Teaching Racial & Social Justice Series

The Office of Faculty Development sponsored a Teaching Racial and Social Justice Series (TRSJ), consisting of monthly workshops designed to challenge our teaching practices. This series was in line with the University's increased efforts towards Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion, and was meant to create a space for important conversations around systemic race and social injustice, including in the academic realm. 

 FDEV Podcast on TRSJ(opens in new window) 

Cultivating student perspective-taking through Global Learning

Presented by Keiko Goto and Nan Li
February 13th, 2:00-3:30 p.m.
Video Recording(opens in new window)

This workshop introduces participants to various approaches and resources for global learning, specifically, perspective-taking. Perspective-taking refers to the ability to see things from others’ perspectives in order to understand how they would think and feel. Students’ participation in high impact practices such as diversity and global culture courses has been proven to enhance their perspective-taking. Using the facilitators’ global practice examples through COIL (collaborative online international learning) and other projects, this interactive workshop aims to:
1. Enhance participation knowledge and skills in incorporating global learning in their curriculum to enhance student perspective-taking.
2. Discuss possible experiential learning approaches to global learning in the classroom.
3. Introduce COIL (collaborative online international learning) as one high impact practice for global learning.

Finding Voice: Connecting Faculty and Museums through Decolonizing Practices

Presented by Will Nitzky,
April Kamp-Whittaker, and Adrienne Scott
March 1st, 3:00-4:30 p.m. at the Valene L. Smith Museum of Anthropology in Meriam Library, Room 180

This workshop helps faculty consider how they approach voice and authority in educational settings. The workshop will be conducted in three phases: 1) Discussion on voice, narrative, and decolonization; 2) Assessment of curricula perspectives and positionalities; and 3) Building connections with museums. Participants will be able to:
1. Integrate multiple perspectives into their education and curricula, helping create classroom environments that are platforms for dialogue and sharing authority.
2. Identify campus and local museum resources and verbalize how to use them in their courses and curricula.
3. Engage students in thinking about visual interpretation and translating projects into visual products.

The Healing Centered Classroom: What Do Feelings Have to Do with it?

Presented by Juni Banerjee-Stevens
April 11th, 3:00-4:30 p.m. in Colusa 100B

The science is clear: trauma, including historical and intergenerational trauma, is impacting our students’ ability to stay engaged in the classroom. Designing course content that does not retraumatize students is an important step, but we cannot—perhaps should not—expect to teach in a way that eliminates all distress from the classroom. This workshops shares tools to help students manage their emotional overwhelm so that they can stay in “learning brain” during courageous conversations about social injustice. Participants will be able to:
- Understand what a brain that feels safe “looks like.”
- Understand when they or their students are out of their Window of Tolerance and how to get back.
- Understand how to identify their own feelings.
- Understand how to reflect OTHERS’ feelings and get confirmation that they’re on track.
- Develop a practice for connecting their feelings to their needs and their beliefs.
- Know when they’ve gotten sucked into the Drama Triangle and how to get OUT of the Drama Triangle.

Posthuman Ruptures of Racial Justice (and Analysis)

Presented by Bretton Varga and Erin Adams
May 1st, 12:00-1:30 p.m. via Zoom

This workshop introduces participants to a critical iteration of the posthuman framework that can be generate in accounting for the agency of more-than-human bodies (e.g., flora, fauna, inert objects) and their relationship to in/justice, race/ism, and oppression. That is, how might posthumanism challenge us (e.g., educators, researchers, and students) to think differently about systemic race/ism and ecological justice with the intentionality of cultivating a more ethical, compassionate, equitable, and just relationship to the more-than-world? Participants will be able to:
1. Articulate the key ideas underpinning posthumanism.
2. Deploy a posthuman mode of analysis to a photograph.
3. Deploy a posthuman mode of analysis to media clip.
4. Create (re)imagings of posthumanism through content-specific areas.

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• 2021-2022 Workshops

  Decarcerating the Classroom and Supporting Justice-Impacted Students
  Tuesday, April 12th, 4:00 p.m. - 5:30 p.m. – Dr. Gabby Medina Falzone

  This workshop will focus on two overlapping themes. In Part One, Dr. Medina Falzone will provide concrete ways faculty can decarcerate their classroom by addressing the ways faculty consciously or unconsciously punish or criminalize students for non-compliance. In Part Two, Dr. Medina Falzone, along with a panel of justice-impacted students from the new Rebound Scholars student organization, will provide concrete ways faculty can better specifically support justice-impacted students through using humanizing language when talking about those impacted by the carceral system (e.g. incarcerated person versus inmate) and through better understanding some of the obstacles justice-impacted students face at Chico State.

