Implementing the Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education Framework Session 2

Nikevia Thomas:

Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the second session of Implementing the Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education Framework, the second session for Setting the Stage for Equity Application and Reflection. We’ll get started very shortly.

David Lopez:

Nikevia, hearing you say it, it sounded so fancy.

Nikevia Thomas:

Yes, well, you’re welcome. All right.

John Jacobs:

It is fancy. I don’t really know.

Nikevia Thomas:

It is. Next please, just keep going in the interest of time, so that you all get the most time today.

Okay. Here’s a bit about who we are. Today’s session has been brought to you by CEE, the Center for Education Equity. CEE is one of MAEC’s biggest projects. We partner with WestEd and AIR, the American Institutes for Research. CEE is one of four regional equity assistance centers funded by the US Department of Education under Title IV of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Next.

Here’s a bit about MAEC. We envision a day when all students have equitable opportunity to learn and achieve at high levels. And our mission is to promote excellence and equity and education to achieve social justice. Next.

If you look here, here is the area where CEE serves, this is region one for the equity assistance center. You can see in this center we have none other than the great New York. Next.

Now I’d like to introduce you again to your facilitators. If you were here for the first session in August, you will be in the good hands of John Jacobs and David Lopez. I will allow them to introduce themselves now.

John Jacobs:

Hello, everybody. Good day, good afternoon. My name is John Jacobs. It’s good to see everybody again. I’m excited to be here with everybody. I am a Senior Technical Assistant Specialist here at WestEd, and as Nikevia pointed out, we work in partnership with MAEC on the Center for Educational Equity.

A little bit about my background. I’m a former teacher… Well, I’m a former teacher and a former New York State Technical Assistance Provider, formerly a member of the NYU Technical Assistance Center on Disproportionality, and more recently a member of the Office of Special Education Educational Partnership at Bank Street. I’m super excited to work with fellow New York State TA Providers. I also have a five-year-old who just started kindergarten in New York City public school. I’m a New Yorker, so I’m really excited to work with you all today.

David Lopez:

I don’t know if John’s a New Yorker. I’m going to start there. He’s from Virginia. Sorry, John. David Lopez, an actual New Yorker from the Bronx, New York. No, I got some laughs. Sorry, John, I had to throw you under the bus for community. Home office in Brooklyn, but actually, for the New Yorkers, I’m in Jersey. My bad. I see that face. I do work around culturally responsive sustaining ed, creating equity-based systems. I was also at NYU TACD, I’ve worked in schools in the South Bronx, special ed director. I did my thing. I come to you as a professional, but also as a parent of a student NYC DOE. Also as a community member and also as a former student of NYC DOE’s, you know, slash NYSED. So I’m happy to be here, work with my folks, and lots of love to you all.

John Jacobs:

So how long before I am, how long does it take?

David Lopez:

You want the honest truth?

John Jacobs:

Never, right?

David Lopez:

The honest? Or give the professional one.

John Jacobs:

Is that right? All right.

David Lopez:

I love you, though.

John Jacobs:

Likewise. All right. We want to make sure that we acknowledge and introduce the awesome support system that we have to bring the last webinar to you. And this one as well. Ian and Nikevia supporting us in keeping us, trying to keep us on track with our time, helping us with tech support, running the slides, sharing materials, putting us in our breakout rooms. We really appreciate you and the support you provide for us. You can go ahead and go to the next slide. Ok, go ahead.

Nikevia Thomas:

And thank you for that lovely introduction. I want to share with you all that live captioning is automatically enabled to today’s session. If you want to turn it off, you would simply find the live caption or closed caption feature on the lower toolbar of your Zoom screen and then select hide subtitles. If you want to turn it back on, you just do the same thing and select show subtitles. Easy enough. Next. Now let’s get things going. I am going to place handouts that you’ll need, links, a link that gives you access to the handouts you’ll need for the duration of today’s session. Enjoy.

John Jacobs:

Thank you so much. And let us know if anyone has any issues accessing them. I’ll pause before we go off of this slide after giving sort of a review and make sure everyone’s good to go with the materials. Just to recap, if folks right here last time give you an understanding of what our goal is, what the purpose is of this session and of last session. What we’re really working to do is to build the capacity of folks in the S/CDN network and a Regional Bilingual Education Resource Network to facilitate PD modules that will help implement and roll out the CRSE, the state CRSE framework. We say build capacity. We know the capacity exists already. So some of it is to build it, to leverage it, to share it, to build connection between folks around equity culture responsive education, to build momentum around the framework. What we are doing, what we did last time was begin to go through a professional development package. You can go ahead and go to the next slide.

David Lopez:

The only thing I will add is to learn from. We also learn from you all all the time as well. So I think there’s some reciprocity here.

John Jacobs:

That’s right. Yeah. And to that point, last time we wanted to go through and experience the PD package. With folks today, we’ll finish that. And David’s point, you go back one more slide please. Sorry. To David’s point, we want to make sure that today we have chance to reflect and apply some of the learnings from session one. And what that’s going to look like is really slowing down, giving us a chance to connect with one another about that content and talk through what it would look like, how different tensions might emerge, and what some strategies are that me and David have that we go to and that folks on the call have that they can offer. And we can sort of do a strategy harvest with one another today. You can go ahead and go to the next slide, please.

So these are learning objectives for the PD package and from our last time. Today, we’ll finish up this and that’s the last two objectives: explore foundational elements of cultural response and sustaining education and consider the framework, the framework, our framework, the NYSED framework for cultural responsiveness to think through what it might look like to implement the CRC framework. So that’s kind of part of what we’re doing today. And then you can go to the next slide.

And then as we said, give a chance for reflection on our experiences from session one and then new learnings. And then practice applying some of the learning and managing the dynamics of conversations about equity. Are there any questions about our objectives for today? David, is there anything you want to add?

Cool. Next. So here’s our agenda for today. We have our welcome. We’ll in a moment jump into breakout rooms and do a little reconnecting briefly with each other. We’ll reconnect with our working agreements, do a really brief review of the tensions because we’ll talk about those in the second half. And then we’ll really dive into understanding culture and exploring the CRSE framework. And we’re going to be responding to the needs or responsive to the needs of the group. And so we’re thinking we’ll put a break depending on time between culture and CRSE framework or after the CRSE framework and before building the toolbox. We want to make sure that we give ourselves some flexibility for the conversation to go as it will and respond to where folks are.

Any questions about our agenda? See some stuff in the chat. Is everyone… Before we move forward, I said I would do it and didn’t. Everyone good with the materials?

Cool. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to here in a moment, randomly get in random breakout rooms and have some conversation with each other. You’ll introduce each other. And if you can go to the next slide, please. Have some conversation or introduce each other and then have some conversations around any internal reflections you’ve had around the materials and or equity and culture responsiveness. When you left last session, is there anything that you were chewing on, that was rolling around your head that you saw an application to your work or you connected with? Or maybe it’s a question, something internal.

