, and racialized people, and in particular, those with intersecting identities, are listed.
- Expose examples of scholarly knowledge and contributions that have been stolen from Black and Indigenous and racialized people and claimed as white knowledge.
- Look for knowledge in students’ lived experiences, in communities, in places of practice, and other locations beyond the academy.
- Create the conditions for communities of critical care that both challenge normative ideologies with fierceness and directness and practice deep respect and care for the dignity of all life.
