Educating Activist Allies

A CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title 2013! Educating Activist Allies offers a fresh take on critical education studies through an analysis of social justice pedagogy in schools serving communities privileged by race and class. By documenting the practices of socially committed teachers at an urban private academy and a suburban public school, Katy Swalwell helps educators and educational theorists better understand the challenges and opportunities inherent in this work. She also examines how students responded to their teachers’ efforts in ways that both undermined and realized the goals of social justice pedagogy. This analysis serves as the foundation for the development of a curricular framework helping students to foster an "Activist Ally" identity: the skills, knowledge, and dispositions necessary to negotiate privilege in ways that promote justice. Educating Activist Allies provides a powerful introduction to the ways in which social justice curricula can and should be enacted in communities of privilege.

Six principles for leading unequivocally in ways that disrupt inequity at its roots. Fix Injustice, Not Kids and Other Principles for Transformative Equity Leadership offers a deep dive into the leadership values, commitments, and practices that help educational leaders create and sustain equitable schools and districts. Drawing from their extensive equity and inclusion work with schools, Paul Gorski and Katy Swalwell introduce key components of the equity literacy framework. They then challenge principals, equity professionals, and other K–12 leaders to embrace six guiding principles for meaningful equity leadership: • Direct confrontation: Honestly naming and directly addressing the conditions that perpetuate inequity. • Fix injustice, not kids: Avoiding deficit views, focused on "fixing" people who are marginalized, and embracing structural views, focused on eliminating inequitable conditions. • Prioritization: Reimagining policies and practices and rebuilding institutional cultures in ways that account for historical and present inequities and their ramifications. • Just access: Reconsidering what we provide equitable access to and whether it is itself equitable. • Evidence-based equity: Applying an equity lens to the ways we collect and interpret data and exercising caution about popular data collection tools and methods. • Care, joy, and sustainability: Withstanding inevitable resistance while embracing visions for love, joy, and community that cultivate and sustain transformative equity. Powerful stories from students and staff members reveal the troubling gaps between their everyday school experiences and the often high-optics, low-impact equity and diversity programs, events, and strategies embraced by school leaders. They also reveal key moments of growth as leaders learned how to deepen their equity understandings and enact more meaningful equity approaches. This thought-provoking book offers guidance to those who want to do better and are on the path to achieving some of today's most crucial goals: disrupting inequity and becoming transformative equity leaders.

This topical book explores the ally perspective in advocating for Lesbian, Gay, Bi-sexual, Transgender, Queer and Inter-sex (LGBTQI+) human rights across American, Canadian, and Australian educational contexts. This book aims to clarify the terms and dynamics of mobilizing heterosexual and cisgender privilege in the interests of promoting safe, welcoming and inclusive educational communities for all stake holders, particularly those students who self- identify as LGBTQI+. By highlighting concrete examples of allies engaged in participatory collaborative research, and by investigating the historical and theoretical dimensions of ally work more generally, this volume presents a comprehensive research account of allies’ role in education, advocacy and activism. This book will benefit researchers, academics, and educators in higher education with an interest in gender and sexuality, the sociology of education and schools and schooling more broadly. Those specifically interested in gender studies, as well as the politics of higher education, will also benefit from this book.

An inspiring instructional handbook for transforming idealism into social change The pursuit of freedom and justice is a timeless one, but new activists may not know where to begin, while more experienced ones often become jaded or fatigued. The task of constructing a new society, free from oppression and inequality, can be overwhelming. Tools for facilitating motivation, engagement, and communication can mean the difference between failure and success for activists and social movements. Educating for Action collects the voices of activists whose combined experience in confronting injustice has generated a wealth of key insights for creating social change. This practical guide explores such topics as: Community activism and direct democracy Conflict negotiation, communication, and rhetoric Law, the educational system, and lifestyle activism Social media skills, conference planning, and online organizing Written in an inspirational tone, Educating for Action consciously straddles the line between street activism and classroom instruction. Bridging the gap between these two worlds makes for an engaging and instructive manual for social justice, helping students, teachers, and larger activist communities turn their idealism into action. Jason Del Gandio is a scholar-activist and assistant professor of rhetoric and public advocacy at Temple University. He is the author of Rhetoric for Radicals: A Handbook for 21st Century Activists . Anthony J. Nocella II is a scholar-activist and senior fellow of the Dispute Resolution Institute at the Hamline Law School. He is a long-time anti-racism, youth justice, prison abolition, hip hop, animal, disability, and Earth liberation activist and has published over fifty scholarly articles and book chapters and sixteen books.