And then any external conversations you’ve had. Whether it’s with a colleague, any district personnel, even your family around equity and cultural responsiveness and or the CRSE framework. Are there any questions about what we’re going to do in our breakout rooms? So we’ll introduce ourselves, share any internal reflections you’ve had, and any external conversations that you’ve had around our content. We good? Cool. So here in a moment you will get zoomed through the wormhole into a breakout room where we’ll stay for about five minutes and then we’ll come back in, have a brief share out. So we’ll sit tight for a second while we get ready for our breakout rooms.

Ian:

All ready to go. Send people in.

John Jacobs:

Awesome.

Ian:

And everyone should be back now.

John Jacobs:

Cool. Everyone’s back. Okay, great.

David Lopez:

John, we got to make our rounds to the small groups because we got to see faces in those. I’m going to… Next one, I’m hopping in just to see faces. You don’t have to, that wasn’t my… I wasn’t throwing shade. I just, it’s nice to see you all.

John Jacobs:

It is. With that, does anyone care to share any of their conversation? Any big takeaways or anything that you all talked about that might be relevant for the group to hear? Feel free to utilize the chat as well.

Speaker 1:

So I’m just going to put into the space, we didn’t actually have a lot of time to dive deeply into the internal reflections and external conversations. However, I’m going to encourage our group to please put that in the chat. And if you don’t have any objection, John and David, if they can share that now if they wanted to, if that’s okay. I appreciate it. Thanks.

John Jacobs:

Yeah. Great.

Speaker 1:

And we do wait time here at the RBERN Network, so I’m going to just jump in.

John Jacobs:

I’m proud of myself for how well I did on that week.

Speaker 1:

Oh, you did. Thank you. I appreciate that. So just in terms of my own reflection together with silence, we are good. Absolutely. I have to say in terms of the tools, they’ve been really helpful in, and one of the hats I wear as a board member for my daughter’s school district. So having those intimate conversations with board members and the superintendent about topics that are starting to surface more recently about SROs and the hiring SROs. There’s one thing, the language you use in public and conversations about safety. And then when you look at descriptions of the positions and things like that, are they aware that language matters? And having a conversation about terms that are used… In this case, used by police departments that connotates something very negative when it applied to children.

So I’m grateful for the tools because when you think about the tensions, what can I do with those individuals? In those moments, I am grateful for tools like this that allows me, it gives me at least…has built that toolbox to have the strength and the courage to use my voice for that type of work. So I appreciate it.

John Jacobs:

Thank you for that. Anybody else? Oh, got some in the chat?

Yeah, I think, just to respond to the external piece, I think one of the things that we’ve talked about a lot, that we talk about a lot in our work working to support implementation of culture responsiveness is that largely what we’re kind of doing is building social movements and momentum within organizations. And those are, it’s into the name, it’s a social movement. We build power by organizing each other and building relationships with each other around shared values. And I think how we, both in schools, in school systems, where me as a parent in a school system and as team providers, how we facilitate that connection and work to convene folks to build power around the implementation of CRSE is it matters and is important.

Cool. Well, we wanted to give folks a chance, even if just briefly, to reconnect with each other, get to know folks if you didn’t already know each other. And to start think and to share some of the conversations internal and external you’ve had since last time. So we really appreciate the couple of shares and folks sharing of themselves in the breakout room. You can go ahead and go to the working agreements.

David Lopez:

All right. So just one thing that I think we really talked about a lot last time and we want to continue here and we’re already starting to see some of that surface is really around naming the elephant in the room. So just to add on, so I don’t want to repeat what we did last time, but I think my encouragement for this session, especially for those who have been there, is for us to challenge each other when we hear things, we might have that question of who are they talking about racially? What students, families, and communities?

I think I always like the next session to be instead of you learning the thing, the importance of naming the elephant in the room and trying to actually apply it together. So when David says the students that move from the Bronx to Westchester, “David, can you name who those students are? Are you talking about Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Black students who have now moved into a primarily White district?” So us beginning to do that. And when we feel like our colleagues are working through that, that we support each other in doing that work. So it might be through a question, it might be through what you know from your experience. So let’s continue to name the elephant in the room in our session. Anything that folks want to add? Or something that resonated? Or something you’re like, “No David, we’re not going to do that”?

Alyssa:

I like that you said that just because as I think about where in the area I am, as the inner city becomes more gentrified and the cost of living goes up in the city, you’re seeing our Black and Brown kids move further out. And so having these conversations, well yeah, we’re getting a lot of kids from the city, and so we’re having trouble getting them acclimated. So let’s say who those kids are. I think that’s important. Because I think sometimes they use kids from the city because they’re afraid to say the wrong thing. But it’s important to give people grace in those areas to say the wrong thing and then correct them with kindness.

David Lopez:

Thank you so much for offering that, Alyssa. I think so for some of us that are working through some personal tensions, Alyssa both offered us the importance of naming who we’re talking about, but also thinking about, so how do we correct folks with some grace and not shutting them down? And I think, Alyssa, you’re also in conversation with the folks in the chat. There’s a bit of conversation in the chat around meeting people where they are. And the tension, at least for me, there’s a tension there because sometimes that can be code for centering the most privileged. Not saying that it always is, but it can be, to lead us to a racial equity detour that doesn’t allow us to really do the work, especially at a systems level. Sometimes our individual approach with one person that we have a relationship needs to be different than our systems approach for an entire district or a whole school.

And so I really appreciate what you just offered, Alyssa. And then, because this is a good example, at least for me as a facilitator, I think I do a good job of reiterating and adding what people are saying. If, I think I said this last time, if you feel like that’s not what you meant or said and I took your point and butchered it, please just call me out because I don’t ever want to do that either. And then I hear Pamela, yes, urban, I think back to Alyssa’s point around the inner city kids or kids from the city. And we see that in a lot of places in New York, whether that’s the Rochester area, whether that’s the suburbs of New York City, whether that’s the Buffalo area, whether… We see that a lot in this state. Any other thoughts that are coming up for us?

All right, so we’re going to do a quick recap. Let’s head to the next slide, please, Ian. Of our working agreements, this both, we have some new folks with us, but also I personally think when you create working agreements, it’s something that you always should revisit. I don’t care if we met yesterday or two days ago, I always revisit it to make sure we still agree. So as I go through these, I’m just going to read them this time, but I am going to ask if there’s anything that we need to add, maybe that John and I forgot to add, and or is there anything that you want to unpack before we move further? And the last thing I will say is if you don’t do that now and you need to do that, and we have 20 minutes left in our session, working agreements are for the entire session. They’re not for when the slide is up.

So some of the things that I believe we agreed on was listen with respect. I think we are packed a lot around that last time. Participate and struggle together. I believe we talked a little, we changed a little bit the expect to experience discomfort and talked about our willingness to experience discomfort, which is different. And I think it helps meet some folks where they are, right? Some folks can be like, “I don’t want to expect to experience discomfort.” But can we open ourselves to the willingness to experience discomfort? We talked a lot about focusing on our impact versus our intent. Focusing on hitting you with the car, not whether you meant to.

Let’s honor confidentiality, we’re all across the state. Share what you learned. Please don’t share people’s personal experiences. It doesn’t help us do this work. Expect and accept lack of closure. We talked a lot about no one person on this call or otherwise has the answers to solving systemic inequities in particular around race racism. If they do, usually I would advocate you run away from those folks who think they solved racism. And then, push your growing edge. So my sort of two part question, is there anything we want to add or is there anything that we need to unpack further for the group?

