Yesterday was the first time I’ve seen my colleagues in my school building since March. I can’t even begin to tell you how it fed my heart and soul to see them in person! But being together after a long quarantine summer also means that we continue our individual and collective work as anti-racist educators who continuously seek to diversify our curriculum and teaching to include all voices in our community and beyond.
The tool we are using to begin our year is self-reflection. The world is upside down right now, and we can’t even begin to help our students if we can’t figure out where we are or acknowledge how we are feeling in the given moment. At the sound advice of Facing History, Facing Ourselves, we reflected on our teaching philosophies, our feelings about COVID-19 and being in the building, what we learned during our first go at distance learning from March through May (we are hybrid this year), and we explored our identities. Our department meeting was weighty, but it is necessary work that we need to return to again and again.
I’d like to particularly point out the importance of exploring identity- both for yourself and for your students. We all need to do some self-exploration before we join our classes. Small work can be done daily, such as during lesson planning when we ask “Whose voice is missing from this lesson/unit and what can I do better next time I plan?” Other self-reflection can be done in more depth by carving out time for it. For example, we can ask ourselves “What is it about my identity that causes blind spots in my teaching and learning? What can I do to help me identify those blind spots, since I don’t always know what I can’t see?” I promise you, asking these questions and reflecting upon who you are and what you bring to the table- both positive and negative- is going to make you a better educator.
As educators, we can also reflect on our prejudices and biases- we all have them- and how those prejudices and biases are reflected in our teaching. What’s really great about human beings is that we can change. If we realize that we need to adjust our behaviors or take notice of some things we do or think or say, we can do better, and we have to for all of our students!
The link to the Facing History self-reflection guide I used with my department is below. I encourage you to take a look on your own or with other teachers. It is a great way to get yourself ready for the year ahead, to better inform your teaching, and to come back to throughout the year to see where you are on your path to becoming an anti-racist, anti-bias educator.