  Creating LGBTQ-Inclusive Learning Environments
  Tuesday, March 22nd, 3:30 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. – Susan Frawley

  Video Recording(opens in new window) | Slides (Google Slide) (Google Slide) | Gender Identity & Inclusivity Teaching Guide
  In this workshop, participants will explore best practices for LGBTQ inclusive pedagogy. Participants will have a chance to share ideas on how to include and respect the identities of LGBTQ students in curriculum design, assignment creation, and overall classroom norms. Attendees will have a chance to explore ways they can apply these ideas in their courses, and brainstorm how these practices can benefit their particular disciplines.

  Throwing Out the Syllabus: Responding to Crisis in Real Time
  Wednesday, October 27th, 1:00 p.m. – 2:30 p.m. – Dr. Claudia Sofía Garriga-López
  

  Our students are pursuing an education during a time of catastrophic wildfires, mass shootings, and a global pandemic. This workshop, led by Dr. Claudia Sofía Garriga-López, helps us acknowledge and address the ways that these compounding disasters impact our students lives in the space of the classroom. Join us for a dialogue about how to adapt our lesson plans to respond to personal, social, and political crises as they are unfolding.

  Confronting the Traditional Learning Space: Anchoring Your course in an Antiracist, Inclusive, and Culturally Sustaining Framework
  Wednesdsay, October 13th, 4:00 p.m. – 5:30 p.m. – Dr. Daniel Soodjinda
  

  Video Recording(opens in new window)
  This workshop will explore and unpack an evaluation tool that is grounded in the Anti-Racist Quality Learning and Teaching (AR-QLT) framework, developed by Dr. Daniel Soodjinda and used as a guide by a faculty learning community at CSU Stanislaus.  The AR-QLT framework contains a set of 11 Antiracist, Inclusive, and Culturally Sustaining objectives, and faculty can use the AR-QLT instrument to assess their courses, learn where there are equity gaps, and take the steps necessary to meaningfully support their diverse classrooms.

• 2020-2021 Workshops

  Supporting Students' Community Wealth and Culturally Sustaining Assessment
  Tuesday, April 27th, 3:00 p.m. – 4:30 p.m. – Pablo Ochoa Bailey and joshuah whittinghill

  Assessment is crucial to our work and understanding if students are meeting learning outcomes. As educators we all have some connection to building and facilitating assessment, but how much thought do we put into it? Are we assessing the right things? Have we developed appropriate outcomes? Are we considering who Chico State students are and what they bring to our campus? This session, led by Paul Bailey and joshuah whittinghill, will provide opportunities to explore these questions and more. In addition we will reflect on our assessment practices and how they impact student learning experiences.

  Participants will:
  Critically analyze relationships between their assessments and possible inequitable student outcomes.
  Explore development and facilitation of assessments.
  Understand how traditional assessment practices may further marginalize oppressed student groups.
  Begin to develop an assessment about students' capital.

  Data Displays and Interpretation: Linking the Practices of Our Fields to Social Justice Issues
  Tuesday, April 13th, 3:00 p.m. - 4:30 p.m. - Dr. M.E. Matthews

  Workshop Slides (Google Slide) 

  A liberal arts degree is valuable not just because the holder has knowledge of a variety of fields but because they have a sense of the vital connections between them. Each content area asks students to interpret and analyze visual presentations of data, whether that involves spectrometer readings, financial trend graphs, or maps. The skills involve more than following a step-by-step set of procedures, and so the open-ended approach lends itself to connections with other areas. We instructors can then make the choice to build our students’ capacity in reading displays from our fields by using displays that communicate information of a social justice nature.

  Participants will be invited to:
  Analyze data displays as a group and enumerate the skills and tools used in interpretation.
  Apply a similar process to a data display from their own coursework.
  Find or create a social justice-themed data display that engages the approaches from their field and create a short activity or assignment for use in their class.

  Personal Stories to Understand Power and Privilege
  Wednesday, March 24th, 1:00 p.m. - 2:30 p.m. - Dr. Browning Neddeau

  You are invited to share and explore how your personal stories -- and those of your students -- help you understand power and privilege. In this workshop, we will use your personal stories to dive deeper into the topics. The workshop, led by Dr. Browning Neddeau, includes brainstorming ways to weave personal stories of power and privilege into the courses you teach. The workshop welcomes individuals to a space where open and honest conversations about power and privilege can ignite transformative teaching practices that lift all students.

