9 Applying Digital Racial Literacy in Computer Science Education
Lloyd M. Talley and Computer Science Educational Justice Collective
Chapter Overview
This chapter offers two tools to develop digital racial literacy in computer science (CS) and CS education (CS Ed). First, the chapter introduces and explores Howard Stevenson’s (2014) Racial Encounter Coping Appraisal Socialization Theory (RECAST) model by applying the model to a case study of a CS classroom experience. Second, the chapter considers digital racial literacy as a form of social and emotional learning. It offers examples of therapeutic techniques and practices that can be used in CS classrooms to support CS educators and their students in navigating racial stress and trauma. This chapter is intentionally written for self-reflective practice in community with others. It is highly recommended that the chapter is read and discussed individually and with colleagues or critical friends to pause, reflect, and identify steps to take action.
Chapter Objectives
After reading this chapter, I can:
- Explain what the RECAST framework is and identify ways to apply this framework to develop digital racial literacy.
- Explain why digital racial literacy can be understood as social-emotional learning and identify therapeutic practices that can be used to develop digital racial literacy.
Key Terms:
digital racial literacy; intercultural competence; racial-ethnic; racial literacy; racial self-efficacy; RECAST framework; social-emotional learning; therapeutic practices
Kwame’s Story
This chapter offers tangible strategies to apply the theories of digital racial literacy introduced in Chapter 8 to the day-to-day work of CS teaching and learning. First, we provide a framework (RECAST) for navigating racial encounters in the classroom (Stevenson, 2014). Second, we consider how developing digital racial literacy is also social-emotional work and explore how teachers can leverage therapeutic techniques to support digital racial literacy development. To get started, let’s meet Kwame, an eighth grade CS teacher.[1]
Kwame’s Story
In the wake of the George Floyd murder, eighth grade CS teacher Kwame noticed that his students were distracted.[2] Some expressed feelings of anger and hopelessness during private conferences after his lesson. Disturbed by his students’ sadness and also angered by the killing himself, Kwame wanted to do something to address his students the next day.
That evening, he silenced his social media accounts, went for a long-needed jog, made his favorite dinner, and journaled reflectively for thirty minutes about his thoughts on the situation. Then, he drew up a brief lesson plan.
The next day, Kwame began his classes with an emotion cloud and a stress barometer to get a sense of his students’ feelings. He also held a moment of silence. Then, pulling from his reflective journal, Kwame discussed his feelings of sadness and distress over the George Floyd murder and connected it to the killings of Emmett Till and Rodney King.[3] Kwame used a write-pair-share activity to have students express their emotions in regard to the strategy. For the writing portion, he encouraged artistic expression using poems and narrative writing and tools like p5[4] on sites created with html and CSS. Kwame then encouraged students to use their responses to express their feelings and perspectives in an impromptu George Floyd Mattered Town Hall activity. After the Town Hall, Kwame’s students wanted to take action to support the memory of George Floyd in their own school and in the community.
The following week, Kwame hosted an in-class Action Brainstorm Bonanza and Unconference to facilitate student thinking on collective action they could take. These activities resulted in students writing emails and letters to their city council and to Congress, advocating for a change to their school’s discipline policies and establishing a Black Lives Matter youth group at his school.
You’ll return to Kwame’s story later to consider the steps that he took to foster his own and his students’ digital racial literacy. We turn now to a framework that can help us consider how to develop digital racial literacy in CS classrooms like Kwame did.
The RECAST Framework
As CS continues to grow as a field, educators may wonder, how can we possibly combat systemic racism from our classrooms?[5] The CS students of today are the industry and field leaders of tomorrow. This means they, and we, have great power to re-define and re-make the cultures of the technology industry. Amid the complexities and challenges, there is a resounding call to action for CS educators. Beyond the theoretical discussions, this chapter is a call to engage, to question, and to guide students toward a more informed and conscientious interaction with technology through developing digital racial literacy. As discussed in Chapter 8, digital racial literacy involves:
- Developing students’ awareness of the role of human bias in shaping algorithmic bias and the ways in which racially marginalized communities are represented in and threatened by current and existing technologies.
