 Aloha and welcome to another edition of The Creative Life, a collaborative production between the American Creativity Association, Austin Global and Tinketech Hawaii. I'm joining your host for today and joining me as our guests are two advocates for the rights of Black students in education, as well as other acceptionalities and also other populations in need. Joining me and probably a few who have been following us, you have seen Julia before when she was joined us before. And Julia Diver, Dr. Diver, is a professor with Purdue University, Purdue University Global. And also new to the creative life is Dr. Gilman Whiting, a link to us from Nashville, Tennessee. And I should mention that Julia is coming to us from Los Angeles. And Dr. G, as he's often called, professor, is quite a repertoire going here. He's associate director of graduate studies and chair of the African American and dysphoria studies at Vanderbilt University. I had to check my notes on that and I probably stumbled over something there. But I think that's close enough. So, most importantly for us perhaps is to clarify some concepts as we direct our conversation. And that would be let's start out, perhaps Dr. G, you could start off and give us some insights on historical marginalization of Black students in education. Well, first off, darling, thank you for having me on the show. I'm pleasure to be here, joining you all from Nashville, Tennessee. Aloha. I've been at Vanderbilt for 19 years, I'm a professor in African American Dyspore Studies. And I tell you, history, without taking the whole show, the history of education has never been designed in a original conception for Black children, for Indigenous children or for Brown children. So we began this whole experiment playing catch-up. We know about the place versus Ferguson and the not separate but equal causes that have been put in there. We know about the Brown versus Board of Education in 1954, but we realized that busting didn't start until 1974. I know because I was involved in it in Boston and it was tumultuous to say the least. And it was really about having students even access to building. And so when we think about the history of education for Black, Brown and Indigenous students in the United States, there's always been something of a catch-up at best. And we're at a point now where we feel like everything is why are we complaining? But if you look at the data, the data shows us statistically today. We are as segregated in most of our public schools today as we were during Brown versus Board of Education in 1950s. So the history of this peculiar endeavor that we call education has its nasty feel and tentacles that make it so that so many of our students, particularly inner-city kids, even rural kids, find themselves left out often not involved in education the way that they could be. I can tell you a lot of reasons why I believe that is. But for the most part, I just wanna listen to know that what we're talking about today may seem a little aggressive because we are in a state or in a place now where we believe that as Rodney King once said, Kent, we all just get along. But you're asking somebody who has had two to 300 years of catch-up to make up and considering the political stance that's going on in the country today, we know that they're pushing back against a lot of these things. So we come into this thing knowing fully that we're gonna get pushed back against these ideas that we're pushing with the National Black Student Achievement Association. And Julia, how did you come to both collaborate? And I know that you both are advocates and are an integral part of the association. So help us out and share some information in that regard. I think being in the educational landscape, working at Title I school sites that are serving predominantly Black and Hispanic, Latino children in California gives you a perspective as a classroom teacher where you see how the marginalization is occurring. Something simple as stepping back and realizing that your classroom library does not necessarily feature families that represent your student population. You're not seeing Black and Brown families in your classroom library represented on the picture books that your second graders are picking up. That's form of marginalization that's occurring in our school system. And from my experience working at Title I school sites in California, specifically in school districts like Los Angeles Unified, I became very aware of the marginalization that was still occurring in the education system in either very direct or indirect ways and the impact that it was having on students. So a lot of my scholarship and work is focused on providing teachers resources so they can integrate the student's culture into their classroom and into their instruction. I provide for our viewers Title I in case they're not familiar with your reference Title I school stuff, just in case some of our viewers are not aware. Absolutely, Title I school sites are school sites that the majority of the student population is on free reduced lunch. Yeah, whenever you hear the phrase Title I, you're talking about students who may be on FTC, formerly welfare and those things like that, you're talking about children from the other side of the socioeconomic train tracks if you will. And probably students that may be coming to school without their breakfast or also single moms. Yeah, absolutely. Well, yeah, we're talking about free and reduced lunch. I was a child of the free and reduced lunch programs back in the 60s and 70s. So I know very well about those kind of programs and they do serve a benefit to that. You think about a child being there hungry early in the morning time and then parents oftentimes don't have the means to actually feed children and things like that. So yeah, it's very much a need. I mean, I think about California, think about the breakfast program which began with the Black Panther Party in the 1960s and spread across the whole United States. So this is a form of black student achievement if you will, even back from them when you have folks