 All right. Welcome, everybody, to the Open for Anti-Racism webinar series. This is our first webinar in the series, and the topic is Integrating Anti-Racist Pedagogy into Your Classroom. And we are so glad that you could make it today and for this event. And we'll talk in just a few minutes about the Open for Anti-Racism Project, or a program, I should say, which we started just late last fall. And many of you have indicated a strong interest in this topic. And so we're just thrilled to have you here today and to hear from the speakers who are practitioners and experts in this area. Next slide, please. So we'll just give you a quick overview of a few of CCC OER, which is the Community College Consortium for OER, who is working with College of the Canyons on this program. And then James Glapagrosswag, the Dean at College of the Canyons, who's leading that effort, will give you a really quick overview of the OFAR program. And then we will hear from Dr. Shauna Brandle and Dr. Alyssa Cooper. And then we'll fill you in a little bit more on the calendar for what the upcoming events are. And we do want to thank you. Pardon me. We're not seeing any slides. You are not seeing slides. I am. I see the slides too. I'm seeing slides too. Oh, awesome. Me. Okay. Sorry to interrupt then. Sorry, James, you're going to have to get your tech people on that. Yeah, holy. Sorry. And I do want to say thank you to the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, who is supporting this program, which is really an exploratory program around using OER and open pedagogy. In your classroom to make, to make our colleges more anti-racist. And then we'll move on to the next slide, please. All right. So the community college consortium for OER, we have been around since 2007. We were actually founded here in Northern California. And we have been working with colleges now around the nation for over 10 years on expanding adoption of high quality OER, and we have been working with other colleges in order to improve student equity and success. And we also have an effort around engaging regional OER leadership so that the folks in California can learn from the folks in other states. And today's a perfect example of that with our speakers from two different states outside of California. All right. I'm going to turn this over to James Clapper Grosskling to talk a little bit about our program. Great. Thank you, Una. Welcome everybody. Glad to be here. So a couple of words about the open for anti-racism program as you'll see on the screen. This is a formerly a one year program to support faculty in the California community colleges to leverage OER and open pedagogy to make their instructional materials and their teaching explicitly for anti-racist. The participating faculty are currently completing an online facilitated course that introduces them to OER, open pedagogy, and anti-racist pedagogy. The course will culminate in the participants creating an action plan to implement some changes, some actual changes this spring term. So quickly turning their learning into action with alive classes and students. And the background to this is that Una and I and our organizations, we've been deeply involved in open education for a long time now. And over the years it's become increasingly apparent or increasingly hard to ignore the blinding whiteness of open education as a field. And at the same time that that was becoming more and more apparent, the realization of many people in the United States last summer was raised about the racial injustices that continue to occur in our country. So Una and I together with our very, very good supporters with the Hewlett Foundation thought that we would like to find a way for people to immediately put to use the affordances of open education so that, you know, in an open education for a while, we've been talking about the fact that if you take a commercial textbook and you replace it with a free textbook, gosh, that's nice. But if you have a commercial textbook that reinforces white supremacy and patriarchy and you replace that with a free textbook that reinforces white supremacy and patriarchy, you're really not making the change that I think many of us want to make. So that's really the genesis of the OFAR program. And we're thrilled to have you here and to have our first speakers with us. So turning it back to you, Una. All right. And just wanted to show you that we have 17 colleges who are involved in this and they're dispersed around the state. And in future webinars, we'll have a little picture so that you can see where they're located. And you can see that these faculty are in different disciplines ranging from career technical ed through math and biology and sociology, history, et cetera. So just a really great set of very disciplines. So we're so excited to work with them. Next up, thank you, Liz. I do want to introduce our speakers and get to this really important, the reason why we're here. So first up, I'm going to introduce Dr. Alyssa Cooper. She's an English professor at Glendale Community College in Arizona. She's the former faculty director of the Center for Teaching and Learning. And she's at her college and she's also the former tri-chair of the Maricopa Millions OER project, which I think many of us have cheered on over the years. And this last year, she co-authored the anti-racist discussion pedagogy guide. It's published by PAC-BAC. And it's available freely online as well. Would you like to say hello, Alyssa? There we go. Hello, everyone. Thanks for joining us today. And I'm looking forward to sharing some information with you. Great. Thrilled to have you. All right. And next up is Dr. Shawna Brando. She's a political science professor at Kingsborough Community College in CUNY, the city university of New York. She's the lead faculty for OER at Kingsborough, where she's been working on spreading OER awareness in the discipline of political science, as well as evaluating and updating OER materials to be anti-racist. She is the author of It's Not in the Reading, American Government Textbooks, Limited Representation of Historically Marginalized Groups. Yeah. Hi, everyone. And at this point, we are actually going to turn this over to Shawna to start out the presentations. Okay. So let me put into the chat here. My slides. I haven't alt-texted my images, so I will do that before you get them. But if you want to follow along or click through them, or you miss something, so there's the slides for you. But also I can share my screen. And do I, oh, I don't have screen sharing possibilities. You were just sharing something there. No, I put something in the chat and somebody else shared that. No, that was me. You should be able to let me stop sharing. Okay. Now I can. Okay. Perfect. Let's see. And now I have 8,000 tabs open. Sorry. All right. Here we go. So I am really excited. I'm put just putting on my timer because I need to make sure that I can hear. We have time for Dr. Cooper. So when the buzzer goes, I will be done. As it is in the playground. So it shall be today. I want to tell you a little bit about first of all, I'm so excited to be here. I'm really excited and energized at this point. I'm really excited. I'm really excited. I'm really excited. I'm excited to be excited and energized at this project. This offer project. And especially starting in a community college because I'm a community college professor. I really love what we do. I love the people who do it. And I love that we have at least in my own university system, we have a little more freedom to actually focus on teaching and teaching materials that's built into our