If we’re all good, I would love… There’s a reaction button on the bottom, if you could just give me a thumbs up. Yeah, it’s cool if you’re on camera, I see you. All right. That looks like the majority of us, so let’s keep it moving. All right. The other thing that, and this is going to be the focus of our later work together. And so Tanya, thanks for the affirmation that this is useful, but I want to do a very quick… Awesome, that’s good to hear, Christine. Review of the core tensions. We just head to the next slide. And actually I would like to stop talking. Need some water. Does anybody want to take a shot at telling us what the personal tension is? How you would describe it.

Rosa:

I can take a shot. I think I’ve been thinking of them as just things that may limit people from fully embracing discussions and thinking through issues of equity and different things that can come up for people in a training and to have them in mind ahead of time. And to me, they’re ways to avoid fully thinking about the issues at hand.

David Lopez:

I really like Rosa how you frame overall those tensions and how as folks who lead this work in the state can really use it. I believe you said what things come up for folks. So can we talk about what it might mean in terms of the personal things that might come up?

Alyssa:

I think personally for me, sometimes I feel like when doing this work, I’m trying to prove to people that Black people are valuable and that Black culture is a real culture, and that Black language is a real language with its own history, rules, grammar and syntax. And so sometimes that can be, I guess my personal tension.

David Lopez:

I really appreciate that, Alyssa. I think that vulnerability, that honesty, I hold often a very similar personal tension. And I think what I want to highlight out of what Alyssa shared is that I believe that everybody is going to have personal tensions. And to connect Alyssa’s and Rosa’s share, thinking about… Because I hold something similar to Alyssa probably for different reasons. I don’t want to act like I live Alyssa’s experience so we share the same reasons we experience those tensions. But it is one that I share.

And for me personally, I think about if it’s around for me that proving sometimes in certain spaces, I wonder about my readiness of how do I do this in a way that brings people forward but also honors Black communities, centers their safety. And even though I am paid and trained to do it, I hold a personal tension every day of like, how do I do this? Do I do it this way with this particular group? Am I ready to do it with this group? Will I honor again the Black or Brown community in the work that I do? Those are examples, but it’s about me thinking about my readiness to do that.

And I think everybody is going to grapple with that again for different reasons. The tension might sound a little different based on who you are, your personal identity, your experiences, your culture. I would say often for folks of color, in particular, Black folks don’t have… the society forces us to think about race in ways that White folks are not always forced to think about it. So there might be a different tension that our White colleagues experience depending on where they are in their journey.

Christine:

So David, I was going to chime in, in that realm of feeling like implicit biases are ones we don’t always know we have. So the tension for me is the personal tension of what biases am I bringing that I don’t even know I’m bringing to the experience.

David Lopez:

Right. Exactly, Christine. And when we think about that, we think about that personal tension that you hold, and then how that might, to Rosa point, get in, stop us from doing the work or may say, “I’m not sure if I’m the person that can.” And so then how do we really begin to do that reflective work, get ourselves to a place… What are the strategies of facilitation that we can use when we hold these particular sets of tensions. And they may vary. John and I do the same material, but don’t use always the same facilitation strategies because we don’t always hold the same personal tensions in how we feel we need to operate in the space.

I’m going to move us forward. Again, you can always tell us, “No, we’re going to go back.” We’re okay with that. Tell us a little bit about the strategy tension. How are we understanding that? And it’s okay to learn through our own experiences. I think we just modeled some of that. All right. John told me that I can’t do wait time, that I have to move on, so I’m going to listen to him. So that strategy tension is around, for instance, Christine, do you mind if I stick with your example? Is that okay?

Christine:

I don’t mind at all.

David Lopez:

All right. Awesome. So we might have a personal attention around our implicit biases, and a strategy tension could be like, “David and John, now tell me how to do it and fix it. Give me the one, two, three, four step.” Often, sometimes what ends up happening, if you don’t give me that, then I can’t move the work forward. That’s an example of the ways that one, that these tensions interconnect, but how they can manifest in different ways. The next then is around the structural tension, and that might be that’s, okay, that’s really around what outside of me might be hindering me from doing this work. So that might be, well, I was trying to think of one to connect to you, Christine.

Christine:

I think one of the things I think about this in particular is when I’m in a space and I recognize we don’t have much racial diversity in particular. But when you recognize you don’t have people of color in the space, then it’s already structured in a way that unless you’ve been really proactive in pre-planning, in connecting with people in groups that are not represented within the space, you’re now in a situation where you already have a level of inequity. And what do you do about that?

David Lopez:

I really like that. And we hear that a lot in the space around… John and I’s supervisor is big on the education pipeline. And some folks, so there’s the research that’s clear on why we need more Black educators, in particular, Black educators. But some of the structural tension is, “Well, I don’t know. It’s a White town with White students. We have 3% Black students. How do we get Black folks here? I believe you, but there’s not enough Black teachers here. What do I do?” Is there anything you wanted? So that’s around the structural a tension. Those could live in different ways for our teachers around cultural responsiveness. Well, we can’t change the regents. You want me to teach this history in a different way? The regents ask certain questions. I can’t change that. John, anything you want to add? I hope I sped up to where we –

John Jacobs:

No, I think you did good. And you know what I appreciate about working with David is that if there’s a bus to be thrown under, you’ll… No, I’m joking. So the one thing I’ll add about the tensions, before we dive into finishing up and slowing a little bit down some of the content we sped through last time, is that the tensions are such for me, and especially I know how David presents them, I find them so helpful as a presenter to think about what are the levels along which that our participants’ learning will occur? What are the levels along which tensions, sometimes like disequilibrium or dissonance, will come up? And sometimes, also just different things that they might grapple with.

It’s helpful as a facilitator who plans and delivers PD to think about: “All right. How in this session am I going to bake in opportunities for us to surface and work through personal tensions, opportunities for us to surface and work through strategy tensions, opportunities for us to surface and work through structural tensions? And then how can I support the clients or the participants in doing their work along multiple dimensions as well?”

Because we know White supremacy and other systemic inequities are just that, systemic. They don’t live within individuals. It lives within individuals and systems and practices and policies, and we have to work along multiple dimensions. And so as we go through our content today, we want you to think about what tensions are coming up for you and how this content might surface different tensions for participants. And then we’ll end our session with revisiting our tensions and sharing some examples, and like I said, doing some strategy harvest to where we share how we might work through some of these with each other. So I appreciate David jumping through those, or not jumping through, going through those. Next.

So like we said, we wanted to go through some of the content that we sped through last time to make sure that we had a chance to both understand the spirit of what the package is intended to accomplish and to build our capacity as facilitators to have that dual track learning to experience this as maybe a participant, and then think about it as a facilitator, as a TA Provider along those multiple dimensions. So we’ll start off with that. We can’t talk about cultural responsiveness without grounding ourselves in an understanding triple track agenda, without grounding ourselves in an understanding of culture here. And so I’ll go ahead and read through this. And as I read it, I want us to pay attention to phrases or words that stand out to us in the definition. This is taken directly from the New York State CRSE framework.