saying that, hey, our kids are going to school, how are they going to study, how are they going to focus when they're not eating before they get to school? I think as I listened to both of you talk about the marginalization and the surrounding circumstances, it makes one think that we're almost on a treadmill. Why are we not moving forward? And I know you two are probably one of the strongest advocates for this initiative in the country at this time. But look at the blocks, one holds us back. Our education system was designed initially to respond to the call of the Industrial Revolution. And at that time, we were preparing individuals to enter the assembly line and enter the workforce under that capacity. And at that time, we also were having certain groups of students attend segregated schools or certain groups of students were not allowed to attend schools at all. So when you're in a place where either you're not allowed to attend school or you're not allowed to attend school with students who are white, you're going to receive a different educational experience. And we've seen through redistricting and the funding that is currently being allocated for school sites that that degree of segregation is still occurring. I think that we also are still experiencing marginalization in the education system because at this point we have hundreds of years of the curriculum representing a specific degree of specific narrative. And that narrative has been the dominant white Eurocentric and oftentimes male narrative. And with that, that's going to not only have marginalization operationalize itself in the present day, but we also have several generations who have experienced marginalization. If you think about the black community specifically, the black community was a community that was lynched if they read or wrote anything. You were threatened with your life if you were caught reading or writing. I mean, that's affected generations of individuals and not only in terms of marginalization but also trust with the education system. You're not going to trust an education system if that education system has systemically and structurally excluded you over time and excluded multiple times. I'd like to add on to that. I didn't know we were going there but not at the way there, let's hit it. Okay, so we also have to take consideration not only historical and within schools but outside of schools. There's nobody who will watch this or listen to this who doesn't understand that there's a political arm today. There's structures in every state and every district of every city that is looking for its constituents. And by their constituents, you're talking about those who pay the most taxes. And in that way, we redline, we segregate those ways. And those kind of the treadmill you refer to deals with policy, deals with procedures. How do we get our government to actually focus on these things? The way the government tends to focus is the loudest voice. Who has the biggest pocketbook and who has the loudest voice? We saw in the 50s and 60s, we saw what they did down in Alabama, segregation now, segregation forever. We heard those kind of things. But today we have things like happening in Florida. We have it happen in Michigan and Texas and these other places where there's another pushback thing. Hey, we've done enough of that affirmative action stuff. Now everybody is on equal footing with opportunities. So we need to go forward from there. But yet we have folks like Senator Connie Laver in California who is advocate for these kinds of programs. We need more backbone in our political as well as our representatives of each state to actually look at the children who are at the bottom of the totem pole, the bottom of the barrel, the back of the bus still, not only academically, but also when they come out of school in terms of going on to higher education. So there are some things that still need to be done on the political landscape. You referenced policy and am I correct to say that often or would you agree that often the policy makers really have no sentiment, no empathy? And as you mentioned there, they have a political agenda often, but yet they're the ones that are introducing or influencing public school at times. And the people, would you agree? We have 7.4 million black students in the United States right now. And if we think about that student population and the degree of marginalization that they have experienced over time to reinforce inequality and socioeconomic disparity, why aren't we providing support for that student population in a very specific and direct way? Why wouldn't we as a nation unite to reverse some of the educational harm that our system has done over time? In the same way that we have as a nation also marginalized indigenous students, were taken from their families as early as four years old and sent to schools off reservations away from their families. And at that time the Department of Education said we had to erase the savage from the man. So the same degree of dare I say, indoctrination was done with our indigenous student population. And that's also been done for black students, right? Could you imagine going through your whole entire educational career, turning every single page of every single book and seeing white families, seeing white characters, seeing white heroes and never seeing yourself represented on those pages, never hearing the stories from your grandmother integrated into your curriculum. So it's about policy, but it's also taking our curriculum and the corresponding action that occurs with curriculum is instruction. So what are we doing as educators to instruct our students to really encourage innovation, creativity and cultural sustainability? I'm glad you mentioned the indigenous population because we're broadcasting as you know, interviewers know through the Honolulu studios and our viewership, we have not only the mainland in Hawaii, but we also have Southeast Asia and we do have viewers that are from indigenous populations most likely watching us today. So I'm glad you touched upon that. And Dr. Gilman, you