Keywords

The idea for this chapter emerged following our town hall discussion for the Science Educators for Equity, Diversity, and Social Justice (SEEDS) 2021 conference, which was broadly focused on anti-racist interventions in science and education. The town hall session was organized as a transnational conversation with panelists and participants who participated virtually from around the world. After the town hall, five of us from the panel came together to reflect further on the many topics and themes that emerged during the live session, meeting (virtually) several times over a series of months. Our conversations were open ended and focused on sharing experiences or discussing the difference between our different locations and subjectivities. Mahdis and Sara are currently based in Aotearoa New Zealand, Kelli in Valparaiso, Chile, and Huitzilin and Rasheda in the United States. We all brought our diverse geopolitical locations and positionalities to bear in our conversations about racism and science education.

Mahdis is a woman of color who has worked in Germany, Denmark, the United States, and Aotearoa New Zealand and tries to think about race and anti-racism across different contexts. As a person of color living on Indigenous land, she is interested in how to teach for justice that centers Indigenous sovereignty and how to best build solidarities across difference. Kelli is a bilingual (English-Spanish) Black woman who was born in DC and raised in Maryland. Prior to becoming an educator, Kelli worked as a freelance American Sign Language [ASL]-English interpreter in the DC metropolitan area. As a teacher educator in Chile, Kelli is interested in exploring with pre- and in-service teachers how to disrupt and counter the stock stories (Bell, 2010) that serve to maintain the status quo in education. Rasheda is a Black woman born and raised in Northwest Florida with a previous career as a medical testing scientist and research scientist in Northeast Florida. Her career path shifted after a challenging conversation with seventh-grade Black girls who questioned her identity as a scientist. She is dedicated to expanding and desettling normalized perceptions of science and scientists for K-12 students through incorporating activities such as sports and gaming, DIY hair care product making, and cooking into classroom learning. Huitzilin is a Xicana from metro Los Angeles with raíces in Michoacán and Chihuahua, Mexico. Her current research focuses on the creation and implementation of environmental justice project-based curriculum in the physical sciences. She is a doctoral student and science teacher in Wisconsin. As someone deconstructing her induction into cultural values of whiteness and Western modern science, Huitzilin strongly believes that no student should have to leave their identity at the classroom door. Sara is a whiteFootnote 1 woman from the southeastern United States (metro Atlanta), with parental roots in Appalachia and southern Louisiana, and a former science, ESOL (English to speakers of other languages), and environmental educator, now teacher educator. Sara sees her role in anti-racist education and anti-racist teacher education as part of a larger justice-oriented and critical pedagogical project which emerges from her inheritances as a white professor with institutional power, as well as through respons-able relations with (and obligations to) others.

Three of us (Rasheda, Huitzilin, and Sara) work directly in social justice-oriented science education, while two of us (Mahdis and Kelli) have expertise in anti-racism and anti-racist education more broadly. We organized our contributions to the chapter around the three overarching questions that were posed to us during the SEEDS town hall, as well as around the topics that emerged from our conversations. While each of us answered questions individually, we also responded to each other’s writing. Our transdisciplinary and transnational approach—bringing to bear a wide range of expertise among the geographically diverse group, from political science to science education, literacy education, teacher education, and social justice education—helped us engage with challenges and possibilities from a more robust and multidimensional perspective.

We encourage readers of this chapter not to engage with our conversation from the starting point of, “What does this have to do with science education?” Countless others—too many to name here—have made clear how whiteness and racism are embedded in the fabric of science and science education. And racism and white supremacyFootnote 2 are part of the ongoing sociopolitical ills that define what geologists refer to as the Anthropocene. And so we are not trying to make a case for anti-racism in science education, or why we should take on anti-racist projects as part of life and living together in the Anthropocene. (We know most of you probably don’t need us to!) Rather, our goal through these conversations was to bring our own experiences to bear on how anti-racist and social justice-driven education can be enacted and sustained, in science and education and beyond. We also found that our transnational and transdisciplinary perspective enabled us to collectively think and imagine beyond the limitations of our own disciplinary (and nationalist) socializations. Furthermore, transdisciplinary and transnational thinking are imperative, in our view, for transcending and acting upon the problems that were, in large part, created by nationalistic- and isolationist- (including within disciplines) informed action.

Question 1: What Vision Do You Have for Cultivating Anti-racist and Social Justice-Driven Education?

