Deeper Learning 2023

What do you do when a student brings up race? Do you freeze in the moment? Change the subject? Feel some defensiveness come up? Race talks are any conversations about racism, race, or other topics where differing experiences of people of color and white people come into play. Race talks can and do emerge everywhere throughout our school day, whether we’re sitting down to intentionally do identity work together or interrupting a microaggression that happened casually in the teacher’s lounge: they may come up when the class is reading a current events article, or when students are joking around in the hallway, or even when students are talking about what they’ll wear or how they’ll style their hair for the school dance. In this session, we will dig into how racism functions in our educational spaces, learn and understand the tenets for having effective conversations about race with students and adults, and practice having race talks through role-playing a variety of scenarios.