structure a little bit more than it is maybe at the senior colleges. So I'm excited to be here with you. So a little bit about me. If you haven't noticed, I am a white lady. I'm a native speaker of English. I am a native New Yorker and I teach at the only community college in Brooklyn where a great deal of my students do not look like me. We actually Kingsborough has the somewhat dubious distinction of having the least representative faculty, ethnically and racially diverse faculty in CUNY. We're working on it. We're working on it. We're working on it. So from the beginning and I'm my, my MAM, my PhD are both from CUNY. I've been aware of the financial hardships that my students take. And that's really what got me into open education. First, it's that 69% of KCC students have incomes. Household incomes of $30,000 a year or less. And that's in New York city. And that number is from 2016. So we know that it's definitely gotten worse, especially with the pandemic. And so, we're working on it. So I do think that's what I'm going to say, because I'm sure that we can sort of set that, set that. Or look at that. Also, 81% of students at Kingsborough are parents. So they're financially responsibly report being responsible for one or more children. And our racial and ethnic diversity is pretty, pretty mixed, right? So we have 15% Asian American population, 35% Black population, 17% Hispanic, 31% white and 44% of our students really diverse group and I love that in my teaching it's fantastic. I'm a comparativist so I teach American government all day long forever even though it's not my jam but it is my jam now and I love to bring in that comparative perspective. So I've always mixing up when I'm teaching comes a little bit naturally but revising what the teaching material is did not come naturally to me at all. I'm the product of two decades of Catholic school and then disciplinary training as a political scientist so it's been really conservative from a pedagogical point of view. So I'm extremely grateful to open education because it has helped open up my pedagogy and now has led me in this direction of evaluating my materials and the reason I share all of this is not so Una and James can be like why did we call her to do this but so that it sort of prefaces this for you you can do something similar. So as I said political science books are extremely expensive and that's really what brought me into this and I was sitting at a conference a political science conference not an open education conference in 2018 listening to a presentation by Dr. Aaron Tully who's Canadian and she was doing a study of representation of minorities and immigrants in Canadian political science textbooks which was really interesting and automatically because I was already thinking open it I was like I wonder if she has an open textbook in in this study and we started talking and her study was on Canada but she sent it to me I said I bet this would be really interesting to do with American government books and I in not the best social science my hypothesis was like OER textbooks are going to nail this they're going to be better because they're just better at everything right and well spoiler alert they were not but we'll get to that in one second what was really useful to me though about Aaron Tully's paper which has now been studied has now been published or is forthcoming from the journal international journal of Canadian studies I put this here this bibliography because these were all of the studies that I could find that I really built mine you can tell this my study on you can tell that I've been working on this for a while because this slide of the adventures in infinity war was a hot and relevant picture right so we're doing it's a replication study in a lot of ways I didn't come up with a new methodology I use the ones that were in all of these and some of these studies they looked at specifically one historically marginalized group or another but they explicitly built on each other's models and you can also notice even though the text is pretty small there they all fit on one slide so there's not been a ton of work done in political science looking at American government textbooks even though it's the the bread and butter of our discipline right if you teach America if you teach political science at one point I almost guarantee that you have taught American government because some states even require it by law right to be part of a college curriculum in their public institutions but we really haven't looked at what's in those books particularly here so I looked at and what was fortunate for me I do content analysis in my disciplinary research but I don't do critical race theory so I don't do that type of analysis I was able to build on these excellent studies and and really appreciate and bring them together and see what they sort of update them adding in OER books as well as traditionally published textbooks doing it more updated because as you can see these studies are a little bit dated even by now and unfortunately the results were not great so I really thought that the OER textbooks would be much better and they weren't they were terrible but they weren't more terrible than the political science books in general they were equally terrible so it really is a political science problem and this is an open study you can go um and read this don't even bother reading the paper because I'll give you the cliff notes on the paper check out the studies that it's built on the bibliography is really the I think the best part of this paper if you're not a political scientist but looking at this and seeing that there's not a lot of coverage whether you're doing an index search which was one of the methods that I chose or an overall just content analysis of digital counting of the word frequencies the only textbook that did well you can see there's one sort of outlier here at the top is McLean and Tauber's book which is not in print anymore they're hopefully coming up with a second edition but this one's a little bit old and it is the only book to do well because it's the only book that had a specific focus so it's American government in black and white that looks at race specifically and what an interesting lens that is to look at so you can see here right I circled all of the OER books they do just about as badly as everyone else and this is true so African Americans receive the most coverage or general generic terms that that aren't made in reference to any specific group or can be coded to another specific group and then women and then let's eat in this population but it's really just an abysmally small number in terms of the actual coverage and this is not an isolated event right so this is the data if you might imagine this is the ethnic and racial breakup of political scientists currently registered in the American political science association and divided by our subfields and I will give you three guesses and the winner gets a prize of what you think blue represents in the racial and ethnic breakdowns here so that's over political science is an overwhelmingly white discipline and I don't think that's disconnected from these lax right and there's even the oliva study and the kasey study that are referenced in my study that say hey you know what it's statistically likely if you have a person of color who is an author on the book you're going to do better on this if you have women who are the authors on books you will do better in terms of representation so that's those are things to look at and the reason I'm here is this really has cracked it open I was never one for the are the