LAJF recently hosted “Approaches to Critical Multicultural Education” a panel featuring Gabrielle Arca ‘05,’06, co-founder of Teaching Pluralism; Dr Patty Bode, Ph.D. co-author of Affirming Diversity: The Sociopolitical Context of Multicultural Education (2018, 7th edition); Dr Tonya E. Walls, Ph.D, co-founder of Code Switch: Restorative Justice for Girls of Color, and Naika Belizaire, Youth Justice Fellow at Code Switch:  Restorative Justice for Girls of Color, and junior at Advanced Technologies Academy High School in Las Vegas, Nevada.  The panel, hosted by Program Consultant Janessa Schilmoeller ‘05,’06,’16-’19, showcased examples of teaching critical multicultural education to a broad range of students. You can catch the recording here. 

LAJF and Camp Rising Sun have been providing transformative experiences to teens from many lives experiences and cultural backgrounds for more than 90 years. This panel is part of our ongoing process to analyze, grow and transform our curriculum to reflect the evolution our program is undergoing on the ground around our values of diversity, equity and ethical global leadership. Over the last few years, this critical examination of our program has focused on confronting our history of appropriation of indigenous cultural practices that were present in some of our traditions, dating back to the 1930s. Our exploration of cultural appropriation in US summer camps and our program can be found here.  

The speakers’ experiences in educational equity and critical multicultural education span across the K-12 classroom, teacher preparation programs, Educational Leadership, community advocacy and nonprofit youth programming. Each speaker offered an introduction to their work before breaking into smaller group discussions where participants discussed the applicability of multicultural education in their workplaces or at Camp Rising Sun. You can find a summary of their remarks below: 

Dr Patty Bode,  Coordinator of Art Education at Southern Connecticut State University and co-author of Affirming Diversity, The Socio Political Context of Multicultural Education (a textbook used widely across teacher education programs in the US and around the world) 

Dr Bode’s work has been really foundational in providing teachers in teacher preparation programs with information about critical multicultural education. In her remarks, Dr Bode: 

• Highlighted that the theoretical framework of critical multicultural education is rooted in anti-racist education. 

• Offered time-lapsed glimpses of case studies of lived curriculum that provide examples of desegregating and decolonizing the curriculum. 

• Invited the audience to think about the idea that racism is not everybody's fault but it's everybody's responsibility as an entry point to gather multiple stakeholders from various communities, and reminded us of the importance of talking about the structural systemic components of racism and of taking action against it.

Gabby Arca ‘05, ‘06, Co-Founder of teachpluralism.org and teacher

Gabby Arca followed Dr Bode sharing her approach to teaching social justice in the classroom setting. Gabby focused her remarks on the importance of helping students build a lens they can then use independently when they leave the classroom. Gabby offered some guidance to build this lens: 

• Some vocabulary needs to be taught explicitly so that students can begin building a vocabulary that will allow them to access ideas. Students will have inklings based on their lived experiences, Gabby reminded us, but they need the language to access the conversations to make sense of them. 

• Schools and classrooms are great places to model community building where students can take an active role. She offered examples of how they do this in her classrooms. 

• Social-Emotional Learning is a vital part of engaging in anti-racist work with students. Students, and everyone, need to be emotionally available to have these hard conversations.  (link to our own blog)

• Once the above are in place, students are able to begin to analyze the events and structures around them. To aid them in the analysis, teachers can offer guiding questions like “who has the power?”, “why?”,  “how do I know...?” or sentence stems like “I used to think… but now I think…”. 

Dr Tanya Walls, visiting assistant professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and co-founder of Code Switch: Restorative Justice for Girls of Color (a university-school community partnership that she helped co-found). 

In her talk, Dr Walls shared a snapshot of the experiences that led her to co-found Code Switch, a multigenerational sisterhood founded by black girls and women to eradicate the inequities they faced in school and community work. Dr Walls started by encouraging attendees to connect with the ancestors and elders that inspire our equity work. She acknowledged the vital work her black teachers had done in providing her and her classmates with the windows and mirrors in which to imagine their futures, and teaching them to transgress (referencing bell hooks) 

Dr Walls spent over 15 years as a teacher in her native Oakland. There, she made the classroom a location of participatory action research and she collaborated with organizations such as the Bay Area Writing Project and the National Alliance of Black Educators before moving to work in academia in Nevada. In Nevada, frustrated with the racism she encountered in the school system, she channeled her energy into community embedded work and co-founded Code Switch to disrupt and dismantle school to confinement policies and practices in Southern Nevada. 

The last contributor was Naika Belazaire, Youth Fellow at Code Switch and student at Advanced Technologies Academy High School in Las Vegas, Nevada. Talking about her experiences as a Youth Fellow, Naika spoke about the importance of spaces like Code Switch, where black girls and women empower each other and shared some of her accomplishments: successfully advocating for the creation of an African American Studies class in her school, teaching restorative justice to other groups, founding a nonprofit organization this summer.

Code Switch is running an event on May 22nd: Virtual Youth of Color Restorative Practices Mentorship Summit, you can register here.

We hope the panelists remarks will inspire you to continue engaging in anti-racist work. The speakers shared a wealth of resources during the event, which you can find below. Many of these have newsletters or social media feeds that can be informative for a non-specialist audience. 

Resources to Continue the Conversation: 

These are some of the authors mentioned: 

James Banks, Nieto & Bode, Ladson-Billings, Geneva Gay, Carl Grant, Gholdy Muhammad, Bettina Love,  Paulo Freire, Christine Sleeter, Mary Cowhey, Ibram X Kendi, 

Websites mentioned: 

Teaching for Social Justice - https://t4sj.org

Learning for Justice - https://www.learningforjustice.org/

Teaching for Change - https://www.teachingforchange.org/

National Seed Project - https://nationalseedproject.org/impact/social-justice

Rethinking Schools - https://rethinkingschools.org/ 

Poem by Claudia Rankine - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/56848/citizen-you-are-in-the-dark-in-the-car 

Transplaining - https://www.transplaining.info

LAJF’s work regarding cultural appropriation - www.lajf.org/publications 

The Routledge International Companion to Multicultural Education (book) - https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-International-Companion-to-Multicultural-Education/Banks/p/book/9780415880787