Why and how have whites joined people of colour to fight against white supremacy in the United States? What have they risked and what have they gained? For anyone who has wondered about the character, motivations, and contributions of white civil rights activists, Refusing Racism offers rich portraits of four contemporary white American activists who have dedicated their lives to the struggle for civil rights. Drawing heavily on interviews and memoirs, this volume offers honest accounts of their thoughts and experiences and shows how their commitments are central to our ongoing history. Meet the White Allies: Virginia Foster Durr, J. Waties Waring, Anne McCarty Braden, and Herbert R. Kohl.

Parents, young people, community organizers, and educators describe how they are fighting systemic racism in schools by building a new intersectional educational justice movement. Illuminating the struggles and triumphs of the emerging educational justice movement, this anthology tells the stories of how black and brown parents, students, educators, and their allies are fighting back against systemic inequities and the mistreatment of children of color in low-income communities. It offers a social justice alternative to the corporate reform movement that seeks to privatize public education through expanding charter schools and voucher programs. To address the systemic racism in our education system and in the broader society, the contributors argue that what is needed is a movement led by those most affected by injustice--students of color and their parents--that builds alliances across sectors and with other social justice movements addressing immigration, LGBTQ rights, labor rights, and the school-to-prison pipeline. Representing a diverse range of social justice organizations from across the US, including the Chicago Teachers Union and the Genders and Sexualities Alliance Network, the essayists recount their journeys to movement building and offer practical organizing strategies and community-based alternatives to traditional education reform and privatization schemes. Lift Us Up! will outrage, inform, and mobilize parents, educators, and concerned citizens about what is wrong in American schools today and how activists are fighting for and achieving change.

Teaching Autoethnography: Personal Writing in the Classroom is dedicated to the practice of immersive ethnographic and autoethonographic writing that encourages authors to participate in the communities about which they write. This book draws not only on critical qualitative inquiry methods such as interview and observation, but also on theories and sensibilities from creative writing and performance studies, which encourage self-reflection and narrative composition. Concepts from qualitative inquiry studies, which examine everyday life, are combined with approaches to the creation of character and scene to help writers develop engaging narratives that examine chosen subcultures and the author's position in relation to her research subjects. The book brings together a brief history of first-person qualitative research and writing from the past forty years, examining the evolution of nonfiction and qualitative approaches in relation to the personal essay. A selection of recent student writing in the genre as well as reflective student essays on the experience of conducting research in the classroom is presented in the context of exercises for coursework and beyond. Also explored in detail are guidelines for interviewing and identifying subjects and techniques for creating informed sketches and images that engage the reader. This book provides approaches anyone can use to explore their communities and write about them first-hand. The methods presented can be used for a single assignment in a larger course or to guide an entire semester through many levels and varieties of informed personal writing.

"This book is a collection of essays that can easily be used for professional development purposes. It has multiple perspectives in term of author identities and positions within "elite" schools and blend of research and experience made accessible for practitioners"--

This book empowers teachers to support student activists. The authors examine arguments for promoting student activism, explore state and national curriculum standards, suggest activist projects, and report examples of student individual and group activism. By offering suggestions for engaging students as activists across the K-12 curriculum and by including the stories of student activists who became lifetime activists, the book demonstrates how activism can serve to bolster democracy and be a component of rich, experiential learning. Including interviews with student and teacher activists, this volume highlights issues such as racial and immigrant justice, anti-gun violence, and climate change.