revised that that fifth are because I am a traditionalist I'm a political scientist that is not part of my training or my experience but it's not good and looking at this and having this firm data has been really useful for me to now to say I need to this is missing right this is not a question of I want to revise it because I need something special this is inferior this is not good enough for my students right it doesn't reflect who they are in their experience but also even if they were all white students it still wouldn't be good because it doesn't reflect the American experience and it's supposed to be a class in American government so what am I doing now I'm continuing to educate myself revising my reading list and really refocusing my courses my international relations course now instead of starting with the cannons of theory it starts with a really great vote vote and look in peace that was in foreign policy about the the the race problem in international relations and it's just a great provocative piece to start with that idea of looking for who's missing I'm sharing these results as widely as possible hello everyone especially with my discipline specific settings APSA doesn't want to hear this the American political science association but I'm going to keep telling them in as many different ways as possible and bring these up and presenting on this in areas I want to encourage everyone to replicate or expand on these studies or see what's available and replicate in your own fields if we have psychologists I would love to see and that I can walk you through my methodology that's super easy to do and then really getting into that last oh I'm sorry that's my timer that's it exploring over getting into that last art to revise and exploring open pedagogy approaches right if I want my students to be able to see themselves in their reading then what better way the chance than to give themselves the chance to write or to revise that material so it does in fact reflect them or reflect the America that we the American government that they want and need it to be and then I will stop there well thank you so much Shauna for sharing those abysmal statistics but the good news is that we can do better and so I'd like to open it up for Q&A well I'll kick it off this is James Shauna thank you this is it's so inspiring and it's just a great example of if you want to if you want things to change you have to be the change right I wonder if you could say a few words about your interactions with the American Political Science Association or reactions of fellow political scientists when you've been presenting this in a disciplinary setting so I think it's um in political science again American Political Science Association is very sort of traditional academic they think it's weird that I've gotten all sorts of shade inside I for being there as a community college professor right like oh what are you doing here um but being in those spaces and saying that this is really important I was really fortunate to be able to actually publish this in one of our bigger journals and to be able to publish it openly because I had so now it's probably going to be the most prestigious and most widely read or cited thing I ever write not because it's the best although I think it's very good but because it's open access right so lots of people can see it you can click on that link that's in these slides or you can just google my name and the title and you'll find it um APSA has been somewhat open to this they know that this is a problem for them right that they that they have uh you can see there's a hashtags like APSA so white um because it really very much is um and they're working on that uh it's been interesting to communicate a little bit with open stacks right so I teach with the open stacks textbook I love the open stacks textbook as much as anyone can love a generic intro to American government textbook um and to say to them like look this is this is a problem and you should be you know what are you doing to address it and I have heard from them some of the steps that they're taking so they're making their google their um textbooks available so anybody wants to revise their textbook if you go into the if you're logged into the open stacks you can request chapters from them and they will send you a google docs version and I know I talked to Una last week which uh and and we said yeah they're supposed to and I got one I'm so excited so that's now available it may not be available for all of the textbooks um but it's coming online for all of the books which is going to make it a lot easier um so that's been interesting but really uh I've never had a problem I'm a high school theater geek at heart so people not listening has never really stopped me from talking um so I'll just keep banging on about it um the uh so I have a question about methodology so um Voyant would definitely work um very low tech I did an index search uh index pages search in uh excel right or google sheets so I kept track of that really simply and there's a big in the paper has a big methodology appendix because it had a very tiny word limit so I put everything in the appendix um but you can see exactly how many times different things were said um different things were indexed the index search is a little bit problematic because some of the books especially the born digital books don't have an index or they don't spend as much time on their index um which makes sense uh but because people don't use it but if you're going to have an index then be really careful and mindful about it um and then I would also say uh I used prevallus uh wordstat um but you can definitely use Voyant um the materials are pretty widely available I would not say I so I have a a a thank there um or a thank you to one of my colleagues who found pdfs of books for me which this part's being recorded so I'm sure he found them not in illegal ways but um that's so you can get instead of having to get because ripping it out of a digital library book digital library or review copy is a little bit hard but Voyant would definitely work wordstand or any really um if you code in python or r you could do that I don't do that because I am lazy and busy and not smart enough um but I hope to be able to do that soon great thank you shawna for that we had a question a little bit earlier on um from truth atkins martin and I'm not sure if you addressed that one because I lost my connection there for a moment but she asked or he I'm not sure does this partner with the work that's already out there such as Turone and Jaleel Howard's work I'm not familiar with them um so I'm gonna have to check that out I I can't answer that but I'm really excited to write that down and and look that up okay great thank you shawna um and there's a few other questions in here we we have a few more minutes before we switch um how so Najila asks how can we make sure that our faculty and staff represent the diversity of our student population in every higher education institution you see more than 90 percent is all white faculty and staff only 10 percent minority and she goes on to say nobody is listening to that question question question mark so that's a really tough question right and it's a different question depending on where you are right it's a different question if you're asking that in a community college setting in california or in a cuny community college in new york city or if you're setting asking that question in georgia um so I was speaking to social scientists in georgia and they're issued their student population because usually when I talk about oer I talk about