Rasheda::

When considering anti-racist and social justice-driven education, I would encourage one to ponder first what might it mean for them to be anti-racist personally. Understanding that racism is endemic to [U.S.] American society (Crenshaw et al., 1996), how are these ideals of racism reified through my own actions and values? By asking oneself “How are my actions upholding racism?” the solutions become deeply personal. Also, racism is a part of a larger interlocking system of oppression such that multiple identities can be experiencing oppression in one person. Therefore, considering racism as part of a largely intersectional problem to address, I think, provides an opportunity for true transformative education. My vision for cultivating a more socially just educational space would be to consider “How am I supporting oppression in my educational practices? What choices can I make toward social justice?”

Through identifying the ways in which racism is interlocking and operationalized through institutional systems and structures, I continuously seek opportunities to oppose the status quo through my personal choices in instruction by providing space for marginalized and minoritized cultures to be more broadly considered. Although these choices may not move a quantitative needle of assessment or curriculum development immediately, these choices do cultivate anti-racist and social justice education. For example, Black girls have been over-disciplined and pushed out in K-12 spaces, leading to behavioral difficulties and mental health trauma due to expectations and norms rooted in patriarchy and whiteness (Collins, 2002; Morris, 2016). The ways minoritized students experience trauma and harm through education require seeking new visions and pedagogical practices for their survival and thriving. The daily choices toward transgressing the status quo, identifying oppressive structures, shifting pedagogy toward liberation, and expanding assessment strategies support educational opportunities that are inclusive and diverse. Cultivating anti-racist and social justice-driven educations requires co-conspirators and agitators from within the educational system. However, these allies and actors would need to reimagine social justice in education for themselves first. Spaces for educators and stakeholders to interrogate the structures that continue to other and erase communities and populations would lead to identifying ways education could be broadened for all. Specifically, guided and continued conversations focused on desettling hierarchies within education across institutions, learning centers, and schools nationwide would be transformative. Also, requiring products such as strategic plans and budget justifications from these conversations would support actionable steps toward social justice. Often these conversations and meetings are a means to an end rather than tangible steps toward liberatory praxis. My vision for cultivating anti-racist and social justice-driven education requires daily choices.

Huitzilin::

When I think about anti-racist teacher education, I first think of my own experience in teacher training. I did this in an alternative certification program through a small state university, and while I’m glad I had the opportunity to obtain my certification this way, I often wonder what my education might have looked like had I had the privilege of taking two years off work to complete coursework through a daytime, in-person program at a major state university.

When I imagine a future of anti-racist and social justice-driven teacher education, I think of prospective teachers who have the potential to be amazing educators with deep knowledge about themselves and their communities, but do not have the privilege of attending high-quality training programs for financial or other reasons. The bar in a lot of places is simply too high without adequate supports for those teachers, especially as we know high-performing countries have these types of programs as a matter of course for prospective teachers (Wei et al., 2009).

Having done some research, it appears that some new programs are now in place for paid pre-licensure apprenticeships in small private colleges, and these are absolutely a step in the right direction. Creating fertile ground for “grow your own” programs, paid training, and loan-for-service programs for these prospective teachers should be the cornerstone of programs that train teachers primarily serving diverse demographics. However, the answer to this prompt or question is incomplete without a vision for student teachers from more privileged backgrounds, who still comprise a majority of prospective teachers in traditional pre-licensure programs. These teachers must learn—and quickly—that whatever their motivations for becoming a teacher are, the realities of the marginalized students they teach must be taken into account. They must make peace with the idea of, and go to war against, systemic racism starting on day one. This can be uncomfortable or even anxiety inducing, but must be done.

Lastly, a teacher’s education should not end the day a student obtains their licensure. More structured teacher induction programs, possibly as part of a district–university partnership, could function as a buffer or a sort of vaccine against first-year burnout and rates of attrition (as documented in Ingersoll et al., 2018). In short, I believe that an anti-racist and social justice teacher education program must give prospective teachers the time they need to be able to cultivate a reflective and successful practice.

