June 19-21,2019 Moray House School of Education hosted a 3-day series of conversations on race/racism in education. CERES (Centre for Education for Race Equality in Scotland) founded by Professor Rowena Arshad, Head of School at Moray House and my Fulbright sponsor, founded CERES. The purpose of the event was to provide a challenging but safe space for educators looking to build knowledge and skill in understanding the needs of an increasingly diverse education system through critical conversation on complex, sensitive, and controversial issues, i.e., racism, Whiteness, Islamophobia, and systemic oppression. I was honored to give a workshop, Critical Conversations on Race through Contemporary Art focusing on contemporary visual art as a means of developing awareness of racial inequities, and taking steps to make schools and educational establishments more racially equitable institutions. The workshop was adapted from Dr. Gloria Wilson's research and The Palgrave Handbook of Race and Arts in Education, an anthology recently published by Dr. Amelia Kraehe, Dr. Ruben Gaztambide-Fernandez and Dr. B. Stephen Carpenter, III. Many local educators doing race work gave talks and workshops including students in the MSc in Transformative Learning and Teaching Master's program established in 2018. I also had the good fortune to meet and have discussions with the keynote speakers, two leading scholars in the field of Critical Race Theory----Gloria Ladson-Billings and Dr. David Gillborn. In chatting with Gloria we discovered that when she was an undergraduate student at Morgan State University in Baltimore, my great-uncle Philip Butcher was her American Literature professor--small world!
Comments