income and I talk about race and ethnicity of my student population and that is not the same institution the university of georgia is a very different student population and student profile and yet the financial imperative and the the culturally responsive imperatives are still very much there um there was a great uh session that I think was recorded at oe global um where uh some some people whose names I will mispronounce so I will send the link out I promise I'll send the link or if you you remember that session that uh was was just really interesting because somebody who's a a person of color in a primarily white institution right that's a different question right if you're so it's a I don't and this is something that I teach about right this is a political science question we talk about american government um so I don't have the answer there I like to look um I've really appreciated the the written in thinking about what what can you do right so very specifically um written on written trisha matthew's like excellent book about um the challenges that tenure track faculty of color face that you know I think everyone who sits on a hiring committee or promotion committee should read that book and just see that because if it's not part of your experience then it's very easy to see that or to think that it's not real right or to not understand that maybe there's systemic um bases here so that's I come from a data point of view um which is not to say that it's more the or a better or the right one or or more than any other but that's just the one that I happen that happens to resonate the most for me so looking at that and saying this can't be individual based it's systemic and if it's systemic then individual solutions are not going to solve things we need systemic solutions so shana there's a lot of questions coming up and we're going to switch in just a couple of minutes but I one of the the title of our topic today is um how you um integrate anti-racism into your classroom and you know in speaking with you last week and and you know previously um I know that you have plans to do that in your classroom in collaboration with your students and so maybe you could speak about that for a few moments before we switch so um I can look at my textbook right I can look at the civil rights chapter and say like this is really limited um and in fact how come one of the findings from my study was that are your mentions of historically marginalized groups siloed in your civil rights chapter in American government every American government textbook has that chapter um and in fact most of their content is right so how could this be um and I see this being uh I haven't I will preface this by saying because this was my plan in March of 2020 right we have a late spring start so we start in March uh no students have said that they want to take on revising a chapter um that's one of the optional assignments but I'm I'm hoping that now especially with the Google docs being a little bit easier we may have some students who are interested in saying this is what's missing or this is missing right um we need this perspective you know and I really want to see what students are interested in right because we have the second most popular major at our school is criminal justice um and we have a lot of nursing students right so there's health disparities there's um all sorts of interesting things that students might bring that they are more interested and that's where the open pedagogy part of it really brings in right so we all have our positionalities we all have the things that we are you know have experience or a life experience that are are going to be more relevant for us individually right and if my students can use that to to motivate their research and their work in my class so that it's actually meaningful for them and we can make something that we can share um that maybe would be helpful or meaningful to others I think that's that's my goal we haven't we haven't got there yet um but we'll see what we can do well wonderful um shawna and we um I know that there's uh members of the OFAR uh faculty cohort who are looking at making those changes this spring as well so um we'll have to all get back together sometime and discuss that further and there's a lot of great questions in the chat window I'll let you take a look at those shawna uh we'll have some time at the end but uh now I want to turn it over to Dr. Alyssa Cooper um to share with us um her work let me stop sharing sorry no right lively discussion okay all right I'm going to share my screen here okay can you all see my screen yes we can okay great well that was a a great starter shawna thank you that was very interesting I kept keep talking keep talking um okay so like shawna did I just want to tell you a little bit about who I teach so I teach at a um not historically a predominantly not predominantly sorry uh Hispanic serving institution which means we have over 50% of our students who are Hispanic we only have about 13% African-American students and so the majority of the students that I face each day are white students and I always like to say when I do presentations like this that I'm not an expert in this area I don't teach racism or racial justice courses I teach freshman composition African-American literature and journalism so I am an instructor similar to most of you out there who are just trying to do good in the profession that we have chosen and fortunately for us we do have the opportunity to do that let's see if I can advance my slides should be able to just hit down okay that should work okay so basically what I want to talk about today is this anti-racist pedagogy so the heart and I'm just going to read this one slide I'm not going to read to you all day but the heart of an anti-racist pedagogy is the intent to actively acknowledge and impose racism in all aspects of a course from the design to the content choices that we make this session will discuss a number of tools and strategies to help build a more inclusive environment in your course including using discussion to examine and oppose the forces of racism so I'm going to try to do that in less than 20 minutes and then I will have time at the end for us to answer some questions so let's start by looking at some of the key areas first off you know we need to talk about why is this important and is it our job to do this you know this is a big issue the nation is looking at this issue right now and it seems to land in our laps is it our job to tackle this I also want to briefly talk about the difference between curriculum and pedagogy because a lot of people a lot of instructors object to taking on this challenge because of this issue of whether we should be changing our curriculum and I want to address that also I will talk just quickly about the practice of intentional course design can help with your anti-racist pedagogy as well as some strategies for anti-racist pedagogy and then the challenges that we all face whether you are african-american or a black instructor or white whatever you come to the table with we all faced similar and different challenges and then I will mention as Una has mentioned not just the anti-racist guide that I helped author but another that I found useful in developing this talk okay so again why is this important well I think a lot of us we have to really think about who we are so for some white teachers who teach primarily white students they might feel a little hesitant to discuss some of these issues of racism in their courses because they feel like it may not affect them or their students and so this is the I this