On The Margins Podcast

Latest Episodes:

Race and the Missing Pages of Leandro with Dr. David Cooper Jul 17, 2020

Show notes

The Leandro vs. North Carolina lawsuit has become a foundational court case in defining the educational rights of students in North Carolina. In 1994, five rural districts sued the state making the case that they did not have enough resources to provide the constitutionally mandated education. From this litigation, the language of all students being entitled to a "sound basic education" emerged. This case and it's implications continue to reverberate in our present context, as the fulfillment of this mandate remains unresolved. In 2018, Judge David Lee ordered the research organization WestEd to assess North Carolina's progress toward this goal. The WestEd Report, released in December 2019, offers a well-documented evaluation of the State's movement or lack thereof. However, Dr. Cooper argues that although race was not the central consideration in the original case it should be focused upon, and is largely absent from the WestEd Report. In his paper, WestEd's Leandro Report: The Missing Pages he asserts the need to acknowledge the ways race and educational rights intersect as we plan for the future.

Getting to Know Our 2019 North Carolina Equity Fellows Jun 22, 2020

Show notes

CREED has just completed it's inaugural year of the North Carolina Equity Fellowship, a leadership development program created to equip advocates for educational equity by deepening their knowledge, skills and understanding of racialized disparities in North Carolina schools. We selected FOUR initial fellows: Rodney Pierce (Teacher Fellow), Dr. Jonita Taylor (Principal Fellow), Porcha McMillan (School Board Fellow), and Emiene Wright (Journalism Fellow). As we open up the application for our 2020 NC Equity Fellowship (included a Superintendent Fellow), we wanted to give the public a chance to meet these outstanding individuals, learn more about their experiences and hear the ways they intend to disrupt the inequities in our education system. If you live in North Carolina, are a classroom teacher, principal, school board member, superintendent or journalist, and are interested in applying for this fellowship, please click this link.

This episode is dedicated to the memory of Porcha McMillan. RIP

Indigenous Education, Tribal Sovereignty & Honoring Culture Pt. 1 with Dr. Susan Faircloth May 14, 2020

Show notes

North Carolina is home to 8 Native American tribes. There is beautiful diversity, tradition and complex history that characterize each group that predates the formation of the United States. While the stories of First Nations people tend to be fixed in the past, the fact of the matter is they are still here! Indigenous students make up 1% of the student population in the North Carolina and often experience depressed education outcomes. Over-suspension, dropout, and poor academic performance are prevalent issues that do not always get the attention they deserve. In this episode, we talk with Native North Carolinian and Indigenous Education scholar Dr. Susan Faircloth about her own personal experience and how we can do better by American Indian students in our state.

*BONUS*

The North Carolina General Assembly created the State Advisory Council for Indian Education (SACIE) in 1987 to advise the State Board of Education on how to better serve Native students. Additionally, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) has very specific protocols for engaging indigenous communities when developing accountability plans.

Equity for Asian-American Students with Dr. Lan Kolano and Cat Bao Le Apr 13, 2020

Show notes

When discussing educational equity for minoritized racial and ethnic groups, many advocates tend to focus on non-Asian students of color. The Asian-American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) category is a massive catch-all demographic that includes groups from Far East Asia, South East Asia, South Asia, and even the Arabian Peninsula. Failure to properly understand the diversity within this group and different experiences would be a tremendous mistake. Dr. Lan Kolano, an education professor at University of North Carolina at Charlotte and Cat Bao Le of the South East Asian Coalition (or SEAC Village) join the program to talk about the misconceptions about AAPIs, the multifaceted nature of racism, and need to center immigrant experiences in racial equity. You can learn more about SEAC Village and their work by clicking on this link.

Responding to Culture in the Classroom with Matt Scialdone Apr 06, 2020

Show notes

Matt Scialdone is an African American Literature Teacher at Middle Creek High School in Wake County. He's a teacher who takes a problem-posing approach to teaching and learning that looks for explicit ways to connect text-to-context. His teaching philosophy is one that honors the agency, various cultural orientations, and ways of knowing that his students embody. For him, teaching is about "lighting the fuse" and getting out of the way. As a white male, he works constantly at modeling culturally responsive teaching in his classroom and being a continual work-in-progress.