do some work with indigenous and have some roots, I believe? I do, both. I work with them and do have some roots. So mine is from the Narragansett tribes, which is basically the Ojibwe band, which goes from all the way from Rhode Island, Massachusetts all the way up to Minnesota. And we find oftentimes, and that's on my father's side of the family, but we have seen in places like Milaks, which is in Northern Minnesota, and also Navajo Nations, all the nations across the country where you have the disenfranchisement not only of lands, a lot of places we talk with seated lands that Vanderbilt University sits on, that Purdue University sits on and almost every college and university from Harvard on down sits on, was either the land of indigenous people and built by the hands of enslaved black people. So there is a correlation to the oppression that has happened across the generations of folks that are here and those folks who are sitting in the islands and other places like that, they to themselves have been ostracized, especially coming to the mainland in terms of the continental United States in terms of jobs, employment, and things like that. So I very well much understand how this extends beyond if two equal people, there was a scholar by the name of Diva Pager, P-A-G-E-R who's now passed sociologist who came out of Northwestern University and she looked at like students who actually young adults who were going into the world of work and she looked at, created these backgrounds, equal employment, equal this, equal that and each time the European American got their call back at a higher rate which we kind of expected but what we didn't expect was when she changed them, what they call the books called Mark, M-A-R-K-E-D, Marked as Mark of a Criminal and what she did was she changed and varied the backgrounds of education and also criminal activity and what found a strange kick to the end of the book was that a white man about the same age as a black man with less education and a criminal record was called back at a higher percentage than the black person, a higher degree and with no criminal record. So even that cultural sustainability that we talk about, even that moving beyond the K-12 system affects us into our futures and that has to do a lot with our race and our culture. So again, when we talk about what scholar identity within the National Black Student Achievement Association does, we talk about that student having as being an advocate for themselves because let's face it, almost 90% depending on where you are, teachers tend to be female and high 80, sometimes 90% of them are white female, a lot of them are from college universities sort of come from middle to upper middle class backgrounds and then they're working with students who come from places that haven't been treated with the right dignity and respect that they deserve. So you have a cultural clash and that cultural clash oftentimes unfortunately ends up with students on the bad end of the situation deciding to opt out, stop out and drop out of school. Some of the work we did a few years ago found that in gifted education, nearly we actually misidentify, don't identify more students, black, brown, indigenous, low income than we identify overall. I mean, I think we would all agree that you can often find research to support anything if you can look hard enough but there is substantial research that generally supports. If there is success for these populations, these marginalized students generally track back to one teacher that made a difference in their life. If it's generally a teacher, we are educators and it probably catches our attention but if not a teacher, it could be a community advocate or a community leader, often in a faith-based situation. So in your work with the National Black Student Achievement Association, how do you collaborate with those communities and do you agree with my comment? So you talked about the work that's done in the classroom and we know you're playing a game with your instructional development for many of the books that you've written but what are your experiences to start with you and is that something else after your comments but what are your experiences working with communities? Absolutely, it's essential that we partner with not only school districts but also individuals within the community who are supporting the black student population because this whole idea behind cultural sustainability really means making those links to the home and community. Think about the varying ways of understanding that a community develops that may be different from the school. We see it all this time in mathematics, right? Teacher may explain a math problem and show the students a specific way how to do it and then the students go home and they speak with perhaps an uncle or a cousin and the uncle or cousin shows them a completely different way how to solve the same problem. That problem solving method that the student is learning from their families is one example of the cultural sustainability that we want to use and honor and value and integrate into the classroom. And there are a myriad of examples of ways in which students return home, tap into their cultural wealth, their home pedagogies and we want to bring that back into the school and have those communicated and integrated into the schools. And one of the ways that we can do that is by encouraging school sites to establish Black Student Achievement Programs and within those Black Student Achievement Programs to be calling on community mentors to be part of the school, to be integrated into the school to share their cultural wealth and ways of knowing with the schools to have that honored and integrated in the education system we find is essential. Dr. Gilman in the National Black Student Achievement Association, mentorship is very important as a student. So what types of personalities or backgrounds are you looking for as a mentor? Well, look, we have to face it that my daughter, for example, went to a Waldorf school. And what I realized going through the Waldorf school was that the