“New York State Education Department understands culture as the multiple components of one’s identity, including but not limited to race, economic background, gender, language, sexual orientation, nationality, religion, and ability. Culture far transcends practices such as cuisines, art, music and celebrations, to also include ways of thinking, values, and forms of expression. These ways and forms are in constant flux, renegotiation, and evolution.” Want to pause for a second. Maybe if we can hear from one or two people about any phrases or elements of this definition that are standing out to you that you’re connecting with or that resonate with you.

Speaker 4:

I like that they mentioned multiple components of one’s identity. I think that’s such a big factor in unpacking this work for people.

John Jacobs:

Yeah. Thank you for that. That’s one of the things that I grapple with a little bit in this definition is sometimes I feel like… And this is a point I often make in facilitation, that we don’t conflate identity and culture. Identity impacts and influences culture greatly, but there’s multiple ways to be White, to be Black, to be Latinx. There’s multiple ways to exist as a middle class person and all of that. That doesn’t mean… We’re not reducing folks of any one identity to a specific culture.

I like to think that one of the ways that identity and culture interact with each other is when we start to talk about the cultural attributes that are associated with identities positioned in power, positions of power, and ones that aren’t. So norms associated with White, cisgender, male, Judeo-Christian, American, standard English, and so on and so forth have value. We privilege those where we punish others. So culture and identity, how cultural attributes are associated with certain groups can impact how we punish or privilege them. That’s one of the big points. And I saw in the chat too that it talks about them, the evolution, how it’s constantly in flux, and renegotiation. Different types of culture are salient in different spaces and places and times and with different people, and it’s important for us to understand that as educators. Thank you. Go ahead. Go ahead and go to the next slide, please.

So some folks may be familiar with the cultural iceberg. The cultural iceberg has been ubiquitous with cultural competence, cultural responsiveness for years and years. And I think the cultural iceberg’s good because so much culture is below the surface. You can’t really see it. And I think, David, you’ve pointed this out before, that what happened when the Titanic ignored the iceberg, it gets hits and sinks. And so we ignore culture at our own peril. We want to share with you a different metaphor, the metaphor of a tree. I like the metaphor of a culture tree for lots of reasons. The trees are living. It was just pointed out, trees are living. They’re dynamic. They don’t sit still. They respond to their environment, that each part of a tree sustains the whole. And I think that that shift in metaphor can be powerful when we think about responding to, and going further than responding to cultures, but elevating and leveraging the cultural practices that sustain our students and communities.

And so many folks are familiar with multiple levels of culture. We’ll talk through this briefly. This is taken from Zaretta Hammond’s book, Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain. It’s a really helpful resource. So surface culture is super observable, patterns, often food, dress, music, holidays. Zaretta Hammond talks about the emotional impact that this level of each level of culture has. And I think to an extent, I agree. If I come and say, “I like country music,” and somebody says, “Yeah, I like rap,” or, “I like pop,” it’s like, “Okay. That’s great.” However, I think when we start to think about how culture is intersecting with race, gender, class, I think that something like dress, how we dress, a dress code in schools, can have quite an emotional impact. And we think about the types of policing that happens to females’ bodies, in particular, Black females’ bodies. We think about how dress codes often include things around different types of headgear.

I’ve been in schools in New York State where they’re suspending middle school Black boys for wearing caps, and White girls have on the exact same thing except it’s got a Nike swoosh, and it’s a headband that goes around their head, and they’re allowed to wear it. I think it’s fair to say there’s a little bit higher level of impact there. But the point is that different cultural attributes have different impacts emotionally when they clash with each other. We go a little bit deeper in shallow culture. So shallow culture being some of the unspoken rules there. There are some examples, concepts of time, food, personal space, emotion, body language. These are big buckets. And we start thinking about how these play out in school, I think about what do we think of as courtesy or manners in a school setting, especially for I’ve got a kindergartner. I’m really in the early elementary space right now with mine. How we’re teaching kids to exist with one another and how we’re punishing them to exist.

There’s research that shows that there’s disparities in suspensions as early as pre-K across this country. What does an anxious or scared kid look like? What does a confident kid look like? What does an engaged kid look like? These are all cultural norms that we often think of as super objective, independent of identity, our bias, and own ethnocentrism, could never play an impact in how we’re judging whether a kid cares about class, wants to be in class, cares about the material, is confident, or is scared. I’ve misjudged students for these things. And especially again as we think about how they intersect with race and other identity forms, I think it’s easy to see how they play out in school.

And a little bit deeper, the collective unconscious, often a high emotional impact. I think, again, with some nuance, mostly maybe yes. But this has to do with ways of making decisions, notions of fairness. We do work around disproportionality in special education, in school discipline, and in classification in gifted and honors in AP. Notions of fairness and meritocracy and who deserves to be in there are baked into those systems. And along with that are prejudices around what we deem to be fair or not.

Another thing that comes up a lot is individualism versus collectivism, competition versus cooperation in school settings, and in particular, when they intersect again with various forms of identity, that often determines how we elevate and privilege some ways of being and how we punish others. Or family engagement, what that looks like, what a cultural notion of deference and respect for a school is for one group versus another group. I’ll pause there and see if there’s anything in this overview of the surface, shallow, and deep culture that folks are connecting with, that’s resonating with them, or any other thoughts that folks have to share, in particular as we think about how these intersect with identity and race.

Alyssa:

One of the things I was thinking about in terms of culture and who gets into these AP courses, I’m not a big fan of participation grades or classroom citizenship grades because that’s a place where we can be implicitly biased by thinking we know, but culturally we’ll say, “Oh. That quiet student is a good student,” but they might not know the content. But because they’re always quiet and they do their work, we’ll give them a high participation grade, which could skew if they’re really ready for an AP course, versus a kid who might have a culture different than our own who’s a little bit louder, but they just asking a question. But they have a different culture, the way they talk to a teacher. They might not use the last name. But those ideas can… Or it’s easy and they’re bored. Yeah. That’s where our cultural biases come in and prevent people from achieving certain things in school.

John Jacobs:

Absolutely. I appreciate you sharing that reflection, those examples. I think that those are great examples of how culture plays out, but how culture’s interwoven with our own biases around who deserves what in schools. For sure. Maybe have time to hear one more connection to the culture tree. Okay. Cool. Next slide, please. So in addition to the NYSA definition, we want to offer a couple of additional key points about culture. I always say culture’s how we find and make meaning, and this definition basically says that from Zaretta Hammond’s book, it says, “Culture is the way the brain makes sense of the world. The brain uses cultural information to turn everyday happenings into meaningful events. It’s how we find and make meaning. It is the…” I always get it mixed up. The software and hard hardware. Culture is the software to our brain. It’s how we make connections to different things. I might be mixing up that metaphor. I probably shouldn’t have brought it up.

