The Open for Antiracism (OFAR) Program – co-led by CCCOER and College of the Canyons – emerged as a response to the growing awareness of structural racism in our educational systems and the realization that adoption of open educational resources (OER) and open pedagogy could be transformative at institutions seeking to improve. The program is designed to give participants a workshop experience where they can better understand anti-racist teaching and how the use of OER and open pedagogy can empower them to involve students in the co-creation of an anti-racist classroom. The capstone project involves developing an action plan for incorporating OER and open pedagogy into a course being taught in the spring semester. OFAR participants are invited to remix this template to design and share their projects and plans for moving this work forward. 

The Open for Antiracism (OFAR) Program – co-led by CCCOER and College of the Canyons – emerged as a response to the growing awareness of structural racism in our educational systems and the realization that adoption of open educational resources (OER) and open pedagogy could be transformative at institutions seeking to improve. The program is designed to give participants a workshop experience where they can better understand anti-racist teaching and how the use of OER and open pedagogy can empower them to involve students in the co-creation of an anti-racist classroom. The capstone project involves developing an action plan for incorporating OER and open pedagogy into a course being taught in the spring semester. OFAR participants are invited to remix this template to design and share their projects and plans for moving this work forward. 

The Open for Antiracism (OFAR) Program – co-led by CCCOER and College of the Canyons – emerged as a response to the growing awareness of structural racism in our educational systems and the realization that adoption of open educational resources (OER) and open pedagogy could be transformative at institutions seeking to improve. The program is designed to give participants a workshop experience where they can better understand anti-racist teaching and how the use of OER and open pedagogy can empower them to involve students in the co-creation of an anti-racist classroom. The capstone project involves developing an action plan for incorporating OER and open pedagogy into a course being taught in the spring semester. OFAR participants are invited to remix this template to design and share their projects and plans for moving this work forward. 

Thought paper on those who became Psychologists and contributed to the development of the field but are not commonly known or given the recognition due to minority status.

I decided to take this seminar because in my career as a literature teacher, neither myself, nor my students, have ever felt collective joy engaging with narrative writing. My students have experienced an entire spectrum of emotion engaging with family, school, work, and all other institutions of society, yet when it comes down to choosing what to write, and actually writing, there comes an immense emotional and cognitive struggle in both brainstorming and production. I have students who participate in youth groups, volunteer work, are life-long athletes, commute to school every day at 5 am, yet choose to write about the stress and eventual success of math class. I have students who have participated in organized protests, work near full time jobs, and experience moments of existential and cultural realizations simply by engaging in conversation at dinner, yet choose to write about overcoming procrastination. I’ve sought out and attended professional development, asked advice not only locally, but all over the country, and have done extensive research in finding a solution to no avail. The vast majority of training, practices and advice I found approaches narrative writing as stagnant, and therefore, were ultimately just different approaches leading to the replicated result of forced-structured, inauthentic writing, that sounds like an individual different from my students.

What I haven’t done, despite it being so clear, and what I’m sure I’ve unconsciously avoided, is approach revising my practice while analyzing through a lens of race, power and identity. Teaching students writing techniques and how to use them correctly has never been a struggle. The struggle is widespread silence, and exclamations of “I don’t know what to write” and “I have nothing interesting to write about.” The struggle is grading and providing feedback to stories involving death, trauma, and raw human emotion, in no commas, periods, or sentences. I am not only looking to make small adjustments for temporary moments of success, I am seeking sustainable transformation--and my experience learning this seminar is a start. In my research, I have learned history, language, and patterns that speak to the tension I am describing in not only narrative writing, but education at large. Through an exploration of anti-racist theory, I have learned new ways to think, frame and ultimately approach teaching the personal narrative. Through researching the work of experienced, and critically conscious educators, I have found many resources, and also, outlined an approach I have never attempted. Moving forward, I will curate big-picture factors and history leading to the dominant practices in my classroom, and also, give perspective on the fallacy of these practices. I will then curate the teaching methods to counter the dominant approaches aiming for a more unifying, reflective, rich, complex and anti-racist- approach in preparing for and teaching students to write a personal narrative.

This unit grew out of a desire to make research in my English classroom more actionable. Every year sophomore students at our local urban magnet high school participate in a year long Social Justice Project of their choice. At the beginning of this year, when I asked my students to define social justice I received a variety of honest answers. One sophomore identified social justice as a negative term, a concept people claim to achieve in posturing but fail in action. Some students struggled to identify the impact of social justice in their communities, stating that the issues such as racism and gun violence were real, but they were unfamiliar with any leaders in their communities who were actively seeking to change things for the better.

