Teaching for Racial Equity & Justice:
A Message from Jody Greene, CITL Director & AVP for Teaching and Learning

For anyone still needing to be convinced that racial healing is the most pressing national issue of our times, the events at the Capitol on January 6th should make clear that we ignore the urgency of confronting and dismantling racism and white supremacy at our imminent peril. Ostensibly a protest against a putatively stolen election, everything from the carefully curated costumes of the armed insurrectionists to the incessant comparisons by Trump and his supporters to the Summer’s largely peaceful Black Lives Matter protests makes clear that this was far less about electoral politics in general than it was about trying at all costs to find a way to make permanent the anti-Black, anti-immigrant, anti-Indigenous, anti-anything-but-whiteness policies of the Trump administration. If we are not ready to do everything we can to address structural racism, the protests made clear, we may as well start preparing for life after the democratic experiment. 

I still speak with colleagues on a regular basis who say, “I teach X. I’m just not sure how to integrate antiracism into my classes.” This Summer and Fall have seen an outpouring of materials directed at all of us who teach in institutions of Higher Education in the US that make it hard to see how we can continue to maintain this posture. Educators, administrators, staff, and students at nearly every institution in the country, including our own, have created reading lists and resources for instructors on how to design courses to promote educational equity, how to support a genuinely inclusive classroom climate, how to mentor with cultural awareness and humility, and how to craft everything from our reading lists to the examples we use in STEM courses to better represent, meet, inspire, and uplift students from groups minoritized and marginalized in Higher Education. Generous thinkers have given us abundant resources. Now we need to use them.

Combating racism and practicing antiracism in Higher Education teaching and learning, including and especially right here on our own campus, is our collective responsibility, particularly for those of us who have historically benefited from and continue to benefit from our whiteness. Education is one of the most powerful tools we have to begin to craft a different–perhaps even a more hopeful–future. We look forward to working with each and every educator on campus who would like to learn more about how to transform their teaching to promote racial equity and contribute to racial justice. This work need not be done independently. We are also happy to help set up communities of practice, where you can learn from and support each other, through existing groups such as the STEM Teaching and Learning Community or in groups that have yet to come into being. We need to do better, and to hold ourselves and each other accountable, and we cannot afford to wait, but by approaching this work collectively, we stand a far better chance of both improving outcomes for our students and creating a more vibrant, welcoming, and resilient community for ourselves. 

In the words of the breathtaking poem, “The Hill We Climb,” from Amanda Gorman at the inauguration this week, we are and will continue to be defined and judged by “the past we step into and how we repair it.”

Upcoming Equity-Focused Events

New Resource! Equity in the Remote Classroom

American Indians 101 & Land Acknowledgements

Global Mentorship Program

LinkedIn Learning is Available Now

Streaming Videos Collection

Moving our Bodies / Moving Online

Daily Open Office Hours & Instructional Design Help

New Canvas Editor, Piazza, Zoom Live Transcription, & Spring Course Shells

• You will need to decide in advance whether or not the transcript will be saved after the Zoom session. 
• Some instructors may want to give students access to the transcript as a supplement to note-taking. Others may not want students to be able to download and possibly share a transcript that includes everything both the instructor and other students attending have said. For this reason, we recommend that faculty familiarize themselves with the “save transcript” settings and features before initiating a meeting that uses the live transcript function, whether for a class or other event.