Kelli::

From October 2019 to March 2020 Chile experienced a series of massive demonstrations and riots nationwide known as the Estallido Social. These demonstrations were triggered by an increase in metro fares against which high school students planned a coordinated fare evasion campaign. Although the hike in metro fares triggered the demonstrations, protests continued for more than four months due to inequalities in health care, education, and social security, among other social inequalities. In addition, in September 2021, in the north of Chile in Iquique, citizens once again took to the streets protesting the large number of undocumented immigrants crossing the border and holding signs saying “No más ilegales.” Although both the Estallido Social and the protest against the wave of undocumented immigrants entering the country have brought to the forefront many topics of injustice that plague Chilean society, there must be a concerted effort within the educational system to teach about and for social justice. This effort must start with our teacher preparation programs.

In 2014 the University of Playa Ancha in Valparaíso, Chile, like many other universities in the country, implemented changes to their program of studies. At Playa Ancha we incorporated two courses on critical pedagogy. Although this is a good start, it is far from enough. Fundamental to cultivating an anti-racist and social justice-driven educational curriculum for schools is first educating preservice teachers within an anti-racist pedagogical framework. Furthermore, teaching programs must be committed to intentionally recruiting and maintaining Black, Indigenous, and People of Color [BIPOC] educators and educators from other marginalized groups. Thus, for me a vision for anti-racist and social justice-oriented education must include educators from marginalized groups working in empowered spaces within teacher preparation programs, a curriculum for teacher preparation that is based on anti-racist pedagogical theories and social justice teaching, and school-based curricula for both elementary and high school students that are based on critical social justice and anti-racist education.

Sara::

After a teacher education meeting one afternoon in Tucson, Arizona, a group of us (predominantly white) teacher educators stayed after to discuss ways in which we could intervene in the racist and white supremacist climate of schooling in the state of Arizona, in the wake of the anti-Ethnic Studies ruling in the Tucson Unified School District. Kelli Gray, who was teaching as a graduate student instructor at UA at that time, said to the group, “I don’t know if I can trust any of you as ‘anti-oppressive educators’ until you take a look at your own selves, and your own programs.” She called on us to do the work in our own “backyards,” so to speak, first, before trying to engage with the racist and white supremacist climate of K-12 schooling in the state of Arizona. And she was right. Under her leadership, a few of us (mostly precarious workers including pre-tenure assistant professors, graduate students, and adjunct faculty) formed a committee to bring to the forefront and disrupt the ways that students of color, and faculty of color, in our “social justice education” programs, were experiencing micro- and macro-aggressions in our department, even by some faculty members who claimed a social justice agenda (Tolbert et al., 2014).

Anti-racist practice in education and (predominantly white) teacher education often turns its gaze toward teaching students how to be anti-racist, or preservice teachers how to be anti-racist, when anti-racist praxis is first and foremost about critically analyzing and dismantling the racist systems in which we are already complicit. I have seen this play out within public schools and universities, in the United States and now here in Aotearoa New Zealand, where cultural competence in predominantly white institutions is conflated for anti-racist practice, while the university remains a hostile place for many people of color, particularly for women of color (Azarmandi & Tolbert, 2022). My vision for anti-racist and social justice-driven education is about willingness “to participate in a killjoy movement” (Ahmed, 2017, p. 267), one in which we collectively and intentionally cause disturbance, one that “begins by recognizing inequalities as existing” (p. 252)—a killjoy movement that starts right where we are.

Mahdis::

When I think of anti-racism I often think of being willing to take a risk. If racism, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore says, “is the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death” (2007, p. 28), then it means that being racialized and living under white supremacy means being at constant risk of violence. Anti-racism then, as Goldberg points out, has to take a risk. Anti-racialism constitutes merely a stand “against a concept, a name, a category, a categorizing [which] does not itself involve standing (up) against (a set of) conditions of being or living” with racism (Goldberg, 2008, p. 10). For Goldberg, anti-racialism is devoid of that risk.

When looking at the university I currently see a lot of colleagues talking or wanting to talk about anti-racism; many assure me that what they teach is committed to anti-racism, and I always ask myself, what is the risk that is being taken here? If anti-racism means standing up and challenging those conditions of racism, to the extent of risking one’s own position, resources, etc., what is it that we are willing to put on the line? Especially for those who are racialized white.

For example, in the last two years a number of colleagues have approached me to talk about their interest in understanding racism and committing to anti-racism. Many turned to Robin D’Angelo to understand “white fragility” and are surprised that it is not a book I would recommend as a starting point for anti-racism. While I find the notion of white fragility useful at times, starting with D’Angelo and focusing on what I describe as making “nicer” or more culturally competent white folks don’t necessarily change the structures that produce premature death. It is therefore crucial to assess anti-racism in its commitment to such risk; that is, do groups work toward reducing racist incidents, or do they also question the very structures that enable racist culture in the first place? For me, anti-racism is thus also about shifting whose work we start with and how we engage in action beyond “raising awareness.” Rushing to understand our fragility in some ways is like trying to find the fastest way to redemption—“hey look, I’m not racist, I’m one of the good ones.”