- Preparing students and colleagues to manage the emotions they will face as they interact with CS products and possible workplace experiences that embed racism.
- Empowering students to critique the impact of technologies on their communities and in their daily lives and empowering students to use technology to disrupt systems of oppression and galvanize their communities.
There are many tools that can be used to support CS teachers and students to develop digital racial literacy. The RECAST framework from Howard Stevenson (2014) is one model that helps explain the relationship among racial encounters, socialization messages (see Table 1 in Chapter 8), and our coping responses to stressful situations. According to Stevenson, overcoming our biases and improving our reactions to racial encounters requires ongoing practice and can’t be resolved just through accumulating knowledge.
The RECAST framework offers a practical approach to addressing racial stress and trauma in the CS classroom. The framework has three key components: READ, RECAST, and RESOLVE.
- READ focuses on developing an historical and factual awareness of race and racial politics, and your own racial identity.
- RECAST aims to manage and cope with racial stress and trauma.
- RESOLVE focuses on addressing and taking action against the root causes of racial tension and trauma.
Let’s look more closely at how we can apply this framework to the practice of digital racial literacy in CS Ed.
In the READ component, CS teachers can educate themselves about the impacts of issues like algorithmic bias, cyber surveillance, and workplace discrimination in the world. Educators can explore — individually and with their students — the underlying biases that shape the design and implementation of computer systems and software and seek to understand how these biases can marginalize certain groups. Additionally, teachers can work to create a classroom environment that values diversity and inclusivity, where students can feel comfortable expressing their experiences with racial bias in tech.
In the context of RECAST, the increasing use of social media/forums and online communication (e.g., internet, dark web) has created a new source of racial stress for many students. Online racial interactions, such as cyberbullying, trolling, and hate speech can cause significant emotional distress and trauma. Teachers can help students develop coping strategies to manage these stressors, such as mindfulness techniques and therapeutic strategies. They can also encourage students to seek support from counselors or mental health professionals.
Finally, the RESOLVE component of the framework emphasizes the importance of social action and taking steps to address the root causes of racial stress and trauma. In the context of CS, this can involve advocating for greater diversity and inclusivity in the tech industry, challenging the underlying biases in algorithms and computer systems, and promoting social justice.
It is important to note that the growing reliance on virtual communication and technology can also hinder youths’ development of in-person social skills and engagement in collective action. Therefore, teachers can also encourage their students to engage in community-based activism and civic activity, helping them build the skills necessary to make a difference in the world. Through these efforts, CS teachers can help students develop the tools and strategies needed to effectively manage and respond to racial stress and trauma in their personal and professional lives.
The socialization that occurs throughout the course of our lives and the coping responses we develop through our experiences shape what Stevenson defines as racial self-efficacy, or our belief that we can cope with and manage racial-ethnic encounters in everyday life (Stevenson, 2014). As educators develop their digital racial literacy by building ongoing awareness, managing their emotional responses, and committing to promoting social justice through CS, they are better prepared to support their students to do the same. To foster your own and your students’ racial self-efficacy, it is essential to focus on developing digital racial literacy as an ongoing practice, including how to address stressful racial-ethnic encounters in the moment.
Applying the RECAST Framework in the Classroom
CS educator Brandie teaches at a predominantly white school in a district that prioritizes developing students’ digital racial literacy.[6] A few years ago, the district started an initiative to develop a curriculum that highlights the racial and cultural challenges of marginalized groups to elevate the voices of those whose stories are not often told. Brandie’s fifth grade students read Ghost Boys by Jewell Parker Rhodes. The novel was inspired by Tamir Rice and includes Emmett Till as a character.[7] Brandie described the novel as “definitely a hard read. The first page starts with the character’s internal monologue as he lays on the ground dying after having just been shot.” Recognizing the racial stress and trauma that this novel would raise for students, Brandie’s fifth grade team used the RECAST framework to support their students’ digital racial literacy as they engaged with the text. In Table 1, Brandie shares what she did as she taught the novel.
Table 1
Applying the RECAST Framework in the Classroom
| RECAST Element | Classroom Application |
|---|---|
| READ | Parents were notified in our monthly newsletter that we were getting ready to read the book so they could familiarize themselves with the story and the themes within the book. We wanted to allow space and time for parents to introduce or discuss topics with their child that felt important to their family before we began reading. We were hopeful that this initial invitation would lead parents to check in and support their child throughout the unit as well.
