EduCon, Addressing Privilege, and Developing Learners Through Race
When friend Audrey Watters invited me to create an EduCon session, one that would eventually run concurrently with my Sunday panel on openness and transparency in education, my first reaction was “Ugh. Do we really have to?” Then she basically says, “Well, if we don’t, then we’re chickenshit.”
Dayum.
Before I could finish shaking my fist at her, I had a list of things that, up to that point, pissed me the hell off. The lists of educators that were bereft of K-12 educators of color, the times when some educational progressives tried to tell Asian educators to fall in line with a racial epitaph just because it happened at an anti-testing rally, the temptation of Kanye West, the nonsense with the Badass Teachers Association calling for educators at the Teacher Town Hall / Education Nation 2014 when Jesse Hagopian (a Black teacher who helped lead the Seattle MAP Boycott) was speaking to his experiences in and out of the classroom, the ensuing discussions comparing