 All right. So Darnell, I think Ben Williams, as Ana Rita mentioned before, is our keynote speaker for today. And he is currently the equity, diversity, and inclusion senior administrator of professional growth and school culture in the Brockton, Massachusetts public schools. Darnell has over 25 years experience in a variety of educational settings, as well as extensive training and expertise in strategies that promote culturally responsive and sustainable practices in support of equity, justice, and transformation. Darnell was previously the associate director of professional development at the Collaborative for Educational Services, the Collaborative Educational Services Department of Youth Services Education Initiative. That's a mouthful, but the Collaborative for Educational Services holds the contract for the DYS education program in Massachusetts. Several of us here at the writing project have worked extensively with Darnell when he was in that role on professional development related to the creation of DYS instructional guides in ELA, science, math, and history. We all learned that Darnell is not only a person of wisdom and expertise and passion for his work, but also one of great compassion and humanity, an inspiration to all of his collaborators. He is also one of the most organized people I have ever met. So it's my pleasure to welcome Darnell Thig Ben Williams to give this morning's keynote. Thank you very, very much. I'm so excited to be here at the best practices in the Teaching and Writing Conference. It's so good to see so many familiar faces. I was sort of scrolling through and I see a number of faces that I've worked with, so I'm very happy to be in your presence. I'm thankful to the Western Mass Writing Project Conference Committee for this wonderful opportunity to talk with you about the impact of COVID on education and discuss opportunities to reimagine and re-center teaching and learning, particularly for our most marginalized and disenfranchised students. And as Bruce said earlier, that's really where my passion and my heart lies. So as our students return to the classroom after over a year of remote and hybrid learning, loss and trauma are ongoing things. As many as 140,000 children have lost at least one parent or guardian to COVID-19. Lockdowns and quarantine meant social isolation resulting in depression and anxiety in children and adolescents. Schools are supposed to provide a sense of safety, security and stability. But switching from in-person to remote to in-person again only produced increased levels of stress and anxiety. One thing that I believe that COVID showed us is that schools haven't focused enough on the well-being and social emotional needs of children. And I heard that when Mamadou spoke and other people spoke, that we're not seeing the whole child. We only seen a slice of them. Academics represents a slice of them. So before COVID shut down everything, our schools had a narrow focus on academic achievement and assessment almost to an extreme. And that extreme was to the detriment of recognizing the needs of the whole child. I remember conversations sitting in professional development sessions prior to COVID and hearing talks such as we pride ourselves here in the Commonwealth for being number one in educational achievement. Number one. But we glossed over the fact that when it comes to providing equitable educational outcomes for our ethnically diverse students, we rank number six from the bottom on that list. So achievement is fine to be number one, but when it comes to equity, we at the bottom. And we need to face that. Massachusetts is actually one of the worst states for closing equity gaps. And when I'm talking about equity gaps, I'm not only talking about education because education is a microcosm of larger oppressions and inequities. So according to the 2015 joint publication between Duke University and the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston and the article, the color of wealth in Boston, White households have a medium wealth of $247,500, while Dominicans and African Americans have a medium wealth of $8. So what we experience in schools is also related to these larger inequities. Educational achievement gaps persist for black and brown and poor students in the Commonwealth. And these gaps are rarely discussed with any sense of urgency that leads to accountability. Black boys are more likely than any other group to be placed in special education classes, with 80% of all special education students being black or Latinx males. Black boys account for 20% of U.S. students labeled as mentally retarded, even though they represent only 9% of the population. On the other end of the spectrum, black boys are two and a half times less likely to be classified as gifted and talented, even when their academic record shows that potential. But the statistic that I tell you keeps me up at night is the one from the Bureau of Justice that now predicts one in three black male babies born in this country are expected to go to prison. One in three. Now that wasn't true in the 19th century. That wasn't even true in the 20th century. It has become true in the 21st century. And there is this appalling silence. There is this indifference to racial disparities, racial inequities. Not only an indifference, but there's this resistance, this violent resistance to even talking about institutional racism. You are here about the debacle around critical race theory. There's like actual resistance to talking about these issues that we all are experiencing. And it bothers me because I see in poor and marginalized communities