#Strategy courageous conversations about race how to
That’s the idea behind Courageous Conversations About Race, an online course that teaches participants how to talk about race. Because race definitely impacts our schools, our students, and our work as educators, and if we’re ever going to make real progress on race-related issues, we need to be able to talk about it in open, honest, and productive ways. So a lot of times, we avoid talking about race altogether.Īnd that’s not good. Regardless of your ethnic background, conversations about race feel like they are loaded with land mines just waiting to go off. “How do they allow this very important rich conversation to take place in their rooms but not make themselves vulnerable to a misstep in communication and potentially cost them their job?”ĭavid Watkins, Director of Equity and Diversity for Broward County Public Schools For fear of getting these conversations wrong, many teachers simply changed the subject. “Educators (were) struggling to understand the populations they were serving and how to apply some of the policies and practices we were implementing.”Ĭurrent events added another layer of difficulty: Teachers felt ill-equipped when students wanted to talk about the racially charged stories that kept coming up in the news. Just as in so many districts across the country, there was a cultural mismatch between the teaching population and the students they served. “What we found was a lot of pockets of good work,” he says, “but not a systemic process to make sure that it gets into the hands of teachers across the system as end users.”
Superintendent Robert Runcie (left) with a group of Broward students.ĭavid Watkins, Broward’s Director of Equity and Diversity, says that although district leaders had always implemented progressive policies and worked to reach their most vulnerable youth, the work was disjointed. Broward County encompasses 31 cities and serves nearly 300,000 students from widely diverse backgrounds, representing nearly 200 different languages and cultures. One school district that found itself in this situation was Broward County Public Schools in Florida, the sixth largest school district in the United States. Or it could be that you’re addressing some equity-related problems, but not in a consistent way across the board. Or behaviors are changing, but you get the feeling that hearts and minds are not fully present. Maybe it’s that only some staff members are really on board with the changes, while you’re sensing resistance from others. If this sounds familiar, you may be starting to feel like this piecemeal approach is lacking cohesion, that even though you and your colleagues have been shifting your practices to some degree, something is missing. There are a lot of people doing great work in equity, so we use what we find when we find it and squeeze it in with all the other initiatives meant to make our schools better. When it comes to improving the way we serve diverse populations, most schools have been throwing a whole lot of stuff against the wall to see what sticks: one-day trainings, book studies, attending sessions at conferences, bringing in speakers. When you make a purchase through these links, Cult of Pedagogy gets a small percentage of the sale at no extra cost to you. This post contains Amazon Affiliate links.
Listen to my interview with Glenn Singleton and David Watkins ( transcript):
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