• CT-Based Anti-Racist Teaching & Learning Collective Hosted Professional Development Course For NHPS Teachers On Anti-Racism

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    The Anti-Racist Teaching and Learning Collective (ARTLC) just completed the inaugural run of its Anti-Racist Teaching Institute (ARTI) for New Haven Public Schools (NHPS), according to its most recent newsletter.

    Screenshot, ARTLC Bi-Weekly Opportunities Digest for Anti-Racist Educators

    The training was conceptualized and coordinated by ARTLC Steering Committee Member Marco Cenabre along with several colleagues, and culminated in meetings where participants reflected together on their "anti racist" experience and also shared projects based on their own classroom practice. 

    The 10-session course was billed as an "anti-racist professional development opportunity" and included 36 NHPS teachers from 17 different NHPS schools.

    The final project required teachers to innovate their curriculum with "authentic anti-racist innovation".

    Examples of possible projects included:

    • A new or revised unit plan. 
    • A sequence of new or revised lessons. 
    • A set of new or revised classroom routines. 
    • A project or performance task. 
    • An in-school event, or club. 
    • An event connecting school and community. 
    • A school-wide initiative. 
    • A revised set of classroom policies. 
    • New or revised form of student interventions. 

    In case you are wondering what "anti-racist teaching" looks like, ARTLC Steering Committee Member Cenabre offered three key [personal] insights:

    1. Racism is a systemic problem, and must be confronted in terms of institutions and power dynamics rather than interpersonal relationships.
    2. Learning must be done in community. This involves reversing traditional hierarchies to place teachers and students as co-learners, and encouraging learning through self-investigation and exploration of lived experiences.
    3. Antiracist pedagogy consists of both tools—curricula, lesson plans, antiracist media—and methods, that is, the antiracist educator. A complete understanding of the task at hand requires equal emphasis on both learning of new, critical perspectives, and the unlearning of racially sanitized ones.

    Cenabre has now been teaching for 8 years, and throughout this entire time, he has embraced the divisive pedagogy of anti-racism, which perpetuates the progressive concept that the US is a hopelessly and systemically racist nation.

    He is far from the only anti-racist teacher in the state, as teachers from across Connecticut have embraced anti-racist teaching, including Westhill High School literature teacher Ruth Terry Walden, Middletown English teacher Krista Bianchini, John Martinez School second grade teacher Jennifer Gonzalez, and Staples High School Literature teacher Samm Leska, among others.

    The ARTLC offers a variety of resources to members, including lesson plans like Anti-Racist STEM: Climate Justice and Identity and Community Affirmation in First Grade English which includes a lesson on affirming queer identities. For first graders.

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    The group also highlights a list of 22 anti-racist children's books, including titles like Race Cars, which is a children's book about white privilege, and Jacob's New Dress, which normalizes transgenderism for young children.

    The group even offers webinars, including one about teaching the CT Black / Latinx Studies Course. This course includes several units that promote the tenets of critical race theory and the Black Lives Matter movement.

    Other resources on the site include a link to the debunked 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah-Jones.

    Funding from the Nellie Mae Foundation apparently supported the ARTI's inaugural training.

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