hope being crushed and sucked out of our children. And I do believe that you can't get to justice without hope. They go together. They are tied together. As Bruce, when he introduced me, he mentioned that I worked at the Collaborative for Educational Services under the DYS contract. But for the past 13 years, I worked with DYS. And I have the honor and privilege of working with teachers and young people across the state through DYS who are all in DYS custody. And over the years, I've been able to mentor several of the young people and build supportive relationships. And I have to say that of all the 13 years, 10 years at the Collaborative and three years at Commonwealth Corporation through the Department of Youth Services, the thing that really gave me life was being able to visit programs and see students and really being able to talk and listen to the students. And I have to say that DYS is really ahead in many ways in terms of schooling. What I mean by that is proximity. That DYS schools are inside of where they live, right? And so our teachers are not only seeing students in an academic context or an educational context, but they also see students how they socialize, how they eat, when they don't want to come to school. So in some ways, to teach in DYS is almost akin to home visits or community visits, then present in the community. We can't teach what we don't know. And if we're not proximate with our students and our families, we can't really support them because we don't understand them. And I think that is the been proximate or that proximity that's really going to give us the radical empathy that we need in order to build these relationships. And I think some of you said it earlier, teaching is really a key teaching is a small piece of it. But foundational is the relationships. You know, so I think that while students and not in every DYS program, there was nightmare stories and some of the DYS programs, but there was also great successes and great lessons to learn. But the thing that really depressed me talking with some of the students in DYS is that many of them said that the way I am in DYS is different when I go back out, when I'm discharged from DYS. And it's different because when I go back into my schools, my teachers don't know me. They think they know me because they're looking at the D that I got or the C that I got, but that's not really who I am. And that those teachers in DYS, they knew me because they saw me when I was at my worst. And they stayed with me and they cheered me on. And when I came to class and I didn't want to learn, they sat with me and asked me, what are you interested in? How can I support you? What do you need from me? How many teachers do you actually hear say that? When I go to school, I'm working in the Brockton public schools now. And I see teachers are saying, this is the time, right? And I have to teach this amount of content during this period. And if you're not going to come into my classroom and really engage, get out. That's the reality. That's the harsh reality. But we forgot about the trauma. You know, and I think that COVID woke us up to some of these traumas. You know, every student that I talked to in DYS and outside of DYS and I experienced myself, I lost a lot of people to COVID. And I lost three family members to COVID. Students also lost family members to COVID because to be black in many ways is a culpability, right? And so if we're not talking about race, we're not really understanding the fullness of who our students are. They can't turn off their race to come into your classrooms. Their race is always on. It's who they are, it's their identities. And when they get messages from schools that say, leave your baggage outside the door, that's basically telling them, do not come here unless you can assimilate to whiteness. That's the harsh message our students are getting. That's more trauma. That's the racial trauma that we'd never talk about. And not talking about racism in school is almost akin to what we were talking about in the 1970s and the 1980s that we now realize is ridiculous and ludicrous, colorblind policies and practices. We don't see color. We teach. We don't see color. But if you don't see color, then how are you going to see me? How are you going to see me when I show up and I say, this is what I need? I have an uncle who just went to prison. How are you going to see me? How are you going to see what I go through in my communities? That's what our kids are coming. So someone was saying earlier, how do we make learning purposeful again? It's about seeing our students, seeing their visibility, not making them invisible. And how do we do that? We get human. We get proximate with our students. When I was teaching in Cambridge, I lived in the community that I taught in. And I would worship at church on Sundays and I would see family members. I would go to grocery stores. I would see families. I would see my students. They saw me in the community all the time. And I think that them seeing me in the community, they knew that when the power went out, I also lost power. They knew that when devastation hit their households, I also experienced similar devastations. And when I came to school the next day to teach, it wasn't going straight to the academics. It was really acknowledging their humanity and that we just experienced something. And I'm not going to pretend like the elephant is not on the table. We're going to acknowledge what we just experienced. And that level of acknowledgement is necessary to going right into learning. So I think that education in this country is doing