  Participants will be asked to:
  Identify their personal stories of power and privilege.
  Reflect on how personal stories of power and privilege potentially drive pedagogical approaches.
  Discuss ways to integrate personal stories of power and privilege into their courses.

  Cultivating Humanizing Pedagogy in Constricting Institutional Contexts
  Friday, February 19th, 11:00 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. - Dr. Annie Adamian

  This session, led by Dr. Annie Adamian, aims to contribute toward expanding the possibilities for teaching and learning toward racial justice in constricting institutional contexts. More specifically, we will discuss how classroom communities have a responsibility to engage with humanizing teaching practices that BIPOC communities deserve and have a human right to experience, by:

  Drawing from critical race theory and exposing how the U.S. legal system protects and serves historically white institutions with policies and practices rooted in the language of “race and equality,” instead of “racism and equity,” creating constrictions and constraints for students and teachers working toward racial justice.

  Examining and confronting race-neutral U.S. policies and practices that perpetuate race evasiveness and the expansion of white supremacy, resulting in racially hostile campus climates for BIPOC communities.

  Discussing how engaging with humanizing pedagogy requires strategic maneuvering while teaching and learning in contradictory ways at the nexus of oppression and liberation, which consequently positions teachers and students working toward abolishing systems of oppression as fugitives.

  Contesting the call for “safe spaces” in classrooms that result in catering to White comfort and innocence, and instead cultivate “brave spaces” that seek to collectively name and take action toward eradicating all forms of oppression and human suffering.

  Teaching Law Without Erasing Justice 
  Tuesday, December 1st, 4:00 p.m. - 5:30 p.m. - Prof. Badami

  "Teaching Law Without Erasing Justice" will be an interactive session that begins with a brief description of the structural problem of erasing race in legal education, which reflects a greater, system-wide history of oppressing racial minorities through institutional "color blindness." This approach ignores the intentionally racist structures that were baked into the legal system since its founding. Professor Maitreya Badami will offer examples of how critical race theory has sought to shift the focus in legal education from race-neutral analysis to one that incorporates the reality of differential treatment and differential outcomes by race. Prof. Badami will also discuss the complex balance between exposing students to the use of professional language in legal studies while identifying how that language removes the specificity of race-related experiences and concerns. After establishing this framework.
  
  Prof. Badami will invite participants to:
  Identify ways in which their own disciplines utilize race-neutral language in a way that supports systemic racist structures.
  Challenge discipline-specific language while still satisfying discipline-specific learning outcomes.

  Social Structures and Power in Academia
  Tuesday, November 10th, 4:00 p.m. - 5:30 p.m. - Dr. Lesa Johnson

  The Social Structure and Personality Theory can help us to understand how academic socializing agents use emotional manipulation tactics to maintain a racialized status quo in Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs). Hierarchical systems uphold the racialized, gendered and elitist norms that prevent large-scale changes in outcomes for Black, Brown, and Poor students. Publicly, however, focuses on new resolutions and reform policies present great illusions of structural change. Calls for deference and respectability reproduce emotional and material sanctions when the marginalized resist oppression. Educational power agents then re-stigmatize those who attempt change, while simultaneously fostering tokenism to uphold current power structures.

  This workshop, facilitated by Dr. Lesa Johnson, will help participants:
  Identify the systemic structures that maintain a racialized status quo in Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs)
  Challenge their perspectives when establishing and writing university policy
  Devise or improve teaching practices that fight institutional racism.

  Pedagogy of Anarchy
  Tuesday, October 20th, 4:00 p.m. - 5:30 p.m. | Workshop Slides (Google Slide) - Dr. Lindsay Briggs

  Anarchy is a popular buzzword these days, but what does it actually mean and how can you harness the power of anarchy in your classroom to create a more just and equal classroom? This workshop, led by Dr. Lindsay Briggs, will talk about how the main tenets of anarchism can be operationalized in teaching pedagogy to create an equity based classroom environment where all students can feel comfortable and valued in sharing their perspectives.

  How to Be An Antiracist: A Pedagoagy Discussion
  Friday, September 25th, 12:00 p.m. - 1:30 p.m. - Dr. Nandi Crosby

  The Office of Faculty Development is partnering with the Book in Common initiative to offer a FDEV workshop led by Dr. Nandi Crosby based on How to be an Antiracist, by Ibram X. Kendi.

  We encourage all faculty to participate, whether you already have a plan to use Kendi’s book in your classrooms (so you can share ideas with others) or you have not had a chance to consider a way to adopt the book in your course (so you can get ideas from this discussion).