Being Unapologetically Antiracist: Preparing Scholars to Survive and Thrive

• In Event: Discussing Race, Ethnicity, and Culture While Teaching Educational Psychology

Abstract

Graduate researchers and practitioners in college of education preparation programs are challenged to address needs of children, youth and families from racially and culturally different backgrounds, yet little preparation, affirmation, or information is devoted to understanding the impact of systemic racism and racial disparities. This presentation offers guidance to scholars interested in cultivating culturally competent graduate researchers and practitioners and to emerging graduate students seeking to increase their level of knowledge, skill and engagement related to race issues in academia.

Led by a professor of educational psychology and a director of graduate affairs and professor of special education, the presentation will provide insights on their research and teaching that focus on race, equity, and social justice issues within their respective programs. With over 30 years of experience in education, primarily as faculty in higher education, their lived experiences include a range of successes and memorable failures that encourage their passion to promote racial awareness, racial equity, anti-racism in education. How to do this as a graduate student, junior faculty, and pre-tenure scholar, clinical faculty or K-12 professional has been an important focus on their work. Now, more than ever as faculty members in academia, it is important to continue the race work and grow professionals who can be proactive and impactful to sustain and increase racial justice outcomes that many scholars, policy makers, and other advocates fought to achieve.

The scholars will present successful strategies for cultivating teaching and learning environments that are inclusive of individuals with varying degrees of engagement with racially sensitive content. Graduate and undergraduate students’ point of entry into race work in education, scholarship, and teaching will be different and must be respected. Racial self-awareness, personal accountability for racial attitudes and behaviors, and proactive anti-racist efforts to counter racist narratives, policies and practices that stem from systemic racism are all important aspects of the race work and the equity and social justice journey within and beyond the walls of the campus classroom and university bubble.

These scholars will share lessons learned on how to assist graduate students in developing and navigating a research agenda focused on racial issues that is aligned with one’s scholarly identity. Emerging scholars must be aware of the conventions and traditions that guide research and contribute to racist policies and practices in education and publications, such as racially oppressive editorial policies and structures that minimize and marginalize equity-oriented scholars and their race work. Scholars must be attentive to the nuances of scientific racism as a function of systemic racism. How to prepare graduate students to identify safe spaces for scholarship that is centered on racial equity will be discussed. When engaging in anti-racist scholarship, graduate students must be prepared for rejection, recovery, and reinsertion into whitewashed scholarly spaces of higher education if their race work and professional purpose involves working in the mainstream of academia. This session will include strategies to survive and thrive as a scholar who refuses to be a bystander to race issues.

Authors

• Tarek C. Grantham, University of Georgia

• Michelle F. Trotman Scott, University of West Georgia