exactly what it was designed to do. And that is to produce gross inequities for his non-white, poor, and female students while systematically privileging wealthy white boys and men. And we see the manifestations of racial and economic inequities and traditional educational approaches. First, teaching and learning have traditionally established academic spaces as dominant white spaces where white students are centered and validated at every turn and every period. At every time they open up the book, they see various images of whiteness. They don't see a single story of whiteness. They see variety. They see diversity. And also what they see are deceptions and lies of what whiteness really represents. So for example, white students see their humanity and white dominant culture reflected in curriculum that promote their skills and individuality, especially in schools and districts where students of color are either not present or minimally visible. So I will argue that in schools that are not diverse, those students are at a greater disadvantage in that those teachers teaching in those environments are at a deficit. And the deficit is them. Teaching and learning have traditionally used the white gaze as the primary metric for evaluating and choosing literature and curriculum content and also defining what success looks like, what academic success looks like. And it's often very linear. By the white gaze, I mean the assumption that the default reader or reviewer is coming from a perspective of someone who identifies as white and hence capable of claiming neutrality and objectivity. White people's objectivity is rarely questioned or examined in educational contexts. As a black person, when I speak, I often have to end with the notion, this is for everybody. This is good for everyone, right? Because again, it's about taking care of whiteness in these spaces because we know that academic spaces are reserved for white people. So our default is whiteness. You know, there's been several African-American authors and advocates and educators who were able to debunk this notion of the white gaze. One in particular is Toni Morrison. And now we hear conversations about her book, The Blue Eyes Been Questioned Now, as we need to take this, we need to remove this from the curriculum. And I have to say that when I talked to Toni Morrison's The Blue Eyes, that was the spark that many of my students were able to identify and resonate with. But yet we're talking about, we're moving it. And the people that's talking about, we're moving it have no proximate connection or relationship with the communities that they want to remove it from. Very ironic. So Toni Morrison talked a lot about the white gaze and her writings and intentionally and successfully was able to de-emphasize and diminish this relevance. She purposely centered black people, especially black girls and women, and her literary writings, while, and this is the key part, portraying them as multi-dimensional, complex, and diverse, always countering a single story narrative. And I think that's the key part is, in some curriculum, we see representations of BIPOC people shows up in our curriculum. But they're very simplistic. They're not complex. They don't exist in the real complexities that they really have. We simplify them. We oversimplify them. And we often highlight the ones that we want to really portray about what is a black woman. When we see a black woman, we put them in this particular box. Toni Morrison was excellent in terms of debunking that and decolonizing that in many ways. The next thing I would say is that teaching and learning have also traditionally reinforced pedagogies that perpetuate racist beliefs grounded in fixed mindsets about learning and achievement. So, for example, the language and ideology surrounding the achievement gap, we know it's flawed, misguided, and highly politicized. Yet, we still use problematic terms of an achievement gap to present academic data, particularly on black and brown kids in comparison to white kids. But we rarely speak about an achievement gap between Caucasian students and Asian students. So why is that? Gloria Latson Billings, who is the president of the National Academic Academy of Education and Professor of Emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she's an author and also the creator of culturally relevant pedagogy from which culturally responsive teaching is derived from. So, Gloria Latson Billings is the first one to really start talking about culturally relevant teaching. But she totally debunked the notion of an achievement gap because she says that the achievement gap, how we talk about an achievement gap, constructs our black and brown students as defective and lacking. So, she offered instead a discourse that will hold all of us accountable. And that discourse she uses is called education debt. So, the education debt. So, according to Latson Billings, she would say that we do not have an achievement gap in this country. We have an education debt. And the education debt was constructed. And she identified four other scenarios or debts to really form what we call now the education debt. First is the historical debt that she refers to. And that's really about the construction of whiteness. There were no, white people didn't exist before the 1680s, right? And so after Bacon's rebellion is where the whole construction of whiteness and how do we create or how do we construct whiteness in a way that puts white people at the top and how we create a racial cast for hierarchy system. If we have someone at the top, we have to create a bottom. And that's