For me as an educator, understanding structural racism and how my own role as a teacher may play in reproducing and disrupting it is central to anti-racism. Especially, as Sleeter (2017) points out, many programs claim to adopt a justice-oriented stance, yet do so in “incremental or symbolic ways” such as adding a multicultural education course to the curriculum or by hiring a professor of color to the faculty, while otherwise preserving programs “defined by White interests” and curricula reflecting white sensibilities (p. 158). I really like Dei’s definition of anti-racism education “as an action-oriented educational practice to address racism and the interstices of difference (such as gender, ethnicity, class, sexuality, ability, language, and religion) in the educational system” (2014, p. 240). So, whenever I am told some workshop, intervention, or framework is supposed to be “anti-racist” or is supposed to make us all more anti-racist, I look for the action-oriented practice. Are we just trying to redeem ourselves and make sure we are not the bad ones, or are we taking a risk to question structures that we might be entangled in or those we are upholding and benefitting from?

What Are Some Challenges You Have Experienced in Enacting This Vision?

Mahdis::

Nobody loves a killjoy. The biggest challenge for me has been getting folks to see that being a killjoy is not about killing joy but about working toward structures that create less premature death. The other challenge is being able to talk about racism and its complexities beyond false binaries. For example, much of the effort in education here in Aotearoa New Zealand have focused on cultural competency and cultural difference rather than looking at racism as a political process. When challenging the limitation of cultural competence (which is important), I find I am heard as saying we should maintain the status quo. I also see a lack of intersectional analysis and solidarity among racialized groups; for example, we need to understand how white supremacy manifests among groups of color, why it is important to think of Indigenous dispossession when trying to address Islamophobia in a place like Aotearoa New Zealand, etc.

Sara::

I chose a career in teacher education for explicitly political reasons. Though I had initially planned to return to classroom teaching after completing my master’s degree, my own teacher education coursework was so bereft of sociopolitical perspectives that I decided to pursue doctoral studies in education. At my first position as an assistant professor and teacher educator in Arizona, I hoped to facilitate a critical pedagogical approach to preservice teacher education—to explore, for example, what could conscientization (Freire, 1970) look like as a pedagogy of/for the privileged in science education (e.g., Schindel et al., 2021)? Fostering deeper understandings of intersecting contexts of oppression (e.g., racism, heteronormativity, sexism, classism) became part of the science teacher education curriculum. As one example, (predominantly white) students would read astrophysicist Neil de Grasse Tyson’s convocation speech,Footnote 3 in which he talked candidly about his experiences of racism in school science. Many preservice teachers in my courses would complain about why he seemed so depressed; shouldn’t he use his platform to celebrate his success? As Mahdis points out, no one loves a killjoy (Ahmed, 2010).

Rasheda::

Some challenges I have experienced enacting a vision of anti-racism through personal reflection is in order to engage with science learning experiences beyond education is to enter spaces where sociocultural systems have not been interrogated. From my experience as a scientist, there was little opportunity given to critical self-reflection or critical questioning of systems and structures in place broadly (Mensah & Jackson, 2018). Having several identities outside of what is represented in science education as who scientists are and what scientists do, assimilation became the way to reconcile these tensions. Challenges enacting anti-racist visions are deeply internal and personal due to the personal choices of continuing and participating in one’s own marginalization. The choices toward more equitable learning experiences mean to consider one’s own marginalized experience and ways to not replicate similar systems of oppression.

I had an experience as a graduate student in a biology master’s program where anti-racism should have been made as a personal choice. I was working in a biology research lab late on a Friday evening. As I was packing up to leave, I left the secured area to fill a water bottle. When headed back into the secure area, I was met by a white man coming out of the door as I was inserting my key into the door. I was a little startled since no one is usually in the lab area late on a Friday night. As I stepped aside so that he could come out of the area and I walked in, he blocked the door and said, “This area is for secure personnel only.” What would have been the response if this man was used to seeing Black women in the science lab space as students, lab supervisors, or even professors? Additionally, I had not seen him before—was he a professor assuming a Black woman was not supposed to be in that area? Was he a student who had not seen another Black female student? Had his personal engagements been challenged or at least had there been conversations around equity and diversity, or lack thereof, among the students, faculty, and staff in the science department? Although conversations challenging structural and systemic biases have been happening at large institutional levels, these local-, community-, department-level conversations should be encouraged and used to shift experiences for marginalized and minoritized students.