I reached out directly to the parent of the one Black girl in my class to make her aware that the book might be particularly challenging for her daughter, considering the discomfort that her daughter had already shown in previous lessons regarding historical racism and discrimination against Black people. Before we began reading the book in class, I sent a copy of the book home for her parents to read themselves, so that they could familiarize themselves with the story and even read the first chapter with their daughter. I hoped this would provide a safe space for her to initially discuss her feelings and consider what she thought might be helpful for her as coping strategies if she were to develop big emotions while in class. |
| RECAST | At the end of reading the first scene, I knew the students would be disturbed and upset. I used a mood meter to help the students identify and name their feelings. I gave them a moment to sit with their feelings before asking questions that allowed them to share their thoughts, feelings, and questions in open discussion. The mood meter was an important reflection and check-in tool that I used at parts of the story that I thought were emotionally challenging. I asked students to raise their hands to identify which color of the meter they were in. I also asked if they wanted to continue reading or if they needed time to pause and write.
I bought a special notebook for this unit that students used to write in as they read. The journal was for them, to help them process the story by drawing or writing their feelings, questions, ideas, etc. Additionally, at the end of each day’s reading, or at significant parts of the story, I asked students to answer questions. Some of the questions were about their feelings and some were about their thoughts and understanding of the story. There were a few times in the unit, such as when the character Emmett Till told the story of his death, that we did a “Chalk Talk.” Students sat in groups at tables that had a large piece of chart paper, and they shared their reactions with each other silently by writing on the paper. They read the reactions of others in their group and responded silently by drawing lines to connect and then write their responses. It provided a different way for students to express themselves, process their feelings and the feelings of others, and respond to each other. It’s a very powerful outlet for the kids to express their feelings and develop empathy as they learned the feelings of their classmates. |
| RESOLVE | At the end of the unit, students had a choice project in which they could choose the genre and media they wanted to use to respond to the book. Some students wrote poems or did art. Although coding a Scratch project was an option, not many students had strong enough coding skills to efficiently complete a program like that. There was a big showcase and fifth grade classes from schools across the district got to share their work with each other. |
Now that you have read Brandie’s experience, reflect on the examples she shared. Where do you notice the different elements of the RECAST framework? How did Brandie develop an awareness of racial stress and trauma for herself? For her students? How did she plan to manage and cope with her own and her students’ stress? How did the unit allow students to address and take action against racial tension and trauma?
Digital Racial Literacy as Social-Emotional Learning
Because a key component of the RECAST framework involves managing and coping with stress related to racial-ethnic encounters, CS teachers need strategies and approaches to help manage stress. This section considers how to do this in the CS classroom by considering how digital racial literacy can be considered social-emotional learning (SEL). SEL refers to learning skills and behaviors to develop healthy identities, manage emotions, and maintain healthy and supportive relationships (Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning [CASEL], n.d.).
Reflection 1: Delving Deeper
- How can digital racial literacy be understood as a form of social-emotional learning?
- How do I improve my capacity to address racial issues in technology in caring, sensitive, and healthy ways?
With the technology industry’s narrow focus on products and efficiency, issues of emotional and social participation can be overlooked. Similarly, in CS, it is also easy to narrowly focus on students’ computational thinking and abilities with little regard to their social-emotional competencies.
However, this narrow focus on computational abilities leaves us with a major challenge. It produces technologists who do not understand the human experience and may not have the ability to build technologies that appreciate human diversity. To address this, CS educators must be proactive and intentional in how they support their students’ social-emotional capacities while also developing their computational faculties.
Recognizing feelings related to racial-ethnic encounters as a response to stress rather than as an inability to deal with the issues overall is a key starting place to resolving them. Our CS students today are the CS leaders and workforce of tomorrow and will shape the future of human-technological interaction. With this in mind, developing our students’ sociocultural awareness and respect for the contributions and experiences of racial-ethnic minorities in the field is key to a more equitable tech landscape. Even students who may not be inclined to seek a career in CS must be equipped with a basic digital racial literacy to promote racial justice in society.