Unconscious Bias in Schools with Dr. Tracey Benson Mar 30, 2020

Show notes

Dr. Tracey Benson is co-author of the recently released book Unconscious Bias in Schools: A Developmental Approach to Exploring Race and Racism. Heis an associate professor, race scholar, former teacher and principal. His depth of knowledge about issues of race and schools is born from both extensive personal experience and research in the field. In this episode, he shares the ways that teachers and leaders can begin the work of adopting deliberately anti-racist approaches to learning, confront their own biases and increase their understanding of systemic racism in the United States context.

The Impact of Black Teachers in the Segregated South with Harvey B. Gantt Jun 11, 2019

Show notes

Harvey B. Gantt is known for many things. Among them is being the first African American admitted into Clemson University in 1963. But what is less talked about is his K-12 experience in the all-Black segregated schools of Charleston, SC. Harvey's alma mater, Burke Industrial School, was the subject of a research article that makes the powerful argument that Black teachers in the South helped catalyze the Civil Right Movement through their unique pedagogical approaches. Many civil rights leaders just like Gantt, first sat the feet of expert Black teachers long before they engaged in activism that sought to break the color line in America. In this episode, he reflects on the memory of his teachers, the profound impression they left on him as a person and offers a critical counterstory in the discussion of school segregation.

Parent Advocacy, Critical Race Theory & Teacher Marches with Rep. Graig Meyer May 04, 2019

Show notes

In this brief episode, we sit down with State Representative Graig Meyer (D) from District 50 in the North Carolina General Assembly. In between sessions he takes time to discuss how being a parent of a child of color shaped his advocacy as a parent and practitioner, using Critical Race Theory to understand how American society operates, a lasting strategy for the May 1st Teacher March in NC, and bipartisan legislation he co-sponsored to help the state respond to opportunity gaps in K-12 education. Graig is a racial equity consultant with the Equity Collaborative, along side his partner Jamie Almanzan. The Equity Collaborative focuses on building new capacities in the people and teams that comprise the education system by working at every level to best understand all of the stakeholders in the school community and ensure alignment of purpose and action toward equitable outcomes. Stay tuned for Part 2...

Click on the link to learn more about the Opportunity Gap Task Force bill referenced in the podcast.

The Role of HBCUs in Teacher Diversity with Dr. NaKeshia Williams Apr 23, 2019

Show notes

Dr. NaKeshia Williams is an assistant professor in the College of Education at North Carolina A&T State University in Greensboro, NC. Working at one of the largest HBCUs in the nation gives her a unique perspective on the role of Black schools in helping increase teacher diversity. NC A&T also has a partnership with BranchED, an organization that utilizes Minority Serving Institutions (MSIs) as a resource in recruiting more people of color to the profession. Dr. Williams is positioned in teacher education and is an advocate for preparing practitioners who are more able to serve the cultural and linguistic needs of a rapidly changing population.

**Link to study mentioned in the podcast**

The Long-Run Impacts of Same-Race Teachers

Advocating for Latinx & Immigrant Students with Ricky Hurtado Apr 07, 2019

Show notes

Ricky Hurtado is the Co-Executive Director of LatinxEd, an organization dedicated to expanding equitable access to higher education for Latino students across North Carolina. He is the child of Central American immigrants and a Morehead-Cain scholar whose personal journey guides his work of exploring the intersections of race, gender, class and immigration. He is doing phenomenal work assisting Latinx students navigate complex social systems and forging sovereign identities while pursuing education in a changing political landscape.

See the news story below to learn more about the school board action mentioned in the podcast:

https://www.wral.com/following-sanford-ice-raid-group-wants-lee-county-schools-to-support-undocumented-families/18188045/