Learning to Talk about Race and Implicit Bias in Historically White Districts: Some Guidance for Educators

Danielle Greene and Ann Jaquith wrote Learning to Talk about Race and Implicit Bias in Historically White Districts: Some Guidance for Educators for SCOPE’s district partner after the first year of the Stanford Sequoia K-12 Research Collaborative project. The paper describes various challenges that they observed as educators tried to talk together about the relationship between existing schooling practices and their different effects on students and families of different racial, ethnic, and socio-economic backgrounds. They observed that talking about race and inequities was often an uncomfortable practice and one that required both learning and unlearning.

In addition to describing the sorts of learning and unlearning that talking about race requires in predominately white districts, Danielle and Ann also offer some ideas about ways to disrupt inequities in schools, particularly in schools where the vast majority of students (and adults) are white.

Given that the vast majority (80%) of teachers in the U.S. are white, that the student population is becoming increasingly non-white, and that many schools are becoming more (not less) racially homogenous, Danielle and Ann realized that the ideas in this working paper might have broader relevance to educators beyond the district for whom this paper was originally written.

>>Read the working paper