While SEL programs are typically framed as a broad strategy to promote students’ executive functioning and emotional management, digital racial literacy can be leveraged as a specific and targeted form of SEL to address racial-ethnic inequities and disparities in technology fields and in CS Ed. Applying strategies that promote historical accuracy and intercultural competence, emotional management, and social/civic empowerment to CS instruction is the cornerstone of an ethical and sensitive practice of digital racial literacy in CS Ed (Talley, 2022). By integrating a digital racial literacy mindset into tech education, we can achieve several learning objectives:
- Building students’ cultural humility and empathy toward multicultural influences in tech.
- Preparing students for experiences of stress and discrimination that may impact their lives as tech consumers and employees.
- Providing students with the technical and civic skills to resist and respond to racial-ethnic inequities exacerbated by technologies and producers.
To develop digital racial literacy as a form of social-emotional learning in CS classrooms, educators need strategies to navigate moments of racial stress that will arise when seeking to promote equity-oriented instruction. Because CS and technology are sites where youth develop racial identities and are racially socialized, we must remain aware of and continually attend to how our students interact with technology and its racial implications.
This question defines your practice of digital racial literacy in the CS classroom. The RECAST theory of digital racial literacy pushes us to recognize our ability to respond to these moments or “encounters” by creating an ongoing and intentional practice of recognizing, processing, and responding to these moments.
Using counseling-based strategies can help educators incorporate digital racial literacy into the CS classroom as a form of social-emotional learning. The use of therapeutic practices can create a supportive classroom environment and scaffold students’ preparedness to discuss topics of race. Common SEL therapeutic practices include active listening, creative expression, controlled breathing, debate, journaling, mindful relaxation, peer co-counseling, role play and drama, self-care, and storytelling. These techniques and how they can support developing digital racial literacy in CS Ed are described below.
Social-Emotional and Therapeutic Practices to Develop Digital Racial Literacy in CS Ed
Active Listening
Active listening involves paying close attention to what someone is saying, asking questions to clarify understanding, and repeating the speaker’s statements to ensure comprehension. Developing a practice of active listening scaffolds empathy development, patience, and the management of emotionally charged responses. Active listening can help students build stronger relationships with peers, teachers, and other community members and helps promote an inclusive classroom environment.
Creative Expression
Creative expression refers to conveying knowledge, emotions, and ideas through mediums such as art, coding, dance, music, and writing. Encouraging creative expression can allow students to explore their emotions and experiences related to racial-ethnic bias in a safe and supportive environment.
Controlled Breathing
Practicing controlled breathing exercises can help students regulate their emotions and manage stress related to racial-ethnic bias. One example of a controlled breathing technique is CLCBE (Calculate, Locate, Communicate, Breathe, and Exhale), developed by Stevenson. This skill is particularly helpful for recasting racial stress and trauma. It involves calculating your stress level on a scale of one to ten, locating where you feel the stress in your body, and communicating what you are saying to yourself during the moment. You then breathe in for four counts and exhale for six counts to allow yourself time to pause, become mindful, and decide how to respond (Ravitch, 2020; Rosati, 2020)
Debate
Debate can involve creating space for individuals to express and articulate differing perspectives on challenging topics. Facilitating debate in an emotionally supportive environment allows students to enhance their argumentation and advocacy skills while promoting comfort in assertiveness and public engagement.
Journaling
Journaling involves recording personal thoughts, feelings, and experience in some way. Journaling supports mindful and constructive self-reflection and allows for a non-judgmental space for students to examine their awareness of and feelings about issues of inequity in and with technology.
Mindful Relaxation
Practicing mindfulness and relaxation techniques such as meditation, yoga, or progressive muscle relaxation can promote emotional well-being and reduce stress and anxiety related to racial-ethnic bias.
Peer Co-Counseling
Peer-to-peer sharing of strategies for coping with and addressing racial-ethnic bias allows students to expand their emotional vocabulary while providing space for collective thought and collaborative action.
Role Play and Drama
Role-playing and drama exercises allow students to explore different perspectives and experiences related to racial-ethnic bias while developing communication and empathy skills.