whole idea that it doesn't affect it them is a fundamental misunderstanding of what anti-racist work actually is so anti-racist work it means acknowledging that racist beliefs and structures are pervasive in all aspects of our lives you know from education to housing to even climate change and then we have to actively do work to tear down those beliefs and structure structures and that's basically what anti-racism is so it does affect all of us regardless of who we are and who we take who we teach I came across a book by Annalise Singh and I'll put this in the well I'll have to do it later but I'll put it in the chat box but it's called the racial healing handbook and I I read through that handbook and I found some really interesting information she says that becoming an anti-racist is always a work in progress and it seldom yields perfection and it differs depending on who you are right so you can't look at me and say oh she's black she's anti-racist that's not the case we all are racist in some ways not meaning that that we are a detriment to society but we all have different levels and so in this handbook the racial healing handbook she suggests that there are different pathways for different people but that we can all be racist or anti-racist and so here's the example that she gave and she says that becoming an anti-racist as a white person it means taking the responsibility of your power and your and your privilege that you have as a white person and acknowledging the feelings that you have to increased multiculturalism or cultivating a desire for understanding and for growth so a lot of times we go about our day-to-day lives and we don't really think about some of these things but trying to be an anti-racist means that we do think about these and we cultivate that desire to do better she also says that becoming an anti-racist as a person of color means recognizing that there are important class differences between people of color so those of us that are African American or black we know that we even within our own race there's this divide of light-skinned black skin and poor and and well to do right and we have to recognize that and acknowledge the feelings that are not acknowledged feelings but acknowledge that all racial groups are not equal and that are struggling in some way under white supremacy okay realizing that people of color are not always united in solidarity and in our fight so there are many people who aren't out there protest protesting black lives matters for whatever reason that might be so we have to acknowledge that we're not all in this together and that we have to learn to address that and that's all part of our being an anti-racist so the anti or the racial healing handbook also proposes that all anti-racists must commit to taking individual and collective action as well as engaging in relationship building beyond our own racialized identity so we have to learn to work with all kinds of people to to with a with a common goal in mind and so as educators we are in the best position to do that and to provide that education for our students because we we have them in this audience and we can bring them together to have these types of discussions so we can't say it's not our job anymore that it is the job it's you know it's my job to teach reading and writing and critical thinking you know it's also my job to create good citizens in this country so I think that it is important and that it is our job all right so let's talk about this issue of well do I change I can't change my curriculum I have a set curriculum I don't I don't have a room or a space to put this well it doesn't it's not all about changing your curriculum okay so I teach freshman composition and we always have this argument amongst all of our composition and structures that some of you might be familiar with and you know the goal of our college is that we all want for our students to write well right and all of our college courses but yet in many colleges students are only asked to take two writing courses and they're only asked to write in our writing courses okay so four years of college and only two writing courses required and we're wondering well where's the help where's the support why aren't we all teaching this concept if it's so important and that's the same idea behind teaching anti-racism we all have our set curriculum we need to teach and we might argue that we don't have to have the time to teach anything else but we don't all have the time we don't all have to have anti-racist curriculum all we have to do is have anti-racist pedagogy and the difference is is pedagogy is the way in which we teach the way we address so when Shana was talking about the textbook and it not representing all of her students that's one example of of changing the pedagogy changing not just the textbook but how you even present information can make a difference as well so there are lots of opportunities for us to change what we do in our classrooms all right so let's first start with just practice intentional course design and I always tell students excuse I worked in an area for four years as Una mentioned and as an instructional designer slash technologist helping faculty design courses and I always say we can just start with practicing or we should also just start with just good teaching right if you have good teaching that's going to cover a lot of the boundaries and I know many of you are already familiar with the seven principles of good teaching or I forget what they're called exactly but quality designing a quality course utilizes those best practices practices and that will help in itself just to give you an example a couple of those seven principles are encourage contact between student and faculty so if you are working in a course environment where you are engaging with your students they are getting an opportunity to learn from you and that is your opportunity to input in part some of that anti-racist knowledge you want to encourage active learning okay give students opportunities to do things that could bring them to this topic that we need for them to discuss and Shana's example having students take on the responsibility of editing a chapter of a textbook that includes more representation of the student body so all of these different principles will help when you are designing your course if you are doing that it will make it easier for you to create an anti-racist classroom so in addition to following just best practices and course design you might also want to identify what what some people call enduring understandings so when I look at the competencies for my course you know write a good thesis statement all of this stuff that's just very specific to teaching writing but there are other things that I want for my students to learn and I call these enduring understandings and it's what we hope students will take with them at the end of the class for me one of the big ones is just critical thinking don't believe everything you find on the internet right that's definitely true today and I do a lot of that in the class where I'm trying to get them to do more critical thinking so that's one of my enduring understandings but I also want for them to be respectful of others views and to understand where other people are coming from and to think before they speak so if someone says something in the class I want for them to stop think about why they might have might have said that and then they can respond to that so we have to not only take into consideration what our enduring understandings will be but also how we might assess those goals that we've created we already