The Future of Education

The proposed presentation is based on my forthcoming book, No Place at the Table: The Harm of Anti-Blackness in Schools (Spencer and Ullucci, forthcoming).  The presentation will chart the contours of anti-Blackness in schools in the US. I seek to achieve three main aims with this work:

a)    Illuminate the ways in which anti-Blackness pervades education. From the normative to the technical, examples of anti-Blackness appear in all corners of school. We seek to call out the ways in which school policies, programs, belief systems, and customs are particularly hostile to Black youth.

b)    Explore the ways in which diversity work is not synonymous with anti-racist work. Our model focuses on justice and equity as endpoints; we will parse out for readers how being intentional about goals is key to working against anti-Blackness in schools. Here we will draw from the work of Kendi (2019), Gorski and Swalwell (2015), and Love (2020). 

c)     Provide concrete, doable, meaningful ways in which teachers and administrators can work against anti-Blackness in their schools. We provide case studies, activities, lessons, and concrete techniques to talk about anti-Blackness, inventory its presence, and take steps to unpack the harm. 

Keywords Black education, teacher education, diversity, multicultural

References:
Gorski, P. & Swalwell, K. (2015).  Equity literacy for all. Educational Leadership, 72(6), 34-40.
Kendi, I. (2019) How to be an antiracist. Random House Publishing Group.
Love, B.  (2020). We want to do more than survive: Abolitionist teaching and the pursuit of educational freedom. Beacon Press.
Spencer, J., and Ullucci, K. (Forthcoming). No place at the table: The harm of anti-Blackness in Schools. Teachers College Press.