The biggest change in my career as someone who advocates for social and racial justice for students and teachers is my willingness to speak up. I don't want to speak over people as a cisgender white, female teacher. I am introverted. I try to be very cognizant of making space for people without taking up too much space. Before I started learning about education justice, if I saw something that didn't sit right with me, I probably wouldn't say anything. And now I feel able to figure out how to confront some of those things while keeping in mind my relationships with my colleagues.
When I work with teachers from schools where you can't see the diversity -- maybe they're primarily white schools -- sometimes those teachers don't think that things like race impact their students.
I would just challenge them to think about how race affects all of our students, whether they're white, black, or brown, because it does. It affects all of our kiddos.
I would say to a colleague who thinks we don't really need to do this justice stuff that we are preparing our students for a world that may not look like the world we have right now or the world we had when we were growing up. We need to make sure that we prepare them for an increasingly diverse world where they are going to be interacting in a variety of ways both through technology and in person with a lot more diverse group of people than we've interacted with. We can either prepare them for that and maybe even introduce the idea that it can be a really awesome thing, or we can choose not to and continue to see some of the tribal strife where we look at differences as negative. It doesn't have to be that way. We can change that paradigm.
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