where we got the anti-blackness and then all other groups in between that continuum or that spectrum. And so that's part of the historical debt which has been in place for centuries in this country. So that's the historical debt. Then she talked about the economic debt, which I referenced earlier in terms of that study that came out of Boston. And that was really about a wealth gap, not an income gap, but a wealth gap. And that this wealth gap was created. It was constructed and exacerbated. And it still is in that situation today. And then there's a social political debt, which reinforces narratives about white supremacy and anti-blackness. And then finally, we are at a moral debt. And the moral debt, I would say that in that sort of getting at the country's conscious, like where is the moral conscience of our country? And I would say that recently, three things or three events took place to really shock white people about this moral conscience. One is COVID, right? And particularly the devastation that COVID came into our communities and what it costs. And it forced us to see great gross disparities. The second major event was the public lynching of George Floyd. And I think that when we saw that nine minutes, it wasn't a noose, it was a knee on the neck for nine minutes. That shocked sort of nice white people. And then the third event was the January 6th insurrection. So those three events, I will argue, sort of help us to really look at where are we? And how do we begin to talk about this in a meaningful way? So COVID has given us an opportunity, what I often refer to as an equity pause, is giving us a moment to really re-center. How do we reimagine how we teach, how we learn? So here's some of the solutions that I like to propose before we end. So I think that one is that we have to change narratives that reinforce white supremacy thinking and learning and development, and de-center our whiteness in teaching and learning. And I know that that's hard to do as white people when you don't have proximity because whiteness has been the default in our classrooms. And until we face the whitening of instruction, it would be nearly impossible to decolonize our educational policies and practices. We need high quality professional development to push our thinking and challenge us to have a critical consciousness about the liberatory role that educators can have in promoting justice in the face of institutional racism and white supremacy culture. You know, there was this study that came out a few years ago, and it talked about the impact of having a black teacher during elementary grades, particularly in third and fourth grade. And that research was drawing on research that came out over 100 years ago from Carnegie Wilson. And that research was really saying that if we have a black teacher, or if you have a black teacher by third grade, that increases your chances of academic achievement and graduating from high school and rolling into college by 13%. And by fourth grade, if you have a second black teacher, that increases it to over 30%. And that's what the research is telling us, right? And the powerful part about that research is that that research wasn't just referring to black students having black teachers. It was referring to all students, even white students, if you have a black teacher during your elementary years, the impact that that would do in terms of your achievement and your view of yourself in the sense of agency. I think about my own development and my own growth. I was born and raised in Detroit, Michigan. And Detroit, I love Detroit when I was 10 years old. My mother died of breast cancer when I was 10. But prior to her passing, I had prototypes of black excellence. I had it from her, and I had it from relatives and the family. But I also went to the Paul Robeson Elementary School in Detroit. And in that school, I met teachers, black women and black male teachers, who look like my mother and father, who look like some of the relatives of my family, and who sounded just like them in terms of the discipline. But one teacher, third grade teacher, Ms. Elmore, she taught us the song and the lyrics of the song called The Greatest Love of All. And some of you may know that song because Whitney Houston made it very famous and popular and so forth. But it was first recorded by George Benson, right? And she, I remember going to class and I used to hate having to learn the lyrics to that song. And she said that every student here needs to understand the meaning behind the song. It's not the melody, it's the meaning behind it. And really what I learned from that song, and I find myself telling that to my nephews whom I raised, the greatest love of all is really finding oneself, finding yourself. And as we go into schools that are colonized, school spaces, everything is conspiring to take that love from us. And so it's really the fugitive pedagogies that we mean. You know, when we think about enslavement days of enslavement, there were people, there were Black people who resisted their captivity. They resisted slavery at all costs, even if it meant die. They resisted slavery in order to become educated, in order to escape, in order to provide better opportunities. There were countless examples of that. We need to be telling those stories. And Carter G. Wilson actually documented it. This is a new book called Fugitive Pedagogy, and it actually documents the history of that. We need to be teaching that. We need to be bringing that into our classrooms. Because our students, because that would actually restore the hope. And as I said earlier, you can't get to