Center on Culture, Race & Equity

Transcript So, we just finished up our third full day professional development series here in district 9 in the Bronx. We don't come in with a plan to tell people what they need to learn. We come in as equal partners with access to information that's coming to collaborate and learn from the people that we are collaborating with and so we collect data and information about the schools as well as the community that we're partnering with. We incorporate a community-based design process which allows for all of those constituents to look at the data collectively and to figure out what their challenge is, what the area of growth is, but also brings in many issues and research-based information around culture, race, and equity so that we've got a full day of experiences that challenge folks, that pushes them to reflect on their own experiences, and also begins to help them take perspective and think about how we live and how children and families live within a racialized context. Race and culture impact our lives every day. CCRE has helped me, you know, to understand how racial bias, how cultural bias affects young children particularly in school. But CCRE has taught me these skill sets that are required as a parent to deal with it from a strength-based point of view. I am not only honed into explicit bias, but now I become hypersensitive to implicit bias within my personal sphere and also professionally. So what I am doing now is bringing a bit more of attention to those implicit situations and just raising my voice when I can. It made me look at other people and maybe not always my perspective and not always having one voice and that there's so many stories not just one story working together to make sure our children succeed in life with different types of families. That's what we have to acknowledge, respect and celebrate. My son and the staff member of the school that you have, that bond between all of us, the personal ways it helped me to communicate more with parents, be more open and able to understand what they're going through. I have taken on this challenge of bringing this work to everyone that I see and I will never not have parents not involved in the process of learning. Again, that personal reflection that people do is something that's not very common for folks but then we push past the tears or we include them in and think about what that means for our learning and then also what that means for professional practice; so for teachers and leaders they're thinking about what they're doing that's supporting children and families and for the family members they're thinking about their own experiences in school, their own hopes and dreams for their children, and how they can start to become more of a leader in that school space. When you are that person who says to myself, okay maybe you know, I don't need to say much, because they might not take me seriously. The CCRE team member showed me that yes, we want to hear from you, yes, we want to listen to what you have to say. It is important what you have to say and that is what kept me going forward. I can go to them and say I want to apply for a job for a family worker, and because they boost me, now I have so much confidence talking in public, I have so much confidence talking, speaking my mind and changed my life in so many ways. I'm like leading an initiative that's happening in my school right now about social injustices and this kind of all started because I’ve been attending all these meetings and I just said I got to put it into action. It's just been like a big awakening for me. This experience inspired me to look within myself, what can I do, how can I empower my school community. Not only am I more cognizant as an administrator, how I purchase certain materials for my centers for my schools and what materials I promote, but I’m also much more cognizant of the resources that I purchase that my children interact with to make sure that they are inclusive and representative of my population. The system is really big and the systems are really flawed and children are not always getting what they need but we try to remind people that the system is actually you. The system is us. Systems are made up of people and so when individual people make positive change to grow and develop and to shift what they're doing, institutions change and those systems change and we're really proud of the fact that, through our collaboration, with many different communities we've been able to see people take the learning and the community-building and actually put it into concrete goals and action steps. So, we see our work changing the lives of teachers, parents, schools, and systems we have.