Self-Care
Self-care involves taking action to care for yourself holistically, in all aspects of your personal well-being and happiness, particularly in times of stress. What self-care looks like is different for each individual, and it might encompass emotional, mental, physical, social, and spiritual facets of life. In the classroom, this might look like extending radical compassion to students and noticing students’ body language as a signal of potential needs (Ravitch, 2020).
Storytelling
Storytelling can promote students’ self-expression and help them understand their own experiences with more clarity. Listening to the stories of others can promote intercultural competence and awareness of other experiences.
Integrating these practices into CS instruction can enable educators to sensitively engage students with race-related CS knowledge. Educators can also use these strategies for themselves as they prepare to engage with these topics with students or colleagues.
Applying Therapeutic Practices in the Classroom
Brandie drew on therapeutic practices to support her students throughout the Ghost Boys unit. She was acutely aware of the racial stress that this unit surfaced and incorporated some of the practices described above into her instruction to support students’ digital racial literacy as social-emotional learning. Table 2 illustrates how Brandie integrated these practices into the unit.
Table 2
Applying Therapeutic Practices in the Classroom
| Therapeutic Practice(s) | Classroom Application |
|---|---|
| Controlled breathing and mindful relaxation | During the Ghost Boys unit, the students read an article about the Tamir Rice shooting to help them prepare for the introductory scene in the book where the character is on the ground dying from just having been shot. Afterwards, I did a breathing meditation activity with the students in which they closed their eyes, imagined a balloon, filled it with all of their negative feelings, and imagined it floating away out of sight. Many of the students leaned into the experience and appreciated the quiet time.
Afterwards, I asked if they thought it helped them calm down and feel more in control of their emotions. The reception was mixed, so I didn’t try it again. Instead of doing guided visualizations, I just allowed the students at least a minute of quiet time after difficult scenes because the opportunity to sit silently and think freely in order to process their thoughts and feelings was what they seemed to enjoy most about the visualization experience. |
| Creative expression | The creative expression aspect of the work came through more in the final project of the unit, so it was more of a resolve activity than a recast activity. Students were given the freedom to choose whatever type of media they wanted and an open opportunity to respond to the text. Although creative expression is presented in the recast section of the framework, for elementary students, giving them some kind of creative project to share their ideas and educate others on the topic they’ve learned is arguably age-appropriate advocacy/action work as well, which I think can also be considered a resolve activity. |
| Journaling | Journaling was used throughout the unit when we read Ghost Boys as a class. The book was read entirely as a shared read aloud. Students had their own copy of the book, which allowed them to read along as I read aloud. Having their own copy let them refer to text details as they reflected on scenes for journaling and as they participated in class discussions.
Reading the text as a read aloud felt important for being able to support the students with the particularly difficult parts of the story. For example, when the main character is experiencing his death in the first chapter, I definitely wanted everyone to stop reading as soon as that scene was over, to help them process, as opposed to just continuing to read at their own pace and not giving that scene the emotional space and processing that it needs. When the journal was introduced, students were told that this was their private place to jot whatever came up for them as we read. Unlike their reader’s notebook, which they knew I looked at to assess their comprehension, the journal gave them the freedom and privacy to release and/or explore whatever came up for them. It was clear that most of the students really used their journal as their processing space. As we read, you could see kids’ faces reflect their emotions or hear kids react with a gasp or a “what?!” When they were sparked by something, they would immediately open their journal and begin writing or drawing. In the pauses after reading, students recorded quickly in their journal as well because I always gave them a few minutes of quiet time to think and journal before we had any kind of discussion. At the end of the unit, the students took their journals home. I think the journals gave kids a private and unstructured space to express themselves, which is rare because for so much of their class work, we ask them to be so structured. |
Take a moment again to reflect on Brandie’s experiences. How did Brandie tailor these practices for her students’ specific needs? Which practices that she described could apply in your own context? What additional supports might you need?
Revisiting Kwame’s Story
We close this chapter with an invitation for you to revisit Kwame’s story and consider how he applied the concepts presented in this chapter. After you reflect, you can find commentary on Kwame’s story from the chapter author in Resource 1.