Huitzilin::

I had trouble identifying the source of the challenge for me and had to think on this one for quite some time, but now that I’ve had a chance to consider it, I imagine the biggest personal challenge is something like burnout. There are days where the task of achieving a socially just education system seems too big for even one person to carve out a niche—the monstrous inertia of the status quo is unbeatable. Choosing which battles are worth fighting, on top of all the other day-to-day decisions that must be made in a career where one makes thousands of decisions a day, is sometimes just a bit too much. Then I think about the multiplicative effect of thousands of other educators experiencing the same feeling and I start to see just the edges of the problem at hand.

Kelli::

The biggest challenge that I have faced here in Chile is English as a Foreign Language [EFL] teachers not being familiar with how to teach from a critical perspective. In 2014, the Universidad de Playa Ancha [UPLA], the university where I work, along with some other universities, re-vamped their teacher education curricula in several teaching areas, English being one of them. In the Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages [TESOL] teacher education program at UPLA, they included two courses on critical pedagogy: one is a foundation course, and the other is a practical course on how to take theory and translate it into practice in the classroom. This is a wonderful start; however, it is not enough. The concepts and theory around teaching from a critical perspective should be a theme or strand that is woven into every course in some way. It is my belief that if we want classroom teachers to be more justice-oriented in their teaching, teacher educators need to be more justice-oriented in their work with preservice teachers. In fact, our programs of study need to be justice-oriented.

Describe Creative Maneuvers or Interventions You or Your Colleagues Have Enacted to Respond to Counter-resistance Strategies

Huitzilin::

One of the very first papers I read that served as an inspiration was a chapter by Rochelle Gutiérrez on political conocimiento in the teaching of mathematics (Gutiérrez, 2017). After reading that chapter, I have long considered that part of my personal strategy to counter-resistance to anti-racist teaching practices should include development of that conocimiento in my science teaching. For my students, what that looks like on a daily basis is helping students become aware of the ways in which the science I’m teaching doesn’t occur in a vacuum—neither in terms of the content that I’m teaching them nor the context I’m teaching it in. Essentially, putting information out there that might not be seen—making the invisible, visible—has been an effective strategy for dispelling resistance in students. Of course, when you start to operate in spaces beyond individual classrooms, countering that resistance becomes more difficult. An excellent example of resistance to anti-racist schooling in these larger spaces like the state arena is Proposition 203 in Arizona, which repealed bilingual education laws and effectively made us an “English-only” instruction state. Some creative insubordination—such as making bilingual materials available to parents—has been an antidote to that for myself and my colleagues. Lastly, there’s the in-between spaces—interactions with other educators and administrators at the building and district levels—that require conocimiento to navigate. You have to learn the limits of how hard you can push back before the cost of the effort outweighs the effectiveness of the strategy. It’s a fine balance between pushing in the ways that need to be pushed and preserving your emotional and spiritual energy in a way that you can still give of yourself to your students—the people that really matter.

Rasheda::

For me, creative interventions build on previously developed strategies toward anti-racist research and education. As an educator who seeks to actively teach to transgress (thank you, bell hooks) in the science learning space, I deliberately seek opportunities to push against individualized experiences and achievement but rather support collaboration and small group work. Specifically for engaging in science and engineering practices, I want students to see learning and discovery in community rather than by one individual. “Students learn science by actively engaging in the practices of science, including conducting investigations; sharing ideas with peers; specialized ways of talking and writing; mechanical, mathematical, and computer-based modeling; and development of representations of phenomena” (Houseal, 2016, p. 1). Since students learn science through collaboration, shifting who is seen as an expert or scientist in K-12 science learning spaces is one practical way to transgress norms in science learning.

