The use of Guiding Principles to guide and ground our work is inspired by the scholarship and practice of Felicia Rose Chavez. The following Guiding Principles developed by the Antiracist Curriculum Initiative Curriculum Leadership Team are designed to serve as foundational practices and reminders for enacting antiracist pedagogy. Each one can be distilled to a short phrase (i.e. the “bumper sticker” version), summarized in a brief blurb, or expanded upon infinitely. Teachers can map their course materials to these Guiding Principles as a framework for continuously striving toward educational justice. As with all of us and all we do, they forever remain a work in progress. We hope you find them useful and empowering for students.

 Reimagine Assessment

For far too long, assessment in the college environment has been used to harm students, both consciously and unconsciously. Antiracist assessment is meant to help students achieve their goals and their ideals rather than fulfill arbitrary and biased standards. We believe that rigor in the classroom does not have to hurt, weed out or gatekeep students. Rather, rigor can be a shared endeavor to stretch our edges as writers, scholars and humans. In short, we don’t have to grade traditionally. We can find new ways to create assessment that is fair and just.  With antiracist assessment methods, students are more likely to write for feedback, for developing ideas and for expressing their voice in ways that are relevant, important and authentic to them. Students start thinking about their ideas and language instead of solely focusing on their grade.

We can ungrade, use various labor based grading methods or dream up entirely new systems of assessment. It’s best to create a system that works for you and for your students. The point here is that antiracist assessment requires us to push back on what is “traditional” and “standard” since “traditional” and “standard” are all too often embedded in white supremacy. As we think about how to reimagine what assessment could be, we can make room for the quest for linguistic justice, see writing as more than merely essays and bibliographies and invite students into a conversation of what good writing entails and requires.

As we start to examine our assessment methods, it’s tempting to ask ourselves what is already antiracist about our grading systems. We believe an even more effective question to lead with is “what is currently racist within our grading systems?”. Once we start to identify the harm, we can reimagine a new way of assessing.

 Student Choice and Student Voice

Much of antiracist assessment is rooted in decentering teachers and centering students. To create classrooms and assessment methods that allow for student choice and student voice, we must create equal and accessible opportunities for all types of learners and communicators to attain and demonstrate learning and knowledge. This includes creating assignments that follow the guiding principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL), co-creating classroom norms, assignments and even assessment methods with students. Within antiracist assessment models, we have more room for what we call “dialogic feedback loops” wherein students and teachers talk about student writing as fellow writers and co-conspirators in students’ scholarship. Welcoming, encouraging and celebrating student language, insight and experience is key here. When we allow for code meshing as well as linguistic/dialectical choice, we expand our collective embrace of what’s possible with writing, languaging and learning; when we challenge Standard American English (SAE) as the supreme norm and ideal, we model for students that writing is a series of choices and we have linguistic agency within those choices.

Teaching is Love

Anti-racist teaching is an act of love. In Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks writes that higher education’s distrust of “teachers who love their students and are loved by them” is based on the “false assumption the education is neutral.” She calls upon educators to be inclusive in an agape sort of loving-kindness to “expand and embrace everyone” (198).  Building on Paulo Friere’s problem-posing pedagogy, Felicia Rose Chavez writes of how infusing classrooms with dialogue filled with “love and humility” works to “subvert the teacher’s authority and elevates students to critical co-investigators” (49-50). With love comes the courage to have compassion for one another, to share honest stories that build trust in one another, and to form an authentic and empowered classroom community that embraces more than constricts.  When we labor from a place of love, ideas such as the oppressive nature of white language supremacy and the need for linguistic justice tend to be unifying and empowering within a classroom community of open hearts.

 Power with Rather than Over

Education is more equitable when we share power with students as much as possible. Paulo Freire first decried the banking model of education in 1968, yet teachers are still too frequently the fulcrum of the classroom, depositing information into student subjects. We can seek to decenter ourselves in the classroom by cocreating assessments, policies, due dates, classroom norms, and more with our students in a true community of learning. We can facilitate student self-assessment in lieu of traditional grading. We can empower students by focusing on their capacities rather than perceived deficits. We can further empower students by explicitly embracing Tara Yosso’ theory of Community Cultural Wealth and celebrating student strengths and abilities that have not been traditionally valued in education. When we are transparent with students about power in our classroom, education, and society, we can strive for cultivating power with students while minimizing our power over them.

 Educate to Humanize not Standardize

Classroom is Community

In our classrooms we should be embracing collaboration and collective creativity while building community. As teachers we can strive to de-center ourselves as much as possible to flatten the hierarchy and position ourselves as developmental partners with our students. We can do this through transparency, vulnerability, and care for students. When we break down the artificial barriers between our classrooms and the “real world” and seek to connect with students on both individual and communal levels, we can engage with them as the fully realized humans they are, rather than as passive receptacles representing statistics, numbers, letters. In so doing, we can transform education into the joyful, connected experience it is meant to be. Every student is invited to bring every aspect of their identities with them, and we celebrate all of it as a caring learning community.