Tag Archives: equity

Honoring Martin Luther King Jr’s Legacy in 2021

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Honoring Martin Luther King Jr’s Legacy

Every year in January, like most schools across the country, we have an assembly to honor Martin Luther King Jr. 

Students file into the gym and proceed to play with their phones while teachers try, in vain, to give them the “this is important” look. 

Then, February passes with hallway acknowledgements of Black History Month, but come March, posters of Black civil rights leaders and activists are replaced by shamrocks and rainbows. 

Of course, things look more than a little different this year. We are remote teaching, so there won’t be an assembly. The halls are unchanged, still frozen in time from last spring (there is at least one corkboard leprechaun, wrinkled but persistent). 

Though circumstances have forced us to alter these traditions, I also believe that we should rethink how we recognize Martin Luther King Jr. in 2021. The fact that this MLK Day of Service follows a summer of protests for racial justice across our country should not be ignored. 

LEFT: Leaders of a march of about 255 people stare at police officers who stopped the group from marching on city hall in Pritchard, Ala, on June 12, 1968. RIGHT: A protester shows a picture of George Floyd from her phone to a wall of security guards near the White House on June 3, 2020, in Washington, DC. Bettman / Jim Watson/Getty
Code Switch 1968-2020: A Tale Of Two Uprisings
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Learning and Leading for Equity: Just Keep Going

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By Guest Contributor and Tumwater High School English Teacher, Emma-Kate Schaake

Humble Beginnings

Three years ago, our equity team was the new kid in school and we had all the hallmarks of not quite fitting in.

We dressed a little differently; Black Lives Matter shirts and rainbow pins. We asked questions while our peers rolled their eyes, understandably exhausted on a Friday afternoon. We visibly perked at the mention of data as everyone else sighed.

Together, we read articles, analyzed school data, and challenged our perspectives. We wanted to examine our privilege, change our classroom practices, and dream big for the future of our school.

Year one, we hosted a staff professional development session on white privilege and, let’s just say, it didn’t go well. People reacted defensively and resisted the very definition of white privilege. They then shared that we wasted their time, because our school is mostly white anyway.

 We had high hopes for systemic revolution, but progress on the ground was slow. We were asking staff to dig deep and examine what they knew about their lived reality, which was inevitably uncomfortable.

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An Example of Privilege

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When I teach about privilege in my classroom, I’m careful to frame it not as an “easier life,” but rather, a life that more closely matches the life of the deciders.

We talk about it in terms of “proximity to power.” As we discuss issues of race, gender, sexual orientation, citizenship, ability, wealth (the list persists), we identify how society unconsciously arranges each of these on an axis. At the convergence of these axes is the “position of power.” Furthest from the convergence are marginalized identities. We talk about this as “social location.”

I am careful to clarify that when we place identities on these axes, we are not making value judgments. Rather, we are making observations based on data. For example, on the race axis we consider which race in our country occupies governmental policymaking seats, CEO positions, media mogul platforms, and socially powerful positions. That race is predominantly white, and disproportionate to that race’s representation in our society. Take gender identity, sexual orientation, sex assigned at birth, (and on down the list) and we get a map of social locations with proximity to power.

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Advocacy: Knowing your System

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On my journey to bring more diverse authors, stories and voices to my high school English curriculum, I notched a couple of wins in the last two weeks. (Quick recap, I’m seeking to add Tommy Orange’s 2018 novel There There to the 12th grade English curriculum.)

Win #1: The district Instructional Materials Committee will review my request. Okay, so this one is kind of like putting “Make to-do list” at the top of my to-do list just so I can check it off… I’m a member of this committee and have been talking up this book to anyone who will listen.

Win #2: My building secretary and principal worked some budget magic and found a way to fund two class sets of novels. My building is the smallest of the district’s three high schools, and two class sets will cover every 12th grader in my building over the coming months. (Of the other two buildings, one high school just recently opened and has not fully phased up to 9-12 enrollment and the other has a senior class typically in the 500s… so that’s a heavier lift.)

These two successes have made me think about what teacher leaders… particularly teacher leaders new to navigating systems… might need to be cognizant of in order to successfully advocate:

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