Kelli::

Bell (2010) in her book Storytelling for Social Justice: Connecting Narrative and the Arts in Antiracist Teaching defines four story types used in the Storytelling Project Model that describe how people “talk and think about race and racism in the United States” (p. 22). These four story types are stock stories, concealed stories, resistance stories, and emerging/transforming stories. Stock stories—stories that maintain and even perpetuate the status quo on topics such as race and racism, or in the case of Chilean education inclusion, gender equity, immigration, or LBGTQ+ topics—are commonplace. However, just as commonplace to these stock stories are the concealed and resistance stories that serve as counternarratives or counter stories.

One major way I have tried to counter the stock stories I experienced and heard as a parent and as an educator was by starting my own school, an example of an emerging or transforming story. Built on the principles of an inclusive, multicultural, and social justice education, our school, through its climate and curriculum, was deliberately built “to challenge the stock stories, [to] build on and amplify concealed and resistance stories, and [to] create new stories to interrupt the status quo and energize change” (Bell, 2010, p. 25).

Sara::

Mahdis and I have recently written elsewhere (Tolbert et al., 2022) about how a pedagogy of alienation might serve as a means to disrupt the culture of complacency (including our own, our students’, our colleagues’) that we feel is often the biggest impediment to social change. People become too comfortable or too resigned in feeling like it’s too big of a problem for me to solve, or things are mostly “fine,” while we carry on drinking our lattes—similar to what Zukin (2010) refers to as “pacification by cappuccino” (in the context of gentrification). It’s easy for white allies to be susceptible to this as we do not experience the embodied effects of racism—which is why I think our responsibilities as anti-racist allies have to include real vulnerabilities and risks, as others have described here in this chapter. It’s easy to “say” the things that make us look like “good allies”—in fact, these are things that are so often rewarded by the institution—because they are essentially ways “to not do things with words” (Ahmed, 2016). They don’t actually challenge the status quo and can even exacerbate it through the illusion of progress. A pedagogy of alienation embraces refusal, rage, and anger as an unsettling alternative to “diversity and inclusion”; in becoming (unapologetically) disaffected and alienated, and seeking systemic change, together we forge new solidarities (Tolbert et al., 2022). This looks different for everyone, but for me it starts with rejecting the politics of domestication in science education—and in the academy (Rodriguez, 2006).

Mahdis::

More recently, the main way I have managed to navigate the “everyday political whiteness” (Ambikaipaker, 2019) of academia has been finding others who find joy in “killing joy”—that is, building relationships and strategically organizing with those committing to dismantling white supremacy. For example, in institutional discussions about curriculum or teaching, we have tried to support each other and make sure that the burden of speaking up against racism does not always sit with Indigenous colleagues or colleagues of color. Building solidarity across minority scholars but also with white colleagues who choose to be accomplices and risk takers, rather than just fair-weather allies, is how we can survive the structure that is designed to exclude us. The other way, as Sara has mentioned, is the pedagogy of alienation and the politics of refusal: refusing to be loyal to an institution that doesn’t love us. This doesn’t mean that we cannot love the connections and solidarities we build, love the classrooms we co-construct, or love the political project of moving beyond the Westernized and settler colonial university. Ambikaipaker writes,

Mitigating the power of the institutions and rule of law to act in alignment with racial minorities’ rights or claims of justice is hegemonic work that people investing in whiteness must undertake on an everyday basis to stabilize hierarchical power relations among other bodies, identities, epistemologies, and cultural lifeways. Hence, racism cannot be understood as simply an aberration in everyday institutional life. It is in fact necessary and habitual political work.

Thus, in order to change the university, we need to make disrupting white supremacy our habitual political work.

Conclusion

Huitzilin::

This morning I was having a Socratic seminar with my students on the subject of climate change and of “wicked problems” (Rittel & Webber, 1973) in general. Climate change is one of those big, interconnected issues that are too big for any one person to solve, where a correction at one node can influence other nodes in positive and negative ways, and touches so many different intersections on social, economic, and political levels. Because of this, the issue of climate change has depth and complexity outside the realm of understanding for the average high school student and can seem much too big to fix. Looking back to my response to question 2, I can see my students’ feelings of disillusionment and cynicism during this seminar mirrored in my previous words about the challenges of enacting an anti-racist and social justice-oriented science education. I realized in that response that I wasn’t listening to my own lesson.

Whenever I teach climate change, I want students to leave my classroom feeling like there’s something within their agency that they can do. So I ask them to identify one thing within their power, something that they could start doing tomorrow. A lot of them come up with wonderful ideas. They find their lane. For me, a conclusion to this discussion would be that we must do the same—find our lane. It might change from time to time, but knowing that you’re doing your one thing, or your several things, is the way to start.