justice without hope. You know, in terms of change, it's the younger generation. It's the students that's going to lead the movement. And so we need to be teaching. I was talking about the libertarian role of educators. For Black people, we know that it's not enough just to learn the word. We have to learn the world at the same time, right? And so there's this sense of urgency. There's this sense of liberation, right? Because while we're reading the word, we're also reading the world at the same time. And that those worldly skills are going to give us the navigational tools to be able to navigate a racist society, a patriarchal society that is critical to our survival. And I would say that many of us say that, you know, we came into education because we really want to give back to our communities. That's great. That's nice. But the older I get, the more I realize it's deeper than that. And that I realize that I'm broken. And I realize that I've been broken by racism and the level of trauma and broke people are able to be empathetic with other broke people. And I'm connecting with these young people through my brokenness. I'm not connecting with young people through my privilege sides. My privilege sides are keeping me away, but it's the broken part of me that gets it. And our students are keen in terms of understanding that and recognizing that. So a few things I want to say. One is about the diversity. We have to be so we must focus on diversifying our education workforce and retention efforts to grow and sustain learning for justice in our schools. Schools are microcosms of society at large and equities we experience in society feel magnified in the classroom. We're all in this together. We need to ensure that curriculum materials and teaching strategies support students to see windows into others cultural experiences as well as mirrors of their own experiences reflected in the curriculum. Effective teaching and learning has a balance of both windows and mirrors. Our students need both especially white students. White students don't they have a distorted sense of the mirrors that they're looking at. How do we change that? We start to decolonize it. We start telling the other parts of the stories. We start getting truthful and honest in how we talk about our history. We start teaching history at a different we change the origin to where we teach it. I really support the 1619 project but I feel that the starting point needs to even go before that. Right and I think that the starting point really means to really speak to black people, African people before colonization. White students have always had mirrors of their own experiences reflected in the curriculum but these mirrors are deceptive inaccurate and incomplete reflections of the full range of white people as racialized people too. White people often don't realize that they are a construction of race. White people are not neutral or raceless. These mirrors position white people in a cast of characters and experiences that validate their identities making only them visible where it matters and reinforcing white dominant or white supremacist culture. Just a few more I see I'm almost out of time so I can take a few more minutes and then I close up. The reality is that white students are deficient in having windows into others cultural experiences. Their windows perpetuate stereotypical single story narratives of other cultural experiences that promote a form of narcissistic tendencies while reinforcing their racial illiteracy. So I asked the question why are we okay with white people being racially illiterate? Who does that serve? We have to meet students where they are and teach to the whole child. We need to prioritize the social emotional needs and well-being of children and address widespread trauma resulting from the pandemic of COVID as well as the pandemic of institutional racism. Both of which have devastating outcomes for our children and our adolescents. Just having black skin as a pandemic in America that leads to all kinds of culpabilities for us. Being diagnosed with a disability when our race is our disability. Navigating schools with the label of disability is a pipeline to school to prison for most black and brown boys in particular. So our black skin makes us targets for all types of abuse whether sexual, physical, racial terror, curriculum violence, police violence, gun violence, living in communities that are highly impoverished or self-inflicted. All of these are traumas that students are coming into the classrooms and they are dying to talk about. They're dying to have a release and writing gives a release. And so if you're looking for something to write about this is stuff that we get, writing can be cathartic in that sense. It can provide that release. So as I close I want to say that one last thing I want to say is about schools and how we shape learning environments that can be either hostile or welcoming. And that not assuming that students are coming to school because they're getting the nurture whether they want this environment where they are often protected in their homes or in their schools. And when they come into schools they are actually getting the hostile environment. So not assuming that just because the students are coming to school this is a nurturing environment. I thank you so much for listening and I appreciate I'm sorry I ran out of time but I got passionate a little bit. Thank you so much. Thank you Darnell. That was a challenging and thought-provoking and clearly very passionate talk and we really appreciate your your ideas and you give us a lot to think about.