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Instead, they’re problems with how access and opportunity are distributed in society and in school, and they’re problems that result from differences in power and privilege. I mean, they are problems that might be based in institutional cultures, but they’re not interpersonal cultural conflicts. But knowing a bit about African American culture-which is, in itself, a bit of a misnomer because there’s enormous diversity among African Americans-is not the same as being able to recognize subtle forms of racial inequity in school policies or to recognize the ways ableism creeps into classroom practices.Īnd we need to be careful not to confuse racism or heterosexism or ableism with cultural problems. Knowing something about the cultures of our students and families can help us interact with them more effectively and relate to them more deeply. It’s interesting that you ask about cultural competence, by the way, because we often use that framework as a way to describe what’s unique about equity literacy.
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It’s meant to provide guidance to schools that might be celebrating diversity, or focusing on cultural competence, but struggling to address inequities. So equity literacy is a framework that provides a set of tools for strengthening and then implementing those understandings. We also recognized that not everybody has developed the understanding necessary to stay in that conversation. How do we create a framework that puts-and keeps-equity at the center of the conversation? Instead of dancing around the issue, we ask: How is racial inequity operating in this school right now? How can we best understand the roots of this inequity? What is the most immediate way to eliminate this inequity? We want to gently but firmly force people to stay in that conversation. We worked on developing an approach that does not allow for that sort of evasive implementation. But as Gloria Ladson-Billings, the creator of that framework, has pointed out, schools often implement it without the deeper digging, without confronting racism or sexism or heterosexism, for example, and they instead focus on cultural celebrations or minor bits of curricular diversity. A few other models-culturally relevant teaching, for example-have this deeper digging built into them. So the framework was created initially as a set of ideological tools, really, to help push educators to look more deeply at what was happening. Instead of asking these sorts of questions, what we so often see are schools implementing grit initiatives or growth mindset initiatives and calling them “equity strategies”-like we want to help students of color be more resilient against racial inequities while we ignore the racial inequities.
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The book also recommends a seven-step process that educators and others can use in dialogues and activities focused on racism, classicism, sexism, heterosexism, and other forms of bias, prejudice, and discrimination.
#Paul gorski equity detours professional#
Gorski and Pothini are advocates of the “case method,” which entails groups discussing and analyzing hypothetical scenarios, usually based on actual real-life events, in ways that allow them to apply theoretical ideas, such as equity or justice, to everyday problems and situations they are likely to encounter in their professional practice. Co-authored by Paul Gorski and Seema Pothini, Case Studies on Diversity and Social Justice Education (Second Edition) features a variety of nuanced examples of inequity and injustice in schools presented as narrative case studies.