Finding One Real Anti-Racist Teacher
Part 1: Learning from Equity in Action
Edited by Ryan Ingram
This is the first in a series of four articles that address how the Goalbook team is making a concerted effort to learn about anti-racist teaching practices from the people who are doing it best. Through research and learning, we hope to contribute to a more racially equitable US public school system.
Continuously understanding and addressing racial inequities through anti-racist ideas and policies is a core part of furthering our vision at Goalbook:
“We empower educators to transform instruction so that ALL students succeed.”
Because the current reality is one in which different racial groups of students are, in aggregate, not being provided an equal opportunity to succeed. Goalbook cannot make progress towards its vision without also contributing to a more equitable and anti-racist school system than we have today.
As product designers, it’s our job to find useful and actionable insights to address complex and ambiguous problems so we can design real solutions for real people to achieve real outcomes. One design strategy we often use at Goalbook when faced with a “wicked problem” is to understand one real user who is living with the problem. This technique allows us to ground ideas, theories, and research in the actual experience of a living and breathing human being.
Pirette McKamey’s article in The Atlantic, What Anti-racist Teachers Do Differently, animated the various theories, philosophies, and approaches to anti-racist teaching I’d been reading about elsewhere. Here was the first black principal of San Francisco’s Mission High School, an English and history teacher for 26 years, and the co-founder and leader of the anti-racist teaching committee for over a decade, sharing passionately and in concrete detail her approach to anti-racist teaching.
What’s more, she and the school were producing positive outcomes. Outcomes of improved racial equity and success for black students that have been replicated and sustained over time.
In McKamey’s experience, those outcomes are not always uniform. The excerpt below demonstrates in the clearest terms, how different the outcomes of black students can be, even within the same school,
“I have witnessed countless black students thrive in classrooms where teachers see them accurately and show that they are happy to have them there. In these classes, students choose to sit in the front of the class, take careful notes, shoot their hands up in discussions, and ask unexpected questions that cause the teacher and other classmates to stop and think … I have seen some of these very same students walk into another teacher’s classroom, go to the last row of desks, and put their head down. I have seen them sit frozen in their seat, staring at an assignment — when earlier I had heard them make jokes, talk excitedly about the content of their history class, celebrate solving a vexing algebra equation, or shake a test tube with authority, waiting for a result.”
While there are a myriad of issues that contribute to a racially inequitable school system, McKamey’s experience demonstrated how powerful the teaching of an individual educator can be and the impact it can have on racial equity or inequity. Therefore, Goalbook’s focus in contributing to a more anti-racist school system is to empower educators to practice anti-racist teaching.
This focus pushed us to learn more about anti-racist teaching and what universal principles were foundational across various research frameworks, perspectives, and practitioners. I’ll explore this further in the second part of this series.
Read part two of this series on Learning From Equity In Action.
Follow our publication Innovating Instruction to stay up to date on all our product updates and to read about the impact Goalbook is having on our partner districts.
Bibliography
- McKamey, Pirette. “What Anti-Racist Teachers Do Differently.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 9 Sept. 2020, www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2020/06/how-be-anti-racist-teacher/613138/.
