Pursuing Antiracist Organizational Change: Disrupting Racist and White Supremacist Culture in a Volunteer Education Professional Development Organization Through Self-Study

• In Event: Saturday Roundtable Session 3:05 pm
  In Roundtable Session: Education Justice and Equity: Calls for Action in the Field of Educational Change and Beyond (Table 7)

Abstract

This paper shares an intervention into the disruption of racism and white supremacy culture in a volunteer education professional development organization. Drawing on their backgrounds as teachers and members of the organization’s executive committee (EC), the authors designed and deployed a year-long program that allowed fellow EC members to surface and interrogate the ways that racist and white supremacist culture show up in the organization’s policies, practices, procedures, and norms. Through this examination of the organization’s structure and its manifestations of white supremacy and racism, the authors then engaged EC members in a recursive intervention at micro, meso, and macro levels to pursue antiracist organizational change.

Authors

• Naitnaphit Limlamai, Colorado State University

• Christina M. Ponzio, Grand Valley State University