Virtual Office of Educational Equity

Greetings, CSM family:

I hope that you are all well! First and foremost, I want to offer a heartfelt “thank you” for the ways in which folks worked to do the impossible. Many of you—in less than a week’s time--transitioned not only the content that you have worked diligently to create and curate, but more spectacularly, your pedagogy to an altogether new educational milieu/medium. That’s beyond impressive! I salute you. In order to maintain and strengthen the equity efforts that you are already engaged in, I am creating a virtual space, titled: CSM’s Virtual Office of Educational Equity. The goal of this online space is to provide resources for faculty as well as the entire campus community so that the educational equity efforts we have been working towards persist in this uncertain time. With that said, because of our current context, the resources housed within this virtual space will lend a perspicacious eye to the ways in which justice-centered, digitally mediated instruction can be leveraged to afford students—especially students that have disproportionately impacted by educational inequity--new opportunities to develop positive academic identities and critical agency.

This site is a work in progress. I hope to have it fully constructed by the end of this semester. In the meantime, however, there is a surfeit of resources on justice-centered online teaching available right now. Please follow the provided link to get the module titled: Equity-centered Online Resources. There are articles and videos designed to provide PD on extant practices in and on equitable online teaching and learning a well as resources for self-care and course design. Please jump right in, right now! I will continue to add resources; and, if there are topics that you would like covered in this site, please send me an email directly.

A personal note: I have taught graduate-level courses (and written about) conceptualizing, developing, and implementing equity/justice-centered pedagogy. I do not have the content level knowledge (CLK) that you wonderful educators have. However, I have spent years seeking to better understand the theory and practice of equity centered pedagogy (Social Justice Pedagogical Content Knowledge). So, if you feel that I can be a resource—please don’t hesitate to reach out.

In solidarity,

Jeremiah

Introduction

The goal of this online space is to provide resources for the entire campus community so that we can maintain and strengthen the equity efforts we are all engaged in. Because of our current context, we will lend a perspicacious eye to the ways in which digitally mediated instruction, both in and out of school, affords (and even encourages in some instances) students, who have traditionally been constrained where available identities are concerned, to re-create themselves virtually.

The Importance of Equity Educational Spaces

Equitable educational spaces afford students the opportunity to develop agency, to self-actualize. This process is important for all students. And, it is especially important for poor ethnoracially minoritized students of color (PERMSC) because for much of their educational history they have been told both implicitly and explicitly that who they are is antithetical to scholastic success (Steele, 2011). Creating spaces for self-actualization, i.e., the realization or fulfillment of one's talents and potentialities, is exigent for students that have been lead to believe that scholastic success is unrealizable because of their ethnoracial identity, socio-economic status, culture, home neighborhood, etc. (Sims, et al. ,2020). Schooling in this was designed for and still functions maintain our Nation's white supremacist based hegemonic status quo (Sims, 2018). In order to positively impact PERMSCs, we have to reimage and, ultimately, redesign the polices, practices and pedagogies that have created an educative environment where racialized inequity is made to seem natural and endemic.

Self-actualization and critical pedagogy

The process of self-actualization is a hallmark of critical pedagogy; thus, a question that underpins, even impels this online resource is this: how can we, as a campus community, develop, hone, and protect the relationship (and potential intersection/s) between digitally mediated instruction and critical, emancipatory pedagogy?

Critical pedagogy is vitally concerned with equipping students with the necessary analytical tools so that they interrogate, critically, the new and emerging technologies that exercise pedagogical influence over them (Giroux, 2011). Likewise, according to Giroux, Critical Pedagogy is a language of hope, struggle, and possibility; and, as such, it must teach students to negotiate difference and make the mission of making knowledge relevant, meaningful, and transformative. Literature supports the reality that digitally-mediated virtual spaces for PERMSCs, if thoughtfully developed, can function as a spaces for disproportionately impacted PERMSCs can explore, confront, and re-configure their identities.

Critical pedagogy and digital instruction

Therefore, the goal of this virtual space to examine the educational vista created by digital instruction. More specifically, the goal of this space is to provide resources that illuminate the interplay of social justice and emancipatory (critical) pedagogy, by critically examining issues of power and equity that are both situated and concretized in the cross-section of language and literacy and STEM education and technology. Make no mistake: access to digitally-mediated instruction is a matter of social justice. Precisely because unlike mainstream students, whose cultural and linguistic repertoires are consistent with schooling culture, poor ethnoracially minoritized students of color (PERMSC) are largely thought to come from a culture that is antithetical to scholastic success. Virtual instructional space is, by no means, an educational panacea. However, if we are committed to equity and justice, critical pedagogical approaches to online instruction hold the potential to afford these students (virtual) spaces to loosen the constraints that have limited their access to opportunities for self-actualization and agential development.

Mahiri (2017) and others have argued that digitally-mediated instruction carries the potential to extricate poor, marginalized students from the pedagogy of the oppressed. Therefore, we want to take a closer look at the ways in which digitally-mediated, virtual (educational) space, through a lens that is fixed on critical pedagogy, has the potential to simultaneously allow for and encourage PERMSC students to reimagine the identities that have hitherto been severely constrained (and perhaps off-limits).

Guiding questions

What are some of the ways in which critical pedagogy alloyed with digitally-mediated instruction can counteract the pernicious effect of race-based educational inequality?
What can be done to ameliorate the inequity that, at the present time, is inherent in access to digital literacy instruction?
How does digitally-mediated instruction move critical pedagogy closer to its goal of emancipation; more specifically, how can critical pedagogy employed via /digital literacy, allow poor, urban African American students to re-envision who they are and who they can be?
What is the potential benefit of an amalgam that features an intersection between critical pedagogy and digitally mediated literacy instruction; and, how is this a matter of social justice?Link