Equitable Teaching Takes Time and Practice. Here Are Strategies to Help. by Sharon M. Ravitch

… Since March 14, 2020, I have worked with over 50 teaching teams in higher education and K–12 as part of intensive professional development programs to help educators embrace this practice mindset, communicate equitably, and enact culturally responsive teaching practices. Together, these practices comprise a pedagogical framework I call flux pedagogy. In this work—and everywhere I go, really—I note that building critical awareness and becoming an equitable teacher takes time and practice; self-development is a marathon, not a sprint.

Understand and Challenge Your Own Invisible Logics

This entire conversation hinges on our awareness of our socialized beliefs and ways of thinking (or “invisible logics”), and the implicit biases they form within us. These include deficit-based beliefs that invisibly shape our curriculum, pedagogy, and communication approaches. We might, for example, design courses with a universal student in mind (a white normative default) or assume students can afford multiple expensive textbooks or have privacy and autonomy in the pandemic.

Focus on Our Own Racial Literacy

There’s no panacea for managing the stress and tension that often emerges during classroom conversations about racism, inequity, and injustice. And it takes practice to be able to approach these moments instinctively with our most present, authentic, and effective selves. I find the best place to start is to improve our racial literacy. Dr. Howard Stevenson defines racial literacy as “the ability to read and recast, or reduce and resolve, racially stressful encounters during face-to-face interactions.”

Plan for What You’ll Do When Tension Arises

Just as emergency and relief professionals have a plan for what to do when disaster strikes, you and your students should be ready with techniques to diffuse tense situations when they happen. I recommend teaching students (first practice yourself!) how to manage racially stressful encounters by introducing Dr. Stevenson’s CLCBE Racial Stress and Mindfulness and Management Model—Calculate, Locate, Communicate, Breathe, and Exhale.

When You Start to Get Uncomfortable, Instead Get Curious

We need to work with and through discomfort to be racially literate. When we can identify the early moments in which our bodies begin to react in times of identity-based stress, we can catch feelings before they swell and overwhelm us. We can learn to create a space between stimulus (an event) and response (our reaction to the event).

Creating Possibilities for Productive Conversations

I am an advocate of using Dr. Stevenson’s Affection, Protection, Correction, Connection racial socialization framework to help educators and students make difficult and important conversations about uncomfortable topics possible and productive. Here are helpful prompts for each phase of the framework:

• Affection: “I affirm, recognize, and validate your humanity.”

• Protection: “We take care of each other as members of a community.”

• Correction: “Because these two are true, I need you to know this does not work for me.”

• Connection: “As part of a community, we remain accountable to each other.”

When on the receiving end of this kind of honest communication, I teach my students and colleagues to do the following:

• Listen calmly for understanding, not simply to respond or defend yourself.

• Work to understand and own your impact; step into accountability instead of dwelling on and defending your intentions.

• Ask about the other person’s emotional experience—listen compassionately and take in their discomfort or pain.

• Consider how you can improve, and then commit to a plan and do the work.

Part of this is a commitment to building our own and our students’ proactive skills for race and equity dialogue rather than waiting for issues to arise and students (or colleagues) to get hurt. These practices create more ease in groups for raising potentially fraught topics and sharing feedback. Intention setting is another important piece; it helps us to cultivate commitment, and our brain readies itself to act accordingly. Set intentions about how you want to feel in conversations about race and equity and then be attuned to how this plays out. Set clear intentions in courses, teams, and in your syllabi, and help students to do the same.

Remember: conflict—particularly racial and identity-based conflict—is inevitable. When we misstep in how we handle or manage conflict in a given classroom incident, that’s powerful data we can use to learn, grow, and be better prepared for next time.

We Can’t Fix Things Overnight—But We Can Commit to Practice

As educators, it’s our responsibility to continuously interrupt and address racism, sexism, microaggressions, and inequities that arise in our classes. We must do this with clarity and kindness while assiduously challenging discriminatory views, unspoken assumptions, and invisible logics as they emerge. And we must validate and amplify non-dominant knowledge, value systems, and points of view.

We can do this work best when we embrace a practice mindset and free ourselves to be learners. We can then model this mindset for our students, creating space for them to build their own awareness in and beyond our courses.

It’s important we care, and create caring environments in which our students can speak and be heard. And of course, we must understand the role our own identities play in this process. None of this is easy or overnight work, but it is critical work.