Activity 1: Kwame’s Story — George Floyd Mattered
After learning about the RECAST framework for racial literacy, read Kwame’s story again. Then read the reflection prompts to identify which elements Kwame embodied in his story.
Kwame’s Story: (Reprinted from above)
In the wake of the George Floyd murder, eighth grade CS teacher Kwame noticed that his students were distracted. Some expressed feelings of anger and hopelessness during private conferences after his lesson. Disturbed by his students’ sadness and also angered by the killing himself, Kwame wanted to do something to address his students the next day.
That evening, he silenced his social media accounts, went for a long-needed jog, made his favorite dinner, and journaled reflectively for thirty minutes about his thoughts on the situation. Then, he drew up a brief lesson plan.
The next day, Kwame began his classes with an emotion cloud and a stress barometer to get a sense of his students’ feelings. He also held a moment of silence. Then, pulling from his reflective journal, Kwame discussed his feelings of sadness and distress over the George Floyd murder and connected it to the killings of Emmett Till and Rodney King. Kwame used a write-pair-share activity to have students express their emotions in regard to the strategy. For the writing portion, he encouraged artistic expression using poems and narrative writing and tools like p5 on sites created with html and CSS. Kwame then encouraged students to use their responses. Kwame then encouraged students to use their responses to express their feelings and perspectives in an impromptu George Floyd Mattered Town Hall activity. After the Town Hall, Kwame’s students wanted to take action to support the memory of George Floyd in their own school and in the community.
The following week, Kwame hosted an in-class Action Brainstorm Bonanza and Unconference to facilitate student thinking on collective action they could take. These activities resulted in students writing emails and letters to their city council and to Congress, advocating for a change to their school’s discipline policies and establishing a Black Lives Matter youth group at his school.
Reflection Prompts:
- READ: What did Kwame do to be aware of and sense (apprise) the upcoming racial moment in his classroom?
- RECAST: How did Kwame acknowledge the stressfulness of the situation and attend to the social-emotional needs of himself and his students?
- RESOLVE: How did Kwame and/or his students address or take action to reconcile the inequalities and injustice in their school or society?
- REASSESS: What affirmation, advice, or support would you offer Kwame moving forward?
- Which therapeutic techniques did Kwame use in his situation? Which additional techniques might be appropriate to use in his situation?
Reflection Questions:
- After reading this chapter, what stands out to you about the importance of integrating a digital racial literacy mindset into CS Ed?
- One reality of developing digital racial literacy is that it requires you as an educator to become aware of, manage, and address your own racial stress as a key part of supporting your students to do the same. What resources are available to you in your context to support you in doing this work? What other supports might you need?
Takeaways for Practice:
- Select a CS unit, lesson, or activity. Analyze it using the RECAST framework. Consider where you are already incorporating aspects of the framework and where you can make changes to more fully address racial stress and trauma.
- Using the same unit, lesson, or activity from above, identify at least one therapeutic practice that you could incorporate to support students’ digital racial literacy as a form of social-emotional learning.
Glossary
References
Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning. (n.d.). What is the CASEL framework? https://casel.org/fundamentals-of-sel/what-is-the-casel-framework/
Ravitch, S. M. (2020, August 11). Why teaching through crisis requires a radical new mindset. Harvard Business Publishing Education. https://hbsp.harvard.edu/inspiring-minds/why-teaching-through-crisis-requires-a-radical-new-mindset
Rosati, J. (2020, October 22). Recasting the moment: Professor Howard Stevenson on creating change through racial literacy. Penn GSE Magazine. https://www.gse.upenn.edu/news/recasting-moment-professor-howard-stevenson-creating-change-through-racial-literacy
Stevenson, H. (2014). Promoting racial literacy in schools: Differences that make a difference. Teachers College Press.
Talley, L. M. (2022). Exploring equity in computer science pilot series (EECS Pilot): Program plan and curriculum. New York City Department of Education. https://sites.google.com/schools.nyc.gov/cs4all-equity/eecs/eecs
Resource 1: Author Commentary on Kwame’s Story
Author Commentary on Kwame’s Story
The table below provides commentary by the chapter author, offering some possible answers to the questions from the concluding activity in the chapter.
