What is Anti-Racist Pedagogy?
Resource: Kishimoto, Kyoko. 2018. “Anti-Racist Pedagogy: From Faculty’s Self-Reflection to Organizing within and beyond the Classroom.” Race Ethnicity and Education 21 (4): 540–54.
Description: By distilling existing literature on anti-racist pedagogy into concrete suggestions and instructions for academic faculty seeking to enact anti-racism, Kishimoto provides an accessible and actionable overview of anti-racist teaching. Anti-racist pedagogy, Kishimoto argues, has three components: incorporating topics of race and inequality into the curriculum, teaching with an anti-racist approach, and organizing within and beyond the campus towards anti-racist ends. Kishimoto describes concrete examples of how each of the three components of anti-racist pedagogy might be enacted, including how faculty might reflect on their own social position and take an integrative approach to course content, how faculty can foster analytical skills on topics of race, decenter authority, empower students, and create community in the classroom, and how faculty might go beyond their individual courses to enact anti-racism in their departments or institutions. This article provides an excellent overview to existing anti-racist pedagogy literature and is a valuable resource for educators seeking to reflect and integrate anti-racism into their own teaching.
Reflection Questions:
- How might you include the voices of people of color within your syllabus? What might be an example of an integrative approach as opposed to an additive approach?
- How do you, or might you, disrupt assumptions about the ‘objectivity’ of knowledge within your classroom?
- When do you talk with your peers in your department about anti-racist teaching? How might you integrate anti-racist pedagogy and thought processes into your behavior during hiring or evaluation practices for other faculty?