The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Dismantle racism? Start in the classroom, teachers say
Nine teachers listened closely earlier this month as Nataliya Braginsky explained a “place-based learning” project she led last year: she went into the Local History Room of the New Haven Free Public Library, compiled a list of key Black and Latinx people and sites, and helped her students research them to create a virtual walking tour of New Haven history.
“Students are so much more invested if there’s a real audience and real purpose for it, and it’s not just about a Google Doc that they share with their teacher that exists in a vacuum,” Braginsky, a social studies teacher at the Metropolitan Business Academy, told the group as that day’s guest speaker for a seminar called “Teaching about Race and Racism Across the Disciplines.”
Braginsky is a member of the Anti-Racist Teaching and Learning Collective, a network of Connecticut teachers who, even in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, are developing, implementing and sharing curricula to dismantle racism from their classrooms outwards.
She views this work as crucial to her approach as an educator, she said, adding that she isn’t just trying to modify curriculum content, but also to find ways to empower students — especially students of color.
At the community showcase for the walking tour, students were educating adults and sharing their sense of “pride of place,” she said. She recounted that one student, who had researched a monument to a black Civil War regiment in Fair Haven’s Criscuolo Park, told attendees, “I go there all the time to play basketball, and I get shivers now, knowing that Frederick Douglass was there.”
The importance of studying Black and Latinx history isn’t novel in the state — last year the Connecticut General Assembly passed a bill that tasked the State Education Resource Center with developing an African-American and Latino history course to be offered in all high schools as an elective by 2022.
But in the wake of the shooting death of George Floyd, which spurred nationwide protests for Black lives, there are teachers and parents throughout the state that find the requirement — and its timeline — insufficient.
Rather than wait for bureaucratic gears to turn, ARTLC members are taking matters in-hand, creating a shared database of ideas and best practices to incorporate anti-racism principles into their curricula across grade levels and subjects this fall, whether or not classes end up being remote due to COVID-19.
“If we want to address racism in society at large, we have to address it in policing, and housing, and health care — but we also need to address it in the third grade music classroom, in the seventh grade social studies classroom,” said Daniel HoSang, an associate professor of Ethnicity, Race, and Migration and American Studies at Yale University, who leads the seminar and co-founded the ARTLC.
“We need to push for the long-term changes, in funding, recruitment, et cetera,” HoSang said. “But we can’t let that delay the work that can and should be done in the fall.”
HoSang developed and began offering his seminar at the Yale-New Haven Teacher’s Institute last year to share theoretical and practical tools toward the practice of anti-racist education. Teachers across Connecticut — and this year, across the nation — apply to the course by submitting a proposal for a unit to develop, and their principal verifies that the proposal is consistent with district academic standards.
Throughout the twoweek seminar, teachers read and discuss texts on racial colorblindness and power, work on and receive detailed feedback on their unit plans, and get to know each other through personal presentations.
Their projects have included reworking an AP U.S. history course to center indigenous peoples, creating plans to teach literature through AfroFuturism, reteaching an international relations course from colonized people’s perspective, writing a unit on histories of segregation and law in New Haven, and developing an art unit focusing on Confederate monuments to think about art making and art reception.
The resulting lesson plans are one of many kinds of resources HoSang hopes to share through ARTLC, which he began last year with local teachers, activists and students from educational justice organizations Students for Educational Justice in New Haven and Hearing Youth Voices in New London.
After taking HoSang’s seminar last year and developing a course on Latinx history, Braginsky became involved in the collective, and she said she has appreciated “learning and thinking together” with like-minded teachers during the group’s bimonthly meetings. HoSang estimates that ARTLC has engaged some 100 teachers since its inception, who find out about it through word of mouth.
“It’s really powerful being able to connect with other educators in New Haven and around the state, and youth organizers, and to be in those conversations together,” she said.