Teaching for Racial Equity

All of us in education can find opportunities to interrupt the status quo that allows inequities to go unchallenged. In Teaching for Racial Equity: Becoming Interrupters, authors Tonya Perry, Steven Zemelman, and Katy Smith show us the way. Using Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz’s Racial Literacy Development framework, the authors demonstrate how critical love, humility, and reflection enable educators to understand their own perspectives, identify racial issues, and promote equity for their students.

Filled with inspiring and sometimes difficult conversations, the book captures the real work teachers and administrators are doing in schools today. By bringing essential perspectives and valuable strategies to the classroom, teachers lead students in learning how to listen and learn about one another’s identities and thoughtfully critique the racial inequities all around us.

Inside you will find:

• challenges teachers face in bringing fellow educators together to discuss race,
• strategies for teachers to understand their own and each other’s backgrounds through a racial lens,
• ways to learn about students’ varying needs through careful observation,
• examples of guiding students’ critical inquiry on racist conditions in their community and nationally, and
• useful tools that document systemic inequities, and lists of resources for teaching about and interrupting racism in education.

We cannot sit back and allow ourselves to perpetuate inequity. We must all become interrupters.