You have a duty in your role as an educator to make change. Do the work and don’t stop the conversations.

Kenneth Reid, African American Affairs, Minnesota State University, Mankato

Now that I’ve had a couple of weeks to recover from the spring semester, I thought I’d take a pass at reflecting on my previous reflection, on the “Authenticity” chapter of Josh Eyler’s How Humans Learn.

In my previous post, I wrote about my goal to make writing assignments more authentic, perhaps by tying them to experiences such as rock climbing and/or connecting my class to a TWP class. But the world has changed—significantly, again—since then. The state-sponsored oppression and murder of African American people has been going on for 400 years, of course, so that’s not new, but the extrajudicial killings of George Floyd, Aumaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor have launched a new civil rights movement, and the events of this summer will have a direct impact on all of our students. I’m wrestling now with how to connect the work of my Composition classes with the historical moment our we’re all living through, while also being sensitive not to inflict more trauma on vulnerable students. I believe it is my responsibility to confront racism directly, to challenge the inequalities built into our educational system, but I must also be careful not to do more harm.

I also plan to search for and share resources specifically about caring for students of color in rural, predominantly white institutions. (If anyone has recommendations, I’m here for ‘em.) Our students face challenges different from those in more urban and ethnically diverse areas. As an example, I rarely have more than one Black student at a time in any given class, and I know from speaking with these students that they’re often put in the impossible position of being a spokesperson for all people of color in front of a class of white students. I hope that we, as an institution, can do a better job of listening to, caring for, and educating these students, and I want to do everything I can to support those efforts.

Of course, I am not a scholar of education, criminal justice, or critical race studies. I mostly teach writing, so that’s where I’ll be focusing my efforts. On my reading list for the summer are Asao Inoue’s Antiracist Writing Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future, bell hooks’ Teaching to Transgress, and Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist. I’ll be reading more, of course, but I want to focus my reading here for now. I’m also committing myself to keeping a blog (which is where I’ll continue to post my CPLC “homework”), for my own accountability and because I want to incorporate blogging into my Comp classes, as a part of my efforts to make writing more “authentic.” I’m grateful that so many of my colleagues here are also committed to anti-racist work in and out of the classroom, and I look forward to our conversations.

The epigraph above comes from a webinar I just attended (and highly recommend), “The Effects of Police Brutality and Racism on Black Students & Professionals in Education,” presented by African American Affairs at Minnesota State University at Mankato. I’ll link the recording here once it’s posted.

I’m going to close this post with words from Asao Inoue, from his Chair’s Address to the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) in 2019, because I’m taking it to heart as a challenge to myself:

You are good people. And yet you are the problem, but you don’t want to be. Think about that for a minute. You can be a problem even when you try not to be. Sit and lament in your discomfort and its sources. Search. If our goal is a more socially just world, we don’t need more good people. We need good changes, good structures, and good work that make good changes, structures, and people.

Asao Inoue, College Composition and Communication, Dec, 2019