While performing research on social justice issues, I noticed that students felt the compulsory need to use formal procedures to verify knowledge. When one student leaned deeply into conducting interviews with rappers in the community to learn about representation in the industry, he at first mentioned that he didn’t feel as though he was completing “real research”. In fact, as his classmates dug through databases constantly reframing their search terms to stretch for new information, they looked at him questionably and doubted the validity of his project. Individuals in the class also felt tension from learning objectives that required students to research multiple perspectives. To achieve this objective, students researching topics such as police brutality were asked to research a perspective that dehumanized and challenged their and their community’s lived experiences.

While the objectives of the original social justice research unit were well intentioned, they fell short in delivering on the most important aspects of social justice: the need for specific and localized action and a disruption of a colorblind ideology in research methods. The following unit seeks to identify and disrupt dominant narratives in social justice education and research. More importantly, the unit seeks to provide counter practices that make the ideals of social justice actionable by incorporating the methods of researchers from Latinx and Indigenous communities and tools for holding space for education through community discussion.

Within this unit, I will take a three level design that is planned to make these courses more relevant to students and promote questions that interrogate the authority of statistics that students will encounter throughout the course and in their lives.

The skill of interrogating statistics is crucial for all adults in our society to become thinking consumers and users of data. In addition, it is important to deconstruct data to see implicit ideas of domination and subjugation that travel through numbers that can appear nuetral. Statistics shares a creation story with the field of Eugenics. Francis Galton, a mathematician who contributed many of the major ideas to statistics was also one of the originators of eugenics. The influence of eugenic thinking in statistics drives a notion of superiority, fitness and ranking alongside measurements. Milton Reynolds describes this in Shifting Frames:,” The term “eugenics” refers to a scientifically based, ideological movement dedicated to the reiification of race. It is the wellspring of scientific theories used to construct taxonomies of difference within the human family and to legitimize the subjugation of different groups.”.1 Statistics often does the work of justifying this subjugation through its “innocent” and authoritative work as a logical system. These embedded assumptions of superiority are validated by the seeming neutrality of mathematical calculations. The “taxonomies of difference” he describes are invalid and biased assumptions about difference that dominate our interpretations of data, however they appear as factual products legitimized by math.

Within the last few years, the demographics of Barnard Environmental Science and Technology School has changed significantly. When I began teaching there four years ago, there was a large Multilingual (ML) population, but not enough to have a full-time ML teacher. The majority of the students who qualified for ML services spoke Spanish. In my first year of teaching at Barnard in 2017, the school began enrolling refugee families from Western Asia, primarily Afghanistan. Between 2017 and 2020 the number of students from Afghanistan rose exponentially, to the point where not only did the school administration make the original ML teacher full-time, but also decided to hire another full-time teacher, which is how I came to have my current job. As of 2021, very close to 50% of the ML students at Barnard speak Pashto, one of the languages of Afghanistan. Spanish is the second most spoken language, followed by Arabic.

I have been looking at the materials that the district has provided as well as what the school might be able to purchase in the future. Most of what I see for Newcomer and refugee students are textbooks explaining how to survive in a traditional American school. There are common phrases, basic English and many smiling faces. These textbooks can be useful, but they oversimplify or do not address the complexities of what it means to be an American, an immigrant or a refugee. They do not address how and why English came to be the language of this country or the racialized structure of U.S. society. They certainly do not touch on the role race (and racism) have in “English as a Second Language” education. By curating resources at various English language levels that positively affirm the identity of multilingual, immigrant, and refugee students, the connection to the content will become more meaningful. Allowing students to have an active role in curating the content and being able to tell their own stories will ensure that the narratives showcase their personal identity and present the message that they would like others to see.

Rationale: Oftentimes, ML students, especially Newcomers, are seen as being in a deficit because they do not know English or are still learning English. They are excluded from many in-class activities and assignments. I want to disrupt this assumption about ML students as not being able to understand concepts that may be more complicated or require analysis and higher order thinking skills, like racism and its effects on education. Instead, I want ML students to feel as though they can not only grasp the content, but contribute to a better understanding for everyone through authentic representation and sharing of their experiences, languages, and cultures.

The Open for Antiracism (OFAR) Program – co-led by CCCOER and College of the Canyons – emerged as a response to the growing awareness of structural racism in our educational systems and the realization that adoption of open educational resources (OER) and open pedagogy could be transformative at institutions seeking to improve. The program is designed to give participants a workshop experience where they can better understand anti-racist teaching and how the use of OER and open pedagogy can empower them to involve students in the co-creation of an anti-racist classroom. The capstone project involves developing an action plan for incorporating OER and open pedagogy into a course being taught in the spring semester. OFAR participants are invited to remix this template to design and share their projects and plans for moving this work forward.