know how to assess the competencies and goals from from our syllabus but how do we assess these new things how do I assess whether or not somebody is listening or someone is being empathetic to a point of view that someone might share right these are the things that we are challenged with so here are some strategies so an anti-racist classroom it should intentionally structure classroom interactions through one or more of these following approaches so we have to address and welcome challenges we can't hide from them I know I always say that sometimes I have on my calendar that we're going to do a certain activity that addresses anti-racism and I'm just not in the mood for it I'm not I don't feel strong enough to do it and you do you kind of have to psych yourself up and be prepared and be ready because challenges are going to pop up so you have to address them and welcome them you can't just say oh we're not going to talk about that or no let's you you be quiet we're not going to address that today you can't do that you really have to address it you also have to utilize classroom discussions to talk about race and it can be challenging in different types of subject matter courses like math I don't teach math but it might be a challenge for math teachers to bring up or have a discussion about anti-racism in their classroom with math now you math teachers out there might be going oh that's easy I can do that I don't see it but in English I do see it so you have to figure out how it works for you we also want to encourage reflexivity and we have to be willing to do that ourselves as well and I'll talk a little bit more about each of these and then we want to be able to provide equitable access to course texts and materials and that's where the OER comes for comes in so I'll go into a bit more detail of these strategies with the exception of the equitable access because that's the easy one easy one making sure students can access your materials is a given you can choose OER or affordable texts you can utilize handouts library resources provide texts reserve the library you all can figure out how to get that $200 textbook accessible to your students and and it's going to be different for everyone else I always like to impart the story about how I've had students who would come when I used to teach face to face I would have students that would come weekly to check out the borrowed textbook and they would sit outside my my door and read their chapters for the week and and you know you never think about it but we always say our students don't buy our textbooks and it's just bad that they don't do that but we don't really think about why they don't buy our textbooks and sometimes they just don't have the money okay so here's some of the things some of the challenges that we might have to address and this comes from found this from some folks at at Vanderbilt and they did a study and there's a link to that study here and I'll share my slides as well it's some somehow but it says even seasoned educators can be confounded when confronted with student reactions to racial justice justice content right so there's this resistance to learning we always have some microaggressions toward others that pop up and others might even exude aggressive comments and behaviors when you're trying to have this discussion and like I mentioned earlier sometimes I just have to I have to say I'm not in the right mindset to do this today and I'm going to change what I have prepared to do and so these are some of the things that popped up in their study let's see if I can read them so sometimes you'll have to deal with a historical and a social ideologies that racism is a problem of a few bad individuals I hear this a lot when we start talking about the black lives black lives matter movement and police officers now no one is saying that all police officers are bad but there are a few and so this argument will come up with that racism it's only a problem for those few individuals but if those few individual officers are causing problems for minorities then that's not good even if it's just a few whatever a few means so we deal we have to address that as a challenge also that racism is only relevant of people of color I brought that one up already well it is it's relevant for all of us because we all live in this country together the post-racial beliefs racism is a thing of the past you know we solved that problem long ago you know slavery doesn't exist civil rights movement all of that but yet we still deal with some of these issues today so we can't really say that if you don't see it it doesn't mean that it doesn't exist is what I tell I tell my students all the time just because you don't see it doesn't mean something doesn't exist all right and so there are some others here that we have to address and challenge we can't ignore them we have to bring we have to talk about them and so the micro aggressions are the ones that generally are the ones that we're faced with dealing with so anti-racist classrooms should intentionally structure classroom interaction through one or more of the following and the biggest one is that the discussions that we have okay so we have to be prepared when we have these discussions so we have to use facilitation strategies such as presenting students with facilitation guidelines when I started doing this I looked at my facilitation guidelines and you'll probably laugh but my guidelines said things like make sure you make your first post by Wednesday of this week and then finish your post by Friday and if you don't post more than a hundred words you will not earn full credit and all of these things about address your classmates by name and nothing about what the rules should be and I can't tell you what the rules are because you have to decide based on your audience what those rules are I try to impart that they should be respectful of each other and to listen and to provide backup and documentation for some of the things that they might say but when we are addressing these discussions in our classroom one of the things that pop up is that we have to learn to check any microaggressions that come up in these discussions and a lot of times people don't realize they're doing them and so I'm going to show you a list on my next slide make sure a list on my next slide of some examples and it's interesting because in the examples I found myself doing some of them as an instructor but also having them done to me as a person as a student as a teacher and so a lot of times when you if you pointed out they're like oh I didn't realize I said that or I didn't realize that it meant that or that it would call someone to fill that way and so we have to learn to recognize them and to check them uh or call them out and address them and then we also want to amplify what we call micro affirmations and those are when students on their own sort of call out something or point out a positive that happens in a discussion and we want to make sure that we amplify that and it shouldn't always be your voice amplifying you want to encourage and coach students to be the person who does these micro affirmations so here's the example and there's link to there's a good guide about teaching race written from some no that's not what I meant to say there's a link to a document that lists some examples of these micro aggressions but I pointed out some of the ones that I recognize and the first one expecting expecting students of any particular group to represent the perspective of others of their race or gender or sexuality in a class discussion or debate so you're like all right we're gonna