Kwame’s Story: (Reprinted from above)
In the wake of the George Floyd murder, eight grade CS teacher Kwame noticed that his students were distracted. Some expressed feelings of anger and hopelessness during private conferences after his lesson. Disturbed by his students’ sadness and also angered by the killing himself, Kwame wanted to do something to address his students the next day.
That evening, he silenced his social media accounts, went for a long-needed jog, made his favorite dinner, and journaled reflectively for thirty minutes about his thoughts on the situation. Then, he drew up a brief lesson plan.
The next day, Kwame began his classes with an emotion cloud and a stress barometer to get a sense of his students’ feelings. He also held a moment of silence. Then, pulling from his reflective journal, Kwame discussed his feelings of sadness and distress over the George Floyd murder and connected it to the killings of Emmett Till and Rodney King. Kwame used a write-pair-share activity to have students express their emotions in regard to the strategy. For the writing portion, he encouraged artistic expression using poems and narrative writing and tools like p5 on sites created with html and CSS. Kwame then encouraged students to use their responses to express their feelings and perspectives in an impromptu George Floyd Mattered Town Hall activity. After the Town Hall, Kwame’s students wanted to take action to support the memory of George Floyd in their own school and in the community.
The following week, Kwame hosted an in-class Action Brainstorm Bonanza and Unconference to facilitate student thinking on collective action they could take. These activities resulted in students writing emails and letters to their city council and to Congress, advocating for a change to their school’s discipline policies and establishing a Black Lives Matter youth group at his school.
Reflection Prompts:
- READ: What did Kwame do to be aware of and sense (apprise) the upcoming racial moment in his classroom?
-
Kwame demonstrated his awareness of the situation as he …
-
Noticed that his students were distracted and that some expressed feelings of anger and hopelessness.
-
Connected his reflections about George Floyd to the killings of Emmett Till and Rodney King.
-
-
- RECAST: How did Kwame acknowledge the stressfulness of the situation and attend to the social-emotional needs of himself and his students?
-
Kwame managed his own and his students’ emotions by …
-
Using his reflective journal to discuss his feelings of sadness and distress over George Floyd’s murder.
-
Silencing his social media accounts, going for a jog, making a favorite meal, and journaling.
-
Having students write an emotion cloud and a stress barometer.
-
Holding a moment of silence.
-
Using a write-pair-share activity to have students express their emotions about the tragedy.
-
Encouraging artistic expression to express their emotions.
-
-
- RESOLVE: How did Kwame and/or his students address or take action to reconcile the inequalities and injustice in their school or society?
-
Kwame and his students addressed the issue in their local and broader community by…
-
Encouraging students to host an impromptu George Floyd Mattered Town Hall.
-
Hosting an Action Brainstorm Bonanza and Unconference.
-
Having students write emails and letters to the city council and Congress.
-
Advocating for a change to school discipline policies.
-
Establishing a Black Lives Matter youth group.
-
-
- REASSESS: What affirmation, advice, or support would you offer Kwame moving forward?
- Kwame might celebrate the actions that he and his students have already taken and continue to engage in self-care and checking in with his students about their social-emotional needs.
- Which therapeutic techniques did Kwame use in his situation? Which additional techniques might be appropriate to use in his situation?
-
To manage his own emotions, Kwame engaged in journaling and practiced self-care by silencing his social media, going for a jog, and making a favorite dinner. He supported his students by engaging them in creative expression.
Kwame might also have found it beneficial for himself and for his students to engage in controlled breathing exercises and mindful relaxation. He could also consider inviting students to engage in storytelling about their experiences and emotions and leading the students in his Black Lives Matter youth group through peer co-counseling activities.
-
- This vignette was developed with Kwame’s permission. ↵
- See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_George_Floyd ↵
- See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmett_Till and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rodney_King ↵
- The tool can be found at https://p5js.org ↵
- We recognize that racism also encompasses ethnic conflict and prejudice based on ethnicity. In this chapter, when we refer to race, we include ethnicity in that discussion. The term “racial-ethnic” is used to emphasize this relationship. ↵
- See the On Terminology section of this guide for an explanation on our use of different identity-related terms ↵
- See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Tamir_Rice and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emmett_Till ↵
