Education Week - July 8, 2015 - 32

COMMENTARY

Education Scholars:
Challenging Racial Injustice Begins With Us

O NOT

Racial Violence Is a 'Clarion Call' to Colleges of Education

By Nicole Nguyen
very day, I ride public
transportation to my university job as an education
researcher and teachereducator. As I watch people board the train, I'm
continually reminded of
the talent, creativity, and
experiences pulsing beneath Chicago's
infrastructure. On my June 8 commute, I
plugged my ears with my headphones to
listen to reports of the humiliation and
brutalization of young Black teens attending a neighborhood pool party in McKinney,
Texas. Aghast but unsurprised, I wondered
what role universities, and colleges of education more specifically, play in dismantling
these state-sanctioned systems of violence
that expose non-dominant youths to narrowed life chances, brutality, and premature
death.
While McKinney Police Cpl. David Eric
Casebolt's resignation moves in the direction of police accountability, this decision
mistakes constant police harassment, brutalization, and killings as a consequence of
a few bad cops. These brutalizing acts are a
violent product and constitutive element of
institutional racism. Police brutality functions as one node in a larger system-racism, classism, heteropatriarchy, and ableism-that dehumanizes and criminalizes
non-dominant youths. Rather than punish
a few bad apples, we must tear down the
entire tree.
As public transit riders shuffled on and
off the train, I began to understand that we
cannot solve complex social problems like
institutional racism within the prototypical
ivory tower as armchair critics. Our scholarship cannot merely inform our own ideas
and advance our own careers. If we are to
train future teachers, principals, and education researchers, we must recognize how
schools perpetuate and disrupt systems of
inequality, nourish the critical consciousness of our students, model antiracist and
decolonizing pedagogies, and build the tool
kits necessary for creating more-democratic
schools. This urgency is further heightened
by the recent, horrific shootings at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church
in Charleston, S.C., and the news that the
accused shooter was lured by racist propaganda all too readily found online.
If we are to counter the oppressive systems of inequality that brutalize youths,
we cannot do it alone. We must marshal the
intellect of all those who board the train,
young people in particular. We do not need
university solutions to public problems.
To think, then, about the implications of

| INSIDE |

22 W HAT WE'VE LEARNED

FROM A LONGER
SCHOOL DAY AND YEAR

Bob Dahm for Education Week

We must build reciprocal partnerships between
communities and universities, using all of our resources
for a common anti-racist, anti-imperialist future."
ongoing police violence for colleges of education, we must first ask: What is the role
of the university? Where do our responsibilities, as university scholars, lie? To whom
are we accountable?
For me, the university is a public good
with a public mission. That is, the intellectual society we fund and nurture extends
beyond university borders and reaches into
communities to solve social problems. Producing knowledge, teaching, and researching, subsequently, we must all work toward

22 THE ILLUSION OF

32 | EDUCATION WEEK | July 8, 2015 | www.edweek.org/go/commentary

CLOSING THE
ACHIEVEMENT GAP

the common good of our multiple publics,
enact democratic practices, and advance
social justice. We must build reciprocal
partnerships between communities and
universities, using all of our resources for a
common anti-racist, anti-imperialist future
we collectively define.
Although current institutional arrangements, reward structures, and accountability metrics discourage publicly engaged
scholarship, the ongoing police killings of
Black youths demand a university whose

23 THE 'POWER'

OF ADVERSITY

resources partner with those in the community. Pressing social problems require collective solutions. To do so, we must fundamentally reconfigure whom we imagine as
a scholar and what counts as scholarship.
Our work as faculty members begins with
the community.
The ongoing police killings of Black adolescents are a clarion call to academics to
remake universities around this public mission. Our privilege as academics charges us
with confronting and resisting the cultural,
political, economic, and ideological work
that makes these killings not only possible
but justified. As the media obfuscate the racialized and gendered logics that rendered
a congregation of Black teens dangerous,
school staff members must build classrooms
to empower children to name, interpret,
and stand up to these daily confrontations
with systems of oppression. We must train
future teachers and school leaders to create
politically charged classrooms where youths
across difference describe, analyze, and address power inequities through collaborative and deliberative coalitions. Classroom
learning can sharpen our analytic lens and
develop the skills for organizing for social
change. Those who can name their world,
after all, gain the power to act in it.
Schools often impose the same racialized
and gendered regimes of humiliations, punishments, and brutalizations we witnessed
in McKinney. Institutions of education, however, also possess the power to disrupt the
cultural contexts that authorize the criminalization of Black youths, most evident in
Casebolt's violent actions. Young people's
classroom learning, life experiences, and
encounters with other social institutions
define how they accept or reject dominant
narratives about Black adolescents and
their analyses of these events. Schools can
empower young people by nourishing their
capacity to create other alternative forms of
security, respect, and dignity. Public schools,
then, operate as critical sites of struggle to
define what kind of education young people
receive and for what ends.
Schools also serve as community hubs
where families, children, community
members, and educators gather to use the
school's resources and discuss their children's progress. For some, this means adult
researchers consult with youths by placing
them at the center of conversations school
adults have about teaching in and improving the schools. These collaborations seek
to democratize research by carving out a
PAGE 27 >

NICOLE NGUYEN is an assistant professor of
social foundations of education at the University of
Illinois-Chicago.

24 LETTERS TO
THE EDITOR

http://www.edweek.org/go/commentary

Education Week - July 8, 2015

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Education Week - July 8, 2015