Sara::

One thing that our conversations, as well as events occurring at our own institution (which Mahdis and I have spoken about as well over the past few weeks with you all), have made me contemplate is the question of who benefits from doing (or being seen as doing) anti-racist work? And also, who is viewed/positioned as an expert and who is not? Who should/can ethically lead the work, particularly in institutions like the academy, where whiteness is so ever-present yet so invisible, even to those who identify as anti-racist? I often marvel at anti-racism in science and education panels that are dominated by white folks, and at how anti-racist work becomes a platform for career advancement for some (white educators) while presenting considerable risks—and/or not being valued as intellectual or scholarly contributions—to/for others (BIPOC educators). This is not to say that there isn’t a critical role for white allies/accomplices in anti-racist movement but that these are ongoing ethical tensions that need to be at the forefront of our thinking (particularly for allies/accomplices/co-conspirators)—and why the idea of “praxis” is so critical. The Showing up for Racial Justice (SURJ) movement is an example of how an organization of predominantly white anti-racist allies can take up the call from civil rights leaders to support a Black and People of Color [POC]-led struggle, by “being in relationship with and following the leadership of liberatory Black and POC-led movement organizations” (https://surj.org). There is no “rule book,” per se, but it is about the specificity of acting (versus not acting) in solidarity, with care and attention to one’s own positionality and complicity in whiteness. Of course, we will make mistakes along the way, so we need to be prepared to humbly own and apologize for—and if/when possible repair the harm from—those mistakes. And I love thinking about it in the context of Huitzilin’s commentary above—what is the one thing we could do that is within our power, something that we could do tomorrow? And for each of us, this will (must) look and be different, and must be informed by an ethic of good, humble, and respons-able relations.

Mahdis::

I want to connect to what Sara has mentioned about who is centered in conversations about anti-racism and what kind of anti-racism is advocated. For example, are we using culturally responsive pedagogy to mean anti-racism? And who are the so-called experts? Often the attempts to be anti-racist push for incremental change and focus on individual learning/change, as if racism is some kind of moral failure rather than a system of white supremacy. To work within our own power also means understanding where we are implicated and complicit in this system, that is, to understand where and how we keep white supremacy in place. What helps me continue doing this work is that we don’t do it in isolation; it is the relationships and solidarities that make change possible, and I’d like to think how we can do that in ways that are locally grounded but also globally oriented and recognize the histories of empire and race outside our own specific contexts.

Rasheda::

I want to revisit a quote by Toni Morrison that culturally sustaining pedagogy (Paris & Alim, 2014) follows: “What would our pedagogies look like if this [white] gaze weren’t the dominant one?” (p. 86). True anti-racist pedagogies require centering someone else—someone else’s culture, someone else’s expertise, someone else’s knowing, someone else’s normal. What might education look like if whiteness were not centered or considered as the basis for learning? Considering other possibilities that do not replicate or mirror the same systems and structures of oppression is so exciting for me. Dreaming of learning experiences and settings that are celebratory and uplifting for the diversity of learners and teachers brings me deep joy and renewed strength to continue in this work. Beyond dreaming, every day, personal, socially just choices are amplified in a community of co-conspirators and agitators like my co-authors. To echo Mahdis, “What helps me continue doing this work is that we don’t do it in isolation, it is the relationships and solidarities that make change possible.” I am more encouraged and better situated to dismantle harmful and violent learning spaces and build something much better when I know that I am not ever alone. Future generations deserve the just and equitable changes we are seeking now.

Kelli::

For me writing this chapter came at the perfect time. I have felt alone at my university as I try to center something other than whiteness, maleness, neurotypicalness, and heterosexuality among other dominant structures. To use the words of Huitzilin, my “lane” has been reaffirmed through our collaboration in writing this chapter. I have been energized to look for ways to continue to move forward in speaking my truth. Furthermore, Rasheda’s question “What might education look like if whiteness [add any other dominant structure] were not centered or considered as the basis for learning?” is pushing me to think more deeply about my own work in teacher education and how I am (or am not) deliberately designing my classes to challenge the stock stories in education in general and second language education in particular. It is refreshing, joyful, and empowering to envision ways my teaching and presence can counter oppressive educational structures in the hope of building new, transformative stories that truly celebrate the diversity of learners in my classroom and in classrooms across Chile.