Let’s Talk!
This year the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC invited educators to come together for 5 days, from July 10-14th, for a conference called Let’s Talk!: Teaching Race in the Classroom, to discuss strategies for generating dialogue about race within educational settings. During the week, attendees had the opportunity to participate in lectures by experts in the fields of education, critical race studies, and child development. Situated in the beautiful recently opened NMAAHC, these lectures were coupled with museum gallery activities and small group discussions to practice pedagogy techniques.
Ms. Elizabeth Peralta and Ms. Chantee Parris-Strigle attended this Professional Learning Event. Attendees of all racial backgrounds discussed how racism impacted them personally, and how and when they came to realize they had a racial identity.
Race in the Classroom
The learned about how children pick up racial bias from authority figures, and how to address this when it arises in an academic context. They studied the characteristics of whiteness as a category of identity, considered the realities of implicit bias even among people of color, and discussed the importance of self-care when experiencing the effects of racism in society. For Ms. Peralta, who worked at the museum as an intern before it opened, returning for the second time as an educator (the first being last year’s SJHS field trip to the museum) provided an opportunity to reconnect with her mentors at the museum, to deepen her own learning, and to consider the ways that racism impacts the students she works with at SJHS.
“Then let justice surge like water” (Amos 5:24)
“When we give in to our fears of the other because he or she is of a race different from ourselves…we fail to heed the command of the Prophet Amos: ‘Seek good and not evil, that you may live; then truly will the Lord… be with you as you claim!… Then let justice surge like water, and goodness like an unfailing stream.’ (Amos 5:14,24)”
“Brothers and Sisters to Us”: US Catholic Bishops Pastoral Letter on Racism, 1979.
Ms. Parris-Strigle saw many connections to the lessons on social sin that she has with her religion students at SJHS. The idea of social sin derives from God’s covenants with Israel in the Old Testament — when the society as a whole came to tolerate a particular evil such as oppression of the poor, of orphans, widows and immigrants, God would send a prophet, such as Amos, Jeremiah and Isaiah, who would remind the people of their collective infidelity to God and call them back to the path of justice and mercy.
Nat Turner’s Bible
What’s Next?
Ms. Peralta and Ms. Parris-Strigle hope to be able to take the students to the museum for longer in future – ideally for a week long camp, so they could have a chance to experience the entire museum and participate in the educational programs there.
Connections they made at the conference are already leading to future PD workshops at SJHS with instructors from the NMAAHC, which will serve to help us understand race and racism in our own educational context.