Statement of Support: Critical Lessons About Equity Belong in Our Classrooms

A Note on Anti-Bias, Anti-Racist, Inclusive and Equitable Practices:

At The Teacher Collaborative, we unequivocally support teachers’ work to create more equitable, just, and inclusive classrooms and schools. 

We support teachers in navigating important issues such as race and equity, through a critical lens, in ways that encourage respectful participation and individual points of view while elevating work toward equity and justice for those who have been historically marginalized. Culturally Responsive Teaching and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) have been throughlines in our teacher-facing programming since we opened our doors in 2017 because these are issues teachers have always cared about and have always known to be crucial to building classroom communities that serve all students. 

We recognize that this is hard because it’s hard. To be perfectly unbiased is not possible. All individuals have biases and the best we can do is be actively aware of them, work to correct them on an ongoing basis, and commit to constant improvement. It’s also true that there are some issues where there are not two sides--to be antiracist is the only right side, to fight for equal opportunity for historically marginalized groups is the only right side.

But this is something teachers are practiced at: teachers know their job is to offer information to students that allows them to draw informed conclusions. Their job is to listen to students as they form their thoughts, and to create a classroom environment that supports open, respectful, fact-based dialogue. The classroom, when set up well, is the perfect place for students to practice skills that will benefit them throughout their lives: forming and defending opinions and having conversations with others who disagree. Teachers call this the “heavy lifting” and the goal is to set up lessons where students do the heavy lifting--the grappling, the thinking, the weighing of information and points of view--not teachers. 

We will continue to support teachers’ efforts to learn and grow personally and to bring a focus on equity and anti-bias efforts into their classrooms. We will be adding more teacher-developed content to The Art of Anti-Racist Teaching Co-Lab for Learning online space, where teachers can access teacher-authored and vetted activities and strategies. We will continue to highlight teachers who have experience and expertise in culturally responsive teaching so that their knowledge can benefit teachers and students beyond their own classrooms. 

As educator Paulo Freire said in The Politics of Education (1985), “Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.”  We are not neutral about ensuring that all teachers are provided with the tools they need to create inclusive, liberatory spaces that invite critical discourse and question the social systems that result in inequitable outcomes for the young people they teach. We are doing our own work as an organization and individually to ensure that we are ready to support teachers in this important and challenging work while acknowledging that the learning is lifelong and imperfect.