Anti-Racist Teaching Practices and Learning Strategies

Building anti-racist, anti-oppressive and decolonized teaching and learning practices through transforming knowledge, lesson preparation, classroom management, teaching strategies and assessment.

Why Anti-Racist Teaching and Learning Practices? Why Now?

"In a racist society, it is not enough to be non-racist, we must be anti-racist" - Angela Davis

"Justice is what love looks like in public" - Cornel West

This workbook is a tool of love and justice. We compiled this text to honor the lives of those before us, those with us, and those to come who continue to struggle for a dignity-centered world. The workbook is deeply imbued in our own research, teaching experiences and learning strategies developed over two decades between us. The reader is presented with theories, practices and personal narratives that reveal our own embodiments and commitments to an anti-racist and love ethic in education. We do this to encourage deep reflection through various exercises, theory and lived realities.

Anti-racism, as opposed to non-racism, is measured by the extent to which the presence of racism is challenged or maintained. We developed this workbook for those who have a basic understanding of anti-racism and for those who have an acute sense of their practice in challenging racism. It is designed to equip you with skills to think through an anti-racist lens, practice from an equitable foundation and build socially just relationships. This workbook is useful to think about and practice teaching that dismantles the systems that degrade all human beings.

This work is not original. The struggle of Black, Indigenous, People of Color and White activists for justice has laid the foundation for all anti-oppressive work. This workbook is a conduit for their brilliance and encourages every reader to seek and read the original texts mentioned throughout this book. However, while the workbook builds on this genealogy of anti-racist and anti-oppressive work globally, we do hope to offer new insights and contemporary examples of everyday practices and strategies for anti-racism and anti-oppression in your spaces.

We drew from a generous and wide-ranging body of work and thinking. We are informed by scholars, activists, students and various other knowledge producers in formalized institutional settings and outside mainstream learning institutions. Thinkers such as Danai Mupotsa (Mupotsa, 2017), bell hooks (hooks, 1994) and Pumla Gqola (Gqola, 2018) among others remind us that pedagogy doesn't only exist in the ivory towers of the academy, but rather that pedagogy is everywhere. Pedagogy is in public transport conversations, popular cultures and many other social spheres of society.