cultural sustainability was everywhere for all the children, except for her. So I had to infuse that from home. And the reverse of that is true when Black students go into classrooms that are led by oftentimes white teachers or teachers who just haven't had culturally relevant pedagology and teaching practices through their K-12 education experience. I mean, through their college experiences. So we have to infuse that. So as Julia said, bringing home back in and another angle that is home is already there for a lot of these students. So how do we do that? One thing we do is that we actually look at what strengths a school is in a community. For example, here in Nashville, when I work with students in the summertime and programs, I use undergraduates and graduate students from Tennessee State University, Fisk University, as well as Vanderbilt University, Belmont University. And these tend to be students who are, would be Black students who are interested in education. So not only are you training them to be mentors, but they become the bridge to the gap to other students. But then also, Julia Sales talked about the family. How do we bring the family back into the school? Because trust me, at the Waldorf school or her high school, it was all girls and private and those things like that. Those parents were there every day. They were involved in the school system in some kind of way, the school board, the fundraisers, the tea cake parties and all those other kind of things. How do we involve that systemic, cultural, very necessary piece of Black families back into the school? So mentoring comes in many ways. It can be training up the teachers who are there. It can be training administrators to train the teachers. It can be also bringing in mentors from outside of the school, as well as the families. So I think mentors, I like to use the word sponsors because of a mentor is somebody who picks you up and takes you to the football game and brings you back home and drops you off. Where a sponsor, I feel is somebody who takes you all the way through and helps you even beyond. I have a student wrote me just today just graduated this past June 23 and she actually said that she is now, I was a basketball player and now she's applying to graduate school. Can I write for her? And then, so those things, and I will write for her. So those are the kind of opportunities beyond what we consider success that students need. So mentoring, like I said, come in many ways, shapes and forms. You don't have to be just a Black male. You know, be just a Black female or Indigenous or whatever. You just have to care about the kids and also get to know their culture, their families and those things there. And that's what we find when we're especially looking at the Indigenous population, you really have to sit down and talk to the elders. When we passed now, Dr. Marsha Gentry and I started doing some work up at your boy nation up in Milaks, we sat down with grandparents and great-grandparents and they got to know us for two or three days before they even let us around their kids. If you'd like to sign up to become a mentor for our association, you can go to blkstudent.org backslash mentor. See that one more time. I was just going to ask one of you to do that. Give it again, Joel. Yes, it's blkstudent.org backslash mentor. If you'd like to join our mentorship network. With your permission, I would hope we could do a part two down the line through this session and have you both back. And it looks like our time is about winding down. So in the short time that remains, what do you see for the future? Possibly 35 seconds for you. Well, for me, with us on the case, I see great things in the future. I think because this is a 501C3 nonprofit, so if you're donating, donate as well because government's going to take your taxes anywhere, you just decide where you want them to go. And if not, help out student. So again, blkstudent.org. And I think that is something that we can do. For me personally, I think having access to platforms like this, having you interested in listening to us and also the work we're doing around the country is going to make a difference. I refuse to believe otherwise. We hope that this association serves as a catalyst to support other marginalized student groups and provide specific support services for those marginalized groups across the education system nationally. And don't forget to mention national standards that we have adopted, Dr. Nautberg. Yes, we do have a set of standards if you would like to start a black student achievement program. We have a set of standards that will help you launch and sustain that program over time. Glad you added that, that's perfect. Perfect opportunity for many that are probably watching us today. So with that, I share my appreciation and the appreciation of our viewers for you taking the time to be with us. And I hope that through all return, your viewers included, do be with us for part two. That probably will be immediately but maybe perhaps a month or so if we could do a part two, especially. Thank you. Thank you very much for your time. And next time, invite us out to Honolulu. That's not invitation. They haven't invited me yet. So for both of you, Dr. Gilman, would you tell us of the connection for your website and other initiatives? Sure, sure. Well, we have working on two. One is BLKstudent.org, which is a National Black Student Achievement Association. And then I also do one called Scholar Identity or OneWord.com, ScholarIdentity.com. And Scholar Identity and National Black Student Achievement Association are infused with the psychological social model that we're concerned with dealing with students. And again, as Julia mentioned earlier, this is something that we hope that becomes a foundational and a growth for other organizations to come out of this as well. I certainly hope so too. So with that, to our viewers, you have been watching The Creative Life on Think Tech Hawaii. And join us again in two weeks when our co-host, Phyllis Please, will have a guest for us in two weeks. And with that, aloha.