At any rate, a couple of additional points we want to make about culture. Often we hear folks talk about a culture of poverty. We want to make sure that we name and reject the idea that a culture of poverty exists. There’s no culture of poverty. The material conditions of poverty and how much money our families have definitely impact how our cultures evolve. So if I grew up camping, I didn’t grow up going to a lake house. My family has certain values around finishing the food on my plate because you didn’t waste food for very specific reasons that were embedded into their deep culture around food, around cleanliness, and so on and so forth. Other people may waste things. The material conditions impact. We aren’t reducing any class of people to one way of being.

Coping and responses to oppression are also not culture. I heard this come up, people talking about, “Well, my students, I know many people, my community, they use drugs. I know that there are thefts.” We hear this a lot. There are thefts from CVSs, people stealing diapers, and they’ll reduce entire groups of people, often Black and Brown folks, to a culture that engages in criminal activity. In addition to being prejudiced and often outright racist, often those behaviors are responses to oppression. That’s not what we are going to mistake for the culture that sustains our communities. To put a finer point on that, we’ll use Lisa Delpit’s quote, “True culture supports its people. It doesn’t destroy them.” As we think about culture responsiveness and weaving the cultural attributes and ways of being into our school systems and practices and ways of working with our communities, we want to think about elevating the cultures of those folks that sustain them, that support them. You can go ahead and go to the next slide.

So to help us lean into this intersection of culture and identity a little bit, we want to offer some reflection questions. In the PD package, there are many different ways to do this activity depending on time. We’re going to do them one way today. I’m going to pause and we’re going to have a moment, a little quiet time while everyone reads these questions. As you read these questions, I just want you to think, are there any that are standing out to you as particularly salient given the work you’re doing or your experience in schools? And then we’ll unpack that a little bit more. So I’m going to be quiet. Take a second, read through these, and see if there are any of them that are resonating or jumping out to you.

Okay. Let’s go ahead and go to the next slide, please. So here in a moment, we’re going to give a chance for the the group to talk through these a little bit. These are going to be the directions that are on the package that you all will receive. Like I said, there are lots of different ways that we can do this. You can have folks identify one or two getting partners or share at their table. What we’re going to do is share any that jumped out to us and do this number three. We’re going to consider how these may show up in the educational communities you are or have been a part of and where and with whom might cultural conflicts occur. So for this activity, we’ll, just like I said, I’ll repeat the directions, we’ll share any that jumped out to us and we read through them the same questions right here on the left. And we’re just going to jump down here to three as we share out in dialogue to consider how they show up and where might cultural conflicts occur and between who.

So if there are any questions, then let’s go ahead and we can use the chat or folks can unmute and share. I can go ahead. I’ll go ahead and share one for me that stands out to me is what’s the story of your family in America? I think that’s something around identity and culture that we don’t always think about. And I think it can have a lot of impacts for who is welcomed and who isn’t in schools. As a military kid, I grew up with a very specific type of patriotism in my life. As somebody who, I was born in the United States. As a kid, I had a innocuous at worst and very strong pride for my country for the United States.

And so where I saw symbols of patriotism in my life, I knew it was a place that I wanted to be pretty explicitly, especially as a young kid growing up on military basis for part of it, everybody might not have that reaction. Not everyone’s experience if you were in this country is as positive in relation to their country as what mine, a straight White male in this country, is. Right. We’ve gone through a period in time, nativism and xenophobia have always been a part of what happens in this country goes back for as long as people have been colonizing this country is. Some people have said you don’t belong here. And that certainly has been the case recently. Some students may not feel like certain forms of patriotism, for example, are always as welcomed and create a space that where they feel safe and where they feel belong as others, right? And that’s one thing that I’m reflecting on as I think through some of these questions. A particular one that I know that can sometimes feel difficult to make connections to how it plays out in schools.

Speaker 1:

I have to say these questions were powerful for me and I really appreciate them. I think for myself, I think about were you allowed to question, talk back to authority figures in your life? Growing up in a Puerto Rican household, you were told what to do, you didn’t talk back or you got the chancleta or papow. And I’ve noticed over time that was the household. But in schools growing up in rural, upstate New York, thinking about authority, most of my teacher… All my teachers were White males. In college, predominantly White males. Most of my leaders that I work under or report to have been White males and typically talking back is not well received with White males. And even now as a leader in the role that I may have, there have been consequences from counseling memos to other disciplinary as a leader now because I interrupt a White male leader or I’m told to not use my hands when talking to other White leaders.

So it’s challenging. So I reflect upon that and how I have relationships with White males in authority figures and it’s… I’m mindful of that history and then the consequences of that and then how I enter in spaces when I do have to interact with White leaders. And I’m very mindful, mindful of history and at the same time I can’t compromise my own belief systems and my own voice, but I’m very aware.

John Jacobs:

Thank you so much for sharing that. For sharing your experience. I think it’s something that unfortunately how these play out for our colleagues and for us as professionals sometimes gets thrown to the way, right? If people dive into it for what it looks like for students and families at all, it’s easy to look past how we do it forward with each other, how we create spaces where everyone’s voice is heard, where everyone’s able to challenge different types of people, in particular White males. As a White male teacher, it’s something that I’ve worked through, I’ve worked through in the past. When you just spoke to me how right now in front of who, you think that that’s okay for me to do that me, you did that to me. It’s something that, I think it’s a big piece of what it means to facilitate understandings of culture with practitioners is your articulation of exactly how that plays out in reality. So thank you for that. Anyone else want to share any that came up for them or were relevant to them?

Alyssa:

I actually had this conversation with someone in this office recently… Well before. I grew up with this idea of you didn’t get respect to speak, you had to earn respect ,where this other White woman came from a point of view who’s like, “Oh, you just respect everyone.” But I definitely went through a model of “I’m not giving you my respect, you have to earn respect.” And that included my teachers. So where they might have seen me as disrespect for them, I’m like, “You haven’t earned my respect, I just met you today.” So I think that was definitely a culture conflict for me growing up.

Speaker 5:

We’ve used…

John Jacobs:

Thank you for that.

Speaker 5:

We’ve used these questions with groups in my region or similar questions. Some of the wording was a little different and it brings up a lot of emotion as well as just making people, I think, sometimes even aware of thinking about that aspect. The example Alyssa just shared about respect and how it might look different. If you’re very similar, then it doesn’t necessarily always make people think differently about it. But then as soon as you have someone who can share a point of view where their cultural experience was different, it does widen the perspective in your point of view. And I think we also have the conversation. I don’t know, in my training as a teacher though, when I was in pre-service into starting as a teacher, we didn’t talk about this stuff. I actually feel like we came out of I, my educational experience and was almost told like, “It’s impolite to ask these questions or to learn about people in this way.”

And instead that’s how you got people to play nice was we don’t talk about it. We just kind of act like we’re all the same and we’ll all just get along. And so it’s a really challenging thing for some people even to just have these conversations now because for a very long period of time, I think that was the way in which we worked in a lot of educational systems.

