National Day of Racial Healing

 

Racial Healing begins with critical thinking both inside and outside the classroom. For faculty committed to intentionally incorporating racial healing practices into their teaching and classroom content, please access, share, and contribute to the crowdsourced set of ideas below.

What is critical pedagogy?

Critical pedagogy is an approach to teaching that asks students to interrogate the relationship between power and knowledge. 

For example, there is an inherent power relationship between student (novice) and faculty (expert). A critical approach to this reality would prompt students to ask questions like: Why is this person (professor) an expert in this knowledge area (i.e. biology, engineering, history)? How did they become an expert? What role did privilege play in them becoming an expert? What new or continuing privileges does that expertise afford?  

Or consider the statement “history is written by the winners.” This assumes that those on top in a society control the narrative about how they arrived on top to legitimate, normalize, and perpetuate their structural advantages so that those advantages seem immovable. A critical pedagogical approach to such forms of inequity would first understand this process of legitimation, normalization, and perpetuation as a set of conscious choices and actions and then interrogate counternarratives that question and seek to upend the immovability of unequal forms of power. 

Please consider using the following prompts for assignments and/or discussions in the classroom. This National Day of Racial Healing Conversation Guide may be helpful in guiding your discussions. WSU Libraries has also prepared a library guide of resources to aid in these discussions.

PROMPT ABOUT THE USE/MISUSES OF DATA:

• What can one actually claim based on data? How does greater transparency about the limits of sets of data prevent or reduce inequitable outcomes?

PROMPT FOR COURSES THAT EMPHASIZE NUMERACY:

• “Budgets are moral documents.” This quote is attributed to Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who in the 1960s criticized US President Lyndon Johnson’s increased military spending on the War in Vietnam while devoting relatively little to the millions of Americans living in poverty. What did King mean by this statement? What is a real world historical or contemporary example to which we might apply King’s logic of moral budgets?

PROMPT ABOUT PROFESSIONALISM STANDARDS IN THE FIELD:

• What are the professional standards in the field? Why are those the standards, as opposed to some other alternative sets of standards? Where did the professional standards come from? Who developed and instituted them? When? In what social context?

PROMPT ABOUT REPRESENTATION IN THE FIELD:

• Conduct basic research on representation in your field and present this research to students in the form of a graph, reading, or other appropriate medium. Where are the demographic equity gaps in your field along lines of race, national origin, gender, etc.? Why have those gaps developed and persisted over time? What are organizations or figures in the field doing to address those gaps?

PROMPT ABOUT HOW KNOWLEDGE (CONTENT) IN THE FIELD IS SITUATED IN A WIDER SOCIAL AND/OR NATURAL CONTEXT:

• Provide students with an example of how content knowledge from the field has been used (implicitly or explicitly) to create, sustain, or challenge racial inequity. What were the circumstances of those impacts?

PROMPT FOR AGRICULTURE-FOCUSED COURSES:

• An assignment or discussion about historical discrimination against Black farmers, and the case for reparations, as told in these 1619 project podcast episodes “The Land of our Fathers”, parts 1-2.