do this anti-racism discussion today and then every time a topic comes up you know you point at the black student and say well what do you how do you feel about that you know and that that may not be you know they may not represent what you want to hear at that particular point so you want to try to avoid those things um we do we have a lot of heteronormative metaphors and examples in class you know a married couple man and woman married couple and their children you use that as a scenario or a case study and you've already sort of excluded any of your students you might not accept that type of lifestyle or live that lifestyle okay the one that that I hear I just read about was with our new vice president Kamala Harris and there was a senator pronouncing mispronouncing her name continually even after he had been corrected so that's one failing to learn to pronounce or continuing to mispronounce the names of students I found myself as a as a culprit of that with my Hispanic students I would say how do you say her name oh can we just call you that's rude no he wants to be called Jesus right we're not going to call him bill or Jesus because it's easier for us right so the this is a list of and it's not exclusive I just picked out some that I could relate to but we have to learn to recognize those when it happens and students will start to recognize them as well but they don't know we have to teach them how to have these conversations and how to have these discussions okay one of the things that also is important with this anti-racist pedagogy is encouraging reflect reflectivity and it starts with you so modeling reflexivity you have to interrogate your own experiences of marginalization or privilege and internalized dominance and share these reflections with students as an example right of how to be self-reflective and it's challenging because as instructors we don't want our personal lives to be out there but sometimes it can be useful and we don't have to put it all out there I mean I talk about my experience of growing up as a a black student in a all white school of nine other black students right and when I first got there there wasn't a day that didn't go by that I didn't hear oh do you run track and unfortunately for me I was an athlete but I didn't run track who wants to run track that's boring running around in circles right or I wanted to play basketball but that's all I ever heard so I talk about these stories I bring that up but I also talk about how I was I was lucky in that I received a good education I was in a good school district and my mom enforced that I that I went to schools I like to share with them that I was bust it sort of tells my age when I say that I lived in Ohio and I was bust to an all white school back in the days of segregation they're like how old are you I'm old all right so but anyway so I do I model reflexivity but as you know as a writing teacher I give my students plenty of opportunities to write their own reflections where they are doing their own interrogation of their experiences whether they are black white Hispanic or any other nationality right and this is really important because it really prompts thinking on their part and I'm going to skip to my next slide because I'm running out of time here so these are the guides that Una mentioned the first one that I was helped in creating but there's also another one that I found from Wheaton College called Becoming an Anti-Racist Educator and it goes through some really cool things and this this slide here is from that from that guide and it basically walks you through the process of this personal reflection you know and care interrogate your position understand the impact of white supremacy in your work learn how racism shapes lives and then even the next step is take action in your role and it gives you the steps to do those action items so if you can get that link from my slides and check that out I think it would be helpful for you all right so questions I only went over by six minutes all right I'm gonna try to see if I can see sorry I was muted it was great I'm glad you went over Alyssa one question that came up and I don't know that we'll have time to address it now is about how grading plays into racism and several folks recommended various resources that people can use to to read more about that did you have any anything in particular you wanted to mention about that Alyssa about the grading in the classroom and how that might affect students of color yeah you know that that's that's one of the hardest things that I've had to deal with because for me being African-American I don't want for anyone I don't want for any of my students to fill as if I'm trying to make things easier for them and so when I do change grading and what I mean by grading is I change the assessments as a whole so students can have different types of assessments and it's not all about one type of assessment luckily for me I don't give tests so I don't have to worry about how my test is written and what the wording that I use my assessments are all about discussion reflecting and writing and so in that sense it's easier for me but it was a challenge for me to think about how I create my rubrics so that they're worded in a way that encourages students to work harder in a particular area so I think it's going to be different for each person so I'm glad someone was sharing resources I don't actually have any off top of my hand to share as far as resources go but yeah that that is going to be important because you really need to think about what you're currently doing and and think about if there needs to if you need to have adjustments in that. Great thank you for that I we want to just finish off the last few slides and then we will have Q&A with with Shauna and Alyssa again and I want to hear more as Shauna mentioned something about self-grading and ungrading so Liz did you want to mention our upcoming webinars just in case you're putting these on your calendar. Sure so our next our next webinar is the going to talk about the math equity toolkit from Education Trust. March we're going to have speakers talking about the African-American male education and network development. April is the community college equity assessment lab of May is to be determined and in June we'll have the before cohort showcase what all the work they've been doing and you're probably all already registered but there's a link. Great thanks Liz so we're looking forward to those I just wanted to mention it just a really briefly about the math equity toolkit so Alyssa was talking about math and how it's going to look a little different from her English classes and so we have the opportunity to have folks from who have developed this pathway to equitable math instruction join us and talk about the work that they've done and specifically about dismantling racism in mathematics instruction and even though their focus is math they really feel that this transfers to any discipline and so I hope that you'll join us for that and we've got two great speakers and next slide. James do you want to mention this? Yeah real fast boy you know building on Dr. Brandel's observation OER is not necessarily better in every way right it's a power powerful message about that but OER and open education does come with an open license and the permission to share and remix so for those of you who are who would like to learn more about open education OER here are some awesome resources Una and Liz's organization CCC OER that should be your first stop the website is just jam packed with resources years of fantastic webinars archived up there