Decolonizing Your Syllabi and Assignments

Antiracist Pedagogy Workshop Series - CCNY Fall 2020

Tim Dalton & Megan Skelly

tdalton@ccny.cuny.edu / mskelly@ccny.cuny.edu

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Agenda

• Introductions (2-2:10 PM)
• Presentation (2:10-2:35 PM)
• Q&A (2:35-2:45 PM)
• Freewrite (2:45-2:50 PM)
• Breakout Rooms (2:50-3:05 PM)
• Sharing & Discussion (3:05-3:15 PM)
• Reflection & Next Steps (3:15-3:25 PM)

Icebreaker Activity

• Type into the chat a representative sentence from a text you’ve taught this week
• While these are coming in, we invite you to “rename” yourself with your preferred gender pronouns in parentheses (this is optional!)
• We’ll do a “sound check” (partly just to hear each other’s voices) by sharing your name and the source of the sentence, along with any brief information about it — say, what class you taught it with. Ideally, this will give us a “corpus” of teaching work that we can refer back to later in class — and at least, will break the ice and tech check us

Presentation Goals

• Be able to define key terms and identify concepts in antiracist pedagogy & syllabi decolonization in order to practice applying these practical ideas through freewriting, question posing, open discussion, and guided reflection.

Overall Workshop Goals

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• Through the guided reflection at the end of the workshop, you will leave with a simple practical next step for your own teaching work (something as simple as a sentence) that emerges from questions and discussion informed by the definitions and concepts in the presentation.

(“Something I'd like to try is...” and / or “A question I now have is...”)

Thesis

• Basically, antiracist (D’Angelo, Kendi) pedagogy and decolonized (Tuck and Yang) syllabi are “an approach rather than a thing.”
• All of us — but perhaps particularly white instructors, like Megan and Tim — need to think about centering classroom procedures, policies, assignments, and structures that most make possible antiracist outcomes.
• We want to emphasize that the collection of "good teaching" practices you may hear us reference today (ie multimodal assignment design, student-centered language policies, collaborative rubrics, curricula that include readings by writers of color and meaningful writing tasks building on the existing skills of our students) is central to a cohesive antiracist approach to teaching. If you leave with one idea, it might be this: thinking of pedagogy as neutral doesn’t get us anywhere. “Neutral” teaching is not antiracist. Antiracist teaching is antiracist teaching.

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Definitions

ANTIRACIST: Author Ibram X. Kendi defines an antiracist as: "One who is supporting an antiracist policy through their actions or expressing an antiracist idea." (p. 13, How to Be an Antiracist)

• Furthermore, Kendi states that: "The opposite of racist isn't 'not racist.' It is 'antiracist.' What's the difference? One endorses either the idea of racial hierarchy as a racist, or racial equality as an antiracist. One either believes problems are rooted in groups of people, as a racist, or locates the roots of problems in power and policies, as an antiracist. One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an antiracist. There is no in-between safe space of 'not racist.'" (p. 9)
• “Ibram X. Kendi defines a racist policy as any policy with a racially inequitable outcome. Look at your organization’s policies. If they are producing racially inequitable outcomes, get them back on the table and keep working…” (Robin DiAngelo)

Definitions

COLONIZATION:

“ Importantly, freedom is a possibility that is not just mentally generated; it is particular and felt….Because colonialism is comprised of global and historical relations, Cesaire’s question must be considered globally and historically. However, it cannot be reduced to a global answer, nor a historical answer. To do so is to use colonization metaphorically. “What is colonization?” must be answered specifically, with attention to the colonial apparatus that is assembled to order the relationships between particular peoples, lands, the ‘natural world’, and ‘civilization’. Colonialism is marked by its specializations. In North America and other settings, settler sovereignty imposes sexuality, legality, raciality, language, religion and property in specific ways. Decolonization likewise must be thought through in these particularities.” (Tuck & Yang 20)

Pedagogical Underpinnings

• UDL & Jessie Male’s CUNY Accessibility Conference talk
• Trauma-Informed Pedagogy & this explainer from the Chronicle of Higher Ed (login)
• Materialist Antiracism (see Nelson Flores & Sofia Chaparro in Further Reading)

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Four Directions to Go in Next...

Idea 1: Make learning activities and classroom procedures prioritize incorporating students' voices.

Idea 2: Engage students with multiple modalities in learning activities at all levels of formality.

Idea 3: Recognize that institutional white supremacy informs the relationship between individuals.

Idea 4: Know there are, in fact, ways to do this wrong. Revise your syllabi but avoid “add-and-stir.”

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Wrap-up

• Q & A time!
• Reminder about upcoming workshops:
• "Using Grading Contracts as an Antiracist Approach" with Robert Balun and Julia Brown - Monday, Nov. 2nd at 2:00pm
• "Engaging Racism and Implicit Bias in Classroom Conversations" with Michael Druffel - Thursday, Nov. 12 at 12:30pm
• Freewrite time!

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Additional Sources for Future Reading

• Pritchard, Eric Darnell. “’Like Signposts on the Road”: The Function of Literacy in Constructing Black Queer Ancestors. Literacy in Composition Studies. 2: 1, 2014.
• April Baker-Bell — Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy
• “Sponsors of Literacy” — Brandt. Deborah. “Sponsors of Literacy.” CCC. 49.2 (1998): 165-185.
• Defining Translinguality — http://licsjournal.org/index.php/LiCS/article/view/221/317
• Paris, Django. “Naming Beyond the White Settler Colonial Gaze in Educational Research.” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education” 32.3, 217-224
• Various authors. Literacy in Composition Studies inaugural issue. 2013. incl Carmen Kynard — http://licsjournal.org/index.php/LiCS/article/view/17/288

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Additional Sources for Future Reading, cont.

• Allen, Danielle. Excerpt from Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown vs. the Board of Education (2004)
• Horner, Bruce and Sara P. Alvarez, “Defining Translinguality.” Literacy in Composition Studies. 7.2 (2019): http://licsjournal.org/OJS/index.php/LiCS/article/view/221/317
• Jonathan Rosa’s Looking Like a Language, Sounding Like a Race: Raciolinguistics Ideologies and the Learning of Latinidad
• Watson, Missy and Rachel Shapiro. “Clarifying the Multiple Dimensions of Monolingualism: Keeping Our Sights on Language Politics” composition Forum 38 (2018): https://compositionforum.com/issue/38/monolingualism.php