John Jacobs:

Yeah, I appreciate that. And you said a lot there, and one thing I want to point to is the idea of it’s impolite to ask about this, right? I think I’ve encountered that, I’m sure you all have too. As TA Providers yourself, that having… Doing work that requires vulnerability and sharing of yourself isn’t something that has fallen under the traditional notion of professionalism. Like, “I’m at work, can I just, let me just do my job. I’m going to just do my job. You’re not going to ask me about what physical and social and cultural attributes were praised in my community. I’m at work right now.” And I think part of our work as leaders for equity and culture responsiveness and to implement this framework is the pushback against that, disrupt… Name it, disrupt it, and create spaces in time where that type of work, that ongoing reflection is a part of what it means to do education, recognizing education as a sociocultural process.

In order for us to do that and then act on it, we have to recognize that we have certain social and cultural programming that impact how we serve students, how we work together as colleagues, how we collaborate with families, how we find ourselves in communities, how the world perceives us, how we move through it. It’s necessary for us to do so. And that’s actually a perfect segue into the next slide. Does somebody want to volunteer and go off mute and read this quote? This is taken from the framework.

Speaker 6:

I can read it. What is culture? Coming to a shared understanding of culture schools then becoming meeting point for cultures containing children and adults who bring with them multiple facets of their identity along with unique experiences and perspectives. From this perspective, learning is rooted in the lives and experiences of people and cultivated through activities that people find meaningful. When teaching is not rooted in students’ lives, student learning suffers.

John Jacobs:

Thank you for that. Learning is rooted in the lives and experiences of people and cultivated through activities they find meaningful. It’s active and it’s rooted in the ways that people find and make meeting our culture. And so with that little unpacking and dabbling in culture will transition to introduce and unpack some of the key elements of the CRC framework. And to start we’ll ground ourselves in some of the foundational research around the CRC framework. I think David is doing these slides.

David Lopez:

So I think the connection I’d like to make here, I think some folks, it sort of plays off of John’s example of, “Oh, we’re at work. I don’t do this.” I think some folks in our state see CRSE as we need to lower expectations. “Oh, you just want to make excuses for people.” And I’m going to challenge myself by people as often Black and Brown children or Black and Brown children’s with IEP, right? With IEPs. But I think they fundamentally misunderstand what culture responsive education is. And so even with what John offered, I want us to think about how we leverage the framework to challenge notions of, “I’m at my job, we don’t do this.” Nope. The state has put out the framework, so let’s use that tool. But also to debunk some of the misconceptions of what culturally responsive education really is. And the sort of mother of CRE Gloria Ladson-Billings, one of the first things she really talks about is students must experience academic success for us to be doing culturally responsive education.

Another one that we didn’t put here was around high expectations. And I like to start with those two because I think it’s like, if you think it’s, other than those two things, you fundamentally misunderstand, culture responsive education. Now we might work through why you think being responsive to particular sets of cultures means those things. That’s a you thing, but you’re fundamentally misunderstanding what CRE is, right? And you don’t get to make up what it is. This is scholarship, right? You don’t get to just, “Well, I want it to mean low expectations.” It’s just not a thing. But to be able to have those high expectations to experience academic success, Dr. Ladson-Billings argues that we have to develop and maintain cultural competence. We begin to understand folks’ culture and all the pieces that John highlighted earlier. So this isn’t a… Some of our educators may ask, “Well, that means I need to know every last thing about every student and I have a diverse classroom.”

No, that’s not how it works. Culture’s not static. We’re not asking you to stereotype, right? We’re asking you to engage folks in their culture. And then for us to, so also to think about how our culture, as John mentioned earlier, influences how we make rules and whose culture we do not value. The other pieces really around helping our students develop a critical consciousness to challenge the status quo and the current social order. And I think this is where sometimes we need to use the core tensions to help people to understand why we need to do that. Because some folks might not agree that we actually need to do that. But again, I wonder then how we root ourselves in the scholarship, in our framework to say, “Well, in this job we expect you to be culturally responsive and this is part of it.” And maintaining that sort of position.

We head to the next slide, another scholar that we really like to highlight and yeah, I’m sure some of you probably took part in the CRE… CRSE framework. Y’all had all these people here. I was like, “Okay, shout out to Nisa,” right? Django Paris’s name is on the framework, but we often like to highlight him. But because it’s beyond just cultural competence and responding to folks, to students’ culture, we want to sustain their linguistic and cultural competence, right? Often I think about, it’s not like you come and you’re like, “Ooh, I’m going to speak David, so then I could get him to do the things that I want to do.” It’s actually helping maintain my culture and who I am and my identity. I think some of the parts that we have to work through as TA providers as folks across the state is that not everybody thinks that you should maintain that culture, right?

I’ll give you an example. I had a state TA Provider about five years ago where I was pushing for one of the asset projects that we center as a core component culturally responsive. The response was, “You keep saying culturally responsive, but they come from the ghetto. Do we really want to be responsive to that culture?” All right. Now, this is a person charged with providing the learning to districts in our beloved state. I don’t put that out there to say for the shock value, but we do have to think about how do we get work with our educators to believe that other folks’ culture in particular, Black and Brown cultures are worth sustaining. Right? We could head to… John, is there anything that you want to add there?

John Jacobs:

I was looking for the exclamation point when you asked me.

David Lopez:

I appreciate it. Oh, this is, you want me? I could jump. Go ahead.

John Jacobs:

Whatever. I mean, as David just said, a lot of folks on this call may have been a part of the journey of this framework, and so I want to pause here. I think that for participants in districts, this is some information that may be valuable for them. Are folks familiar with the sort of journey of the framework’s creation? So I’ll give a real quick… I can see I was trying to look across, I’ll give a real quick overview of this and this’ll be provided for folks in the package when we get it. So an expert panel was convened in January of 2018, which was sort of spurred… My understanding is that the catalyst for this was the New York State ESSA plan. It was initiated as a part result of public comments that were made on the ESSA plan around specifically recognizing the impact of an environment on performance, promoting relationships and trust between schools and families, continual professional learning on equity, anti-bias education, and culturally responsive sustaining education and support for education and communities and engaging critical conversations about CRSE.

As folks on the call are probably aware, this work came out of OBEWL. Shout out to the bilingual folks and all the work. You’re out for those on the call and off the call. That was done on this awesome framework. As folks who do this work nationally across the country, this is the nation leading document. It’s a framework that we use in all of our work and that many states linked to and refer to on their state education pages for what that’s worth. It builds on really important work that was already happening in the state by folks who are probably already on… Who are probably on this call, and some other district folks like in Buffalo. Some of the work that Buffalo was doing and some of the work that NYU Metropolitan Center for Research on Equity and the Transformation of Schools helped lead in the state. It went through multiple rounds of input. The document says three. I believe that it was three and it was formally released in January of 2019.

We can go ahead and go to the next one. There be a break. We promised a break. We are going to get a break before our next activity. We’ll do this slide and then we’ll go ahead and take a break. So the document contains multiple sections, right? It contains a vision definition, principles, mindsets, and CRS guidelines. I have these all here bulleted out. We’ve pulled them out because some of these things are baked into and embedded into the document, into the sort of narrative overview of the CRSE framework, and some of them have formalized sections for the introduction of this framework. We find it useful to sort of tease out these different parts to help people become familiar with it, build interest, and make it a little bit more digestible. And so for the next section after break, we will dive into unpacking some of these sections together. It is 3:21. We’ll go ahead and take a 10-minute break and come back at 3:31.