as well as many many other resources also here in California community colleges our our statewide academic senate has a fantastic massive project to support faculty in creating open educational resources by discipline so you can check out their project there at the link that you see and then again the number one resource that you should get involved with if you want to learn more about OER is the email list from CCC OER you can sign up with the link here be warned it is an active email list so you have to be ready for that but it is the number one source certainly in North America perhaps around the world for colleagues to exchange information about current OER stuff so onwards thanks Una. Well thank you for that James with I would say we're the largest network for community colleges specifically and actually our February webinar please go to our website I can't remember what date it is I think I think it's the 10th is on inclusive design for OER courses and we will have specifically some speakers who have done this in their classroom who have attempted to make their classes more anti-racist and introduce more diverse curriculum and that's being led by the amazing Suzanne Joaquin who many of you may know she's a biology instructor at Butte College in Northern California and now I want to go back to Q&A and I wonder Shauna if you might mention briefly a little bit about that self-grading and ungrading idea that seemed really exciting to hear about. So sort of my experience with open education has been like the I'm going to sub out my expensive textbook for a free one and that was good but then sort of opening up my pedagogy more and moving a little bit into and just sort of hearing from people who were experimenting with this and having really great results like what is the purpose of the grading and like what is the purpose of all of like the rules like I love Alyssa's like my my requirements for posting were like post on this day make sure you finish by this day and like yes those are if that's what you want and what do I really want from my students right what do I want them to know and be able to do at the end of my class and what do I need to focus on for that. So last year again not knowing it was about to be a pandemic I started working on this and I do sort of self-grading right my students grade themselves there's a rubric for all of the assignments and it's also choose your own adventure I've tried to bring in a lot of flexibility for students right and this is relevant of different economic needs different class needs first gen versus not first gen working students and then also race and ethnicity right so everybody needs that flexibility or can benefit from that flexibility so my students there's 160 points of stuff that they can do they can choose what they want to do and for each thing that they do there's a rubric and they have to say or or a checklist or what it is that they're supposed to do and they have to say how well they did or didn't do that and give themselves the points I reserve it's modified because I do still have to give grades right I have to put something into the the CUNY first CUNY worst like you know grade receiver they have to have a final grade for the course we're not Sarah Lawrence and it is modified because I do reserve the rights and I say this up front to say if I disagree then we'll have a conversation right and and that conversation has been really great because students have revised their work and what do you want more than that where if if students aren't meeting aren't doing what you need them to do or want them to be doing right that they then do it what's better than that and in that my grade student grades have also gone up for everyone and since those grades can be so it's really about for me students doing the work right if they can do the work then they should get the grade and I also abolish deadlines for classes for due dates this will work for me this will not work for everyone so I've written a little bit about it on my very enemic blog and I love Alyssa's point of like I can't I can't tell you what you should do I can tell you what I have done but every so for me I blow deadlines all the time right it's like the the one thing and you know what that has gotten me into because everyone's like oh we got to train these students for the real world like I am so bad at deadlines that I've become a tenured professor of political science right like and that's not I have a lot of privilege that that makes it okay for for me to have this problem but how come I can't extend that to my students especially when I know right like I love Alyssa's point of like sometimes students don't buy the book because they think it's not worth it sometimes students don't buy the book because in a choice between child care or food on the table or that textbook I'm not telling you that my book is more important right like that's it's not like I will and I've said that and it's been so nice during the pandemic to be able to say when students are saying oh my gosh I need another week on this or can I still submit this like yep yep I don't need to know why because everybody's got a good reason and if they don't want to tell you their reason it might be because they don't know that they can right so there's different cultural backgrounds where you wouldn't go to a teacher and say that it might be because it's something so horrific they don't want to tell you right something you know a student says that you know there's a death in the family or they have to work when they've been assaulted or they've been arrested right I don't need students to plead for me to get basic accommodation it's just there for everyone and then it's equitable to so thank you shawna that's great well we are running a little over and I know folks are having to take off I um Alyssa I wanted to give you a chance if you wanted to respond to anything that was in the chat window that this chat window has been amazing and um and Liz is going to share that with folks um so that uh you can uh if you didn't get a chance to see that during the event so Alyssa yeah I just you know sorry for laughing shan I was reading the comments right in a serious moment there but um you know someone made the comment ago a comment about it wasn't that long ago and and it really wasn't that long ago where we were fighting for civil rights and so forth but you know but our students who are only 18 or 19 years old that is a long time ago to them and so we do have to remind them that yeah it wasn't that long ago that you know I for me I find myself trying to explain to students why black people are so angry right now right because they only see it as one incident not one but a few incidents that have happened in different cities across the country they don't see that you know less than 10 years ago it was happening then and then 20 years ago it was happening and you know these years that we've lived in that they haven't lived in yet so it's important to bring it to their attention that this isn't new so but that's all I wanted to say and um thanks for listening and um good luck with your endeavors of your anti-racist pedagogy. Thank you so much Alyssa and Shauna um you uh you've got a big fan base out there um so thank you really appreciate your time today and we hope to see the rest of you uh in another month thank you for joining us it's been a great discussion and a great presentation anything else james from you before we sign off nothing else just I'm so grateful to to be here and boy some days I love my job this is one of those all right well thanks everyone and see you all soon