Ijeoma Njaka
educator | artist | writer | speaker
How can we discuss the implications of institutional racism in an hour?
Some buttons we made in advance of the workshop session.
The Center for New Designs in Learning and Scholarship (CNDLS) at Georgetown University provides support to professors, graduate students, teaching assistants, and others looking to improve their teaching. CNDLS has a team of staff members who focus on inclusive pedagogy—teaching practices centering equity, access, and students. With the inclusive pedagogy team, I wanted to create a workshop on institutional racism and complicity for a predominately white audience of Georgetown faculty and staff. Tackling subjects like structural and institutional racism takes time, so I was challenged by how to address the topic productively in a single, hour-long interaction.
In conjunction with educators at CNDLS, I designed a workshop entitled Building an Antiracist Institution: Examining Beverly Daniel Tatum’s “Moving Walkway of Racism.” The session was centered around scholar Beverly Daniel Tatum’s extended metaphor describing the cycle of racism as a moving walkway. I created a scaffolded process so participants could create their own interpretation of the metaphor in order to understand it, reflecting on their place in the cycle of racism in the process.
As part of the workshop exercise, participants recorded their intentions for future next steps.
I co-facilitated and co-designed this workshop with Michelle Ohnona and Joselyn Schultz Lewis, both staff at CNDLS.