John Jacobs:

Okay, we’ll go ahead and get started in about two more minutes. Okay, let’s go ahead and go to the next slide, please, Ian. We’re going to get started.

So to introduce and unpack each of those sections: the Vision, the Definition, the Principles, the Mindsets, and… Well, we won’t unpack the Guidelines in this section… we’re going to utilize what’s referred to as a say something structure. So in a moment we’re going to get into pairs or trios. I think what we’ll do is get into pairs and we’re going to read each section, pause for a moment, and take turns just sharing a related thought connection or question. So you’ll read the Vision and we’ll pause for a second and make sure everyone has the… I should have started with that. Let me back up.

We’re going to use the handout entitled NYSED Culturally Responsive-Sustaining Education Framework Overview. If you have the one from last time, we’ve made some tweaks to it. So there should be a document in the materials that were shared today that have an overview at the top, the little hand tree to the right in the upper right hand corner. We’ll give folks a chance to locate and pull that up.

Is there any issues pulling that up? Cool. So we’ll read the first section, which will be the vision. Short. This is an excerpt pulled verbatim from the CR-SE framework. We’ll pause for a second. Once everyone’s done, all two or three people, and you’ll just take turns sharing a thought that you have, a connection or a question that you’re making. It should be about a sentence. It’s just a chance to slow down and be intentional about processing what we’re reading and sharing that processing with our colleagues. And you’ll do that for each section. So there’s vision, there’s the definition, there’s principles, and there’s mindsets. It’s not too much reading.

And so for that, we’re going to start out with seven minutes in our breakout. It’s not very much. Again, the sharing shouldn’t be more than a phrase or a sentence, a thought that’s coming up. And we’ll repeat that for each section. Are there any questions about the task? Everyone have their handout? Okay, great. So here in a moment, we’ll get zoomed into our breakout rooms.

David Lopez:

Should we bring people back?

John Jacobs:

I guess we’ll see. It’s still recording.

David Lopez:

I put the-

John Jacobs:

And we’re all back. Great. Okay. So to keep our familiarity and to give us something to use to help process what we just read, we’re going to watch a video, use it to introduce culturally responsive education in a New York context. It talks about the state, the city. And what we’re going to do is watch the video and make connections between certain components of the framework, whether it’s the vision, the mindsets, the definition or the principles, and the framework. And then we’ll unpack anything that stood out to us from the framework, any connections we’re making in the video, by section after that. Are there any questions? Great. We can go ahead and watch the video now.

Jose Luis Vilson:

Culturally responsive education for me is the understanding that children are people, and without building relationships and without understanding children, we can’t teach them.

Whitney Stephenson:

When I’m trying to find myself or find my identity, I go towards art and I go towards poetry. But I feel like when I’m in the school system, they always try to define by your numbers.

Kevin Park:

It was the first day of biology class and the teacher, in her Southern accent, was just like, “All right, I’m just going to get this off my chest now. I’m not going to remember any of your names because all of you got the same hair color and the same eye color.”

Carlos Perez Valle:

Growing up, I had a really hard time finding an interest in reading. A lot of the literature that we read talked about topics and experiences that were not that relevant to me. The closest we would come to was probably the narratives of immigrants who came from Ellis Island. But even then, there was still some kind of disconnect. I remember noting that these people were welcomed here, whereas my community, they’re shunned.

Christian Melendez:

When a few other students and I had approached different history teachers specifically about teaching about LGBTQ culture, either we got the response from teachers that they didn’t feel comfortable teaching about LGBTQ history because they didn’t identify, or we got the response that they’re against teaching LGBTQ history within schools.

Khalilah Brann:

When I began teaching, I thought I had to know everything and I had to control everything. I need to assign your seats, tell you when you can get up, lecture to you, write down all of these things, regurgitate it back to me. And if you did that, fantastic. And nothing about your culture was welcomed into the classroom.

Marla Gil:

[speaking in Spanish] I’ve seen with my own eyes, I’ve witnessed how the teachers talk about the students. “Everyday, kids come in that don’t even bring a pencil, or don’t bring their notebooks. Many kids arrive hungry, many kids come in who have problems at home. And I don’t have time to be dealing with those kids.”

Diana Noriega:

I had over an hour and a half commute every day just to get to middle school in eighth grade, and I was always late. I was always late, I was always sleeping, I was tired, I was depressed. And not once did he ask me, “Why?”

Tasfia Rahman:

My parents stopped going to parent-teacher meetings in middle school. A lot of the teachers just went with that, right? That they didn’t think, “Okay, well, this 12-year-old is filling out all these forms and also just signing her parent’s name.” There was no effort to make them a part of this world.

Veronica Morales:

[speaking in Spanish] At a parent-teacher conference in the first grade – because my daughter was having trouble with the pronunciation of some words – the only question she asked me was what language we spoke at home, and when I told her that we all spoke Spanish at home, she said that was probably the problem and she had no other answer.

Natasha Capers:

In New York City, 85% of students identify as Black, Latinx, or Asian. We know that across the country and in New York, 60% of the teaching force is White.

Alex Cuff:

There were a couple of Black teachers, guidance counselor, assistant principal, that came into the school and often left within a year.

Jose Luis Vilson:

We are often asked to be the dean, and of course, if we’re not the dean, then we’re the assistant principal who takes care of discipline. You’re not letting us build those relationships.

Khalilah Brann:

The way that we’ve been teaching comes from the 19th century factory system. When we say decolonizing our practice and decolonizing education, it is first questioning what you think is normal and right and the way that it should go. Question: where did this come from?

Natasha Capers:

When was the last time a student learned about Haiti? When was the last time a student learned about Colombia?

Veronica Morales:

[speaking in Spanish] For example, my children have traveled to Mexico. They had the opportunity to visit with family there, and every time they return, they come back surprised because there’s so many things they didn’t know before. Things that go beyond tacos and mariachi bands.

Shedeline Paul:

I want everyone to be able to know, along with myself, about my heritage. I want people to be able to say where they are from without it having to be like a personal question, a question that you ask a friend.

Khalilah Brann:

The way you teach, how you teach it, and why you teach it. From what perspective are you teaching? The biggest thing is that people, educators, don’t want to address race, gender, power, and privilege.

Daniel Dromm:

I remember one time when I first began to get South Asian students into the classroom. There was a young girl who came to the classroom and her parents had put mehndi on her hand. I said, “Oh honey, you shouldn’t be writing on your hand.” And then she explained to me that it was part of the celebration for either Eid or Diwali. I had to reach out to the families to find out what it was about, understand their culture a little bit more. I tried to bring in a way that we could celebrate those cultures into the classrooms.

Natasha Capers:

Welcoming families and having teachers and staff come out of the school building to really learn about the communities that they’re in.

Marla Gil:

[speaking in Spanish] Many parents should get involved, because many of our children are suffering. Because my daughters see me involved and with passion, they also become passionate.

Khalilah Brann:

As our country is becoming more and more diverse, we need to use the indigenous practices of storytelling, of music, of conversation. It’s not like I have 52 different countries and three languages, so I have to figure out how to CRE. No. All of those students come from an indigenous culture that values community, that values cooperation, and that’s how you start to engage students in CRE.

Jamaal Bowman:

We created an all-boys class and we also created boys reading groups at that time. They read Decoded by Jay-Z, which is his memoir, and they also read The Autobiography of Malcolm X. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that that was also the same year that we just shot up in terms of our academic growth across the board.

Jose Luis Vilson:

I’ve been very fascinated with the idea of students doing the teaching, me very much pulling away from the board. I try to make sure that students feel that they have a sense of agency in the math. I ask them to think critically about the math that’s in front of them.

Whitney Stephenson:

A lot of kids feel as if it’s about SATs, ACTs, getting these high grades, and they don’t develop their individuality. It’s like that carbon copy. But you’re forgetting that you’re human. Find that thing about you that makes you different from everyone else.

Diana Noriega:

When we negate people the opportunity to learn their legacy and what brought them into this world, we don’t give them the space to fully love themselves.

Jamaal Bowman:

Our goal is for our kids to graduate from us with a level of consciousness. Conscious of who they are and what they bring to the table, conscious of their history, and conscious of the world that they live in, and how to navigate that from a place of strength.

Natasha Capers:

That’s cultural responsiveness. It’s challenging the adults in the building to do right by every child, and therefore doing right by themselves.

John Jacobs:

Okay. I don’t know if folks are familiar with that video. There’s so much good truth sharing packed into 10 minutes in that video. So what we’re going to do now is we’re going to, in our closing minutes, go through the sections and share and give folks a chance to share the connections or questions that they had by section to unpack the framework. Are there any questions about what we’re going to do next? Okay. Next slide, please. Cool.

So for the vision, rather than hear from me, I’ll open it up. What was something that resonated with folks from the vision? This is a summary of the text that you read about the vision. What jumped out to you? What is the essence of the vision of the CR-SE framework? And were there any connections that you all made to the video to things that were a part of the vision?

David Lopez:

I think something that stood out to me was this critical lens. I became a big fan of Gholdy Muhammad’s work in my last couple years teaching. She talks about criticality, and it’s something that I tried to incorporate into my teaching that I found was super powerful for students. It really engaged them and I think really pushed them. So that is what stood out to me in this section.

John Jacobs:

Thank you for that. I agree. I think grounding ourselves in a vision of schools that doesn’t separate what we do from the fact that inequity exists in the world, and then working backward from that and saying that it’s our job as educators to teach students the history and contemporary forms of oppression and inequity and build their capacity. Viewing our academic skills-building as a means for them to name and act on their world I think is huge and I think it’s a necessary shift. And I think that this is something that people think only lives in social studies class or government class, but I think challenging dominant narratives about what types of knowledge and processes are valuable is just as salient in math class as it is in government or civics. Naming the voice and perspectives that dominate a story or a narrative in an English Language Arts class, ELA class, is just as relevant there as it is in a social studies or civics class. I think that there are multiple ways that we can bake that into the structure of schools.

One of the other things I want to highlight before we move on to the next one and give folks a chance to share any connections is the experience. Academic success is there, but building students who are sociopolitically conscious and socioculturally responsive, their ability to both understand how power operates and their ability to understand how culture, their own culture, what their own culture is and how to connect with folks across culture is central to this vision.

And we’ll go ahead and go to the definition next. So is there anything that really stood out to folks from the definition excerpt and/or were there any connections to definition you found or heard in the video? Yeah, thank you. In the chat it says, “The video mentioned a lot of the importance of people seeing themselves in their classes and curriculum.”

I think we heard both what it looks like to do that, right? This idea that culturally responsiveness, that affirming racial and cultural identities doesn’t mean you have to know all of the cultures. You don’t have to be fluent in every single one of your students’ culture, and that’s what CR-SE means. We heard that that’s not necessarily what it means. We heard the… I think it was talking about how it’ll be so normal and regular to answer questions about and operate from a sense of knowledge of who you are in your own identity that it won’t feel like such a personally intrusive question for kids or for anybody. We talked about that earlier, too, in our conversations.

The importance of making sure that things are relevant and interesting to students, and the violence and harm that’s done when we dehumanize and the various forms of dehumanization that happens. We don’t take efforts to intentionally… Or not just take efforts, but we aren’t intentional about affirming our cultural, racial, and other identities that are present in the spaces. Any other connections to the definition?

Were there any other… Because we’re about to run out of time and I want to open it up. Were there any other reactions to anything in the video or in the framework generally?

Speaker 1:

Just upon reflection in the work that we’ve done in districts, it’s interesting to listen to colleagues and educators and administrators their own perceptions and ideas, what some of this language means to them and what does that mean to them in different spaces, and what it means in the spaces that we work with students. It’s very interesting, and I think there needs to be an unpacking of that. Because even welcoming and affirming, the language itself, I think for most districts, they feel they do those both, and they’re very different things. So I think unpacking language as well, exploring what that means as an individual and as an ecosystem as a whole is also a powerful piece to this greater work.

John Jacobs:

Absolutely. Thank you for that. And Ian, could you skip us forward to the Tensions slide? The next one that has all three of them on it just to make one or two final points as we… Yeah, perfect. Thank you so much. We were going to dive a little bit more into the Tensions, but I just wanted to use it to sum up some of our work today.

Part of what we did when we put this together was try and make sure that there were opportunities to name and unpack all three of these. And that last point that was just made around figuring out what it looks like to, for instance, validate and affirm… Or it’s not validate and affirm, is it, in this language? That’s a different one. Welcoming and affirming environment, for instance. What does that look like across spaces, across systems, with different groups of students? How does your curricula do that? How does your physical space do that? How do the ways that you interact with your students and your families do that? How does your behavioral systems do that? How do your systems of student support do that?

One of the ways that we wanted to put… That we included in the handout is a really simple way to help people manage their strategy tension in particular are to use the areas to embed culturally responsive-sustaining education, which is on the back of that. It’s an extended learning opportunity for folks to use. We wanted to put something else on the handout for the package to use as you all see fit. But that’s one of the ways you can manage that.

And I want to encourage folks also to… You have the slides that have some of the examples of personal, strategic, and structural tensions on there that have some strategies that David and I have used in the past to help manage them as they come up in dialogue and through the explicit content that’s there. Like the culture activity is explicitly going to get at our personal tension. People are going to elevate personal tension or surface personal tensions as they go through that culture activity. They’re going to bump up against structural tensions as they think about what it looks like to create welcoming and affirming environments, to shift their entire curricula. Being able to anticipate them and start to build up your own toolkit, more access knowledge funds and knowledge that you already have to address them as it comes up around conversations of equity is necessary and important.

So with that, it’s four o’clock. We really, really appreciate everyone’s attendance and engagement and appreciate all the work that you all do throughout our state. Thank you so much for attending. Please take a moment and complete the survey. And be on the lookout: we will send the PD package when it’s finalized, before the end of the month. We’ll send a link to a Google Drive using the emails that everyone used upon registration. Are there any questions for us? Cool. Awesome. Thank you so much.

Please, again, take a moment and complete the survey. We really, really appreciate your feedback. And have a great day everyone.