Seattle Schools Ethnic Studies Updates

 From the January 18, 2022 Student Services, Curriculum and Instruction committee agenda:

We partner with various community-based organizations from the Filipino American community to determine topics, curriculum, and ways to leverage community expertise for the new Filipino American 8th and 11th-grade courses. This work includes organizing professional development partnerships to support educators in content delivery.

We are collaborating with El Centro de La Raza to gather information around the needs of the SPS Latinx community. We are exploring partnerships to utilize grassroots organizing to institutionalize supports and resources for Ethnic Studies/Latinx Studies while fostering student agency and autonomy.

We presented at the DREA Racial Equity Team institute on December 11, 2021, to provide a foundational understanding of the scope of Ethnic Studies, its relevant history, and how it looks in P-12 environments. We will collaborate with DREA on future professional development for educators and our internal team.

Black Studies Curriculum

We have been developing the high school scope and sequence document for units and lessons. The scope and sequence for 11th grade is complete. We will have twenty-eight (28) weekly units that will be completed by the end of the school year. The middle school Black Studies Curriculum units will be ready for teacher feedback by mid-February. To support cross-content implementation, our CAI content managers/district staff have had four professional learning sessions with Dr. Muhammad on curriculum unit development.

The Black Studies department launched its first course (virtually) in January 2020. Since then, we have piloted a 10th grade World History Black Studies Course at Cleveland High School (21- 22). We continue to get strong feedback from students and families. We have a feature story being published through public affairs that will highlight this work.

We will provide professional development for teachers in the spring and offer an institute in the summer for teachers teaching Black Studies in our secondary schools. We are working on summer credit-bearing skills/course work. (i.e. financial literacy, health, etc.).

We collaborate with SPS educators to expand and update the Ethnic Studies curriculum. We are working to align curricular materials with Dr. Gholdy Muhammad’s Historically Responsive Literacy (HRL) framework. We will publish the curricular materials on the mySPS website during the second semester of the 2021-2022 school year. We are also working DOTS to ensure online material meets accessibility requirements on mySPS website. Lastly, we have convened community learning circles with educators in preparation for our 3rd Annual Liberation Through Antiracist Education Institute, scheduled for August of 2022.

Comments

Anonymous said…
I fully support Ethnic Studies as a stand-alone social studies course or series but I was never keen on the idea of integrating it into other subjects. All semester long my Garfield student has been bemoaning the use of class time in Japanese for discussing racial matters and then today he texted me a photo of his Geometry final... it was an essay about Dr. King.

I don't see how he's going to be able to go into a math or science-based college path if this is the basis of his math knowledge. He also has dreams about living in Japan in the future, but who knows if he'll ever learn enough Japanese? We keep talking about moving to the burbs. This might finally push us over the edge.

Just TOO Seattle
1/19/22, 11:13 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tuesday Open Thread

The speaker list is up for the Board meeting tomorrow; not as packed as I thought with just four people on the waitlist. The majority of the speakers are speaking on high school boundaries (with several wanting to talk about Ballard High). There are only three of us speaking about the Green Dot resolution asking the City to not grant the zoning departures that Green Dot has requested.  It's me, long-time watchdog, Chris Jackins, and the head of the Washington State Charter Schools Association, Patrick D'Amelio.  (I knew Mr. D'Amelio when he headed the Alliance for Education and Big Brothers and Big Sisters; he's a stand-up guy.)
Read more

Breaking It Down: Where the District Might Close Schools

Update 2: an absolutely fabulous interactive map made by parent Beth Day (@thebethocracy on Twitter - she covers Board meetings and is fun to read).   end of update    Update 1: Mea culpa, I did indeed get Decatur and Thornton Creek mixed up. Thanks to all for the correction. end of update   I suspect some who read this post will be irate. Why do this? Because the district seems very hellbent on this effort with no oversight skid marks from the Board.    To clearly state - I do not believe that closing 20 schools is a good idea. I think they hit on 20 because they thought it might bring in the most savings. But the jury is still out on the savings because the district has not shown its work nor its data. I suspect closing schools and THEN leasing/renting them is the big plan but that means the district really has to keep the buildings up.   But this district, with its happy talk about "well-resourced schools" is NOT acknowledging the pain and yes, grief, that is to come fro
Read more

MEETING CANCELED - Hey Kids, A Meeting with Three(!) Seattle Schools Board Directors

 Update 2: So I have seen a message from President Liza Rankin on why she, Director Evan Briggs, and Director Michelle Sarju backed out of this meeting.  In a nutshell: - She says there was no organization to the meeting which is just not true. They had a moderator lined up and naturally the board members could have set parameters for what to discuss, length of meeting, etc. All that was fleshed out. - She also claimed that if the meeting was PTA sponsored, they needed to have liability insurance to use the school space. Hello? PTAs use school space all the time and know they have to have this insurance.  - She seems to be worried about the Open Public Meetings law. Look, if she has a meeting in a school building on a non-personnel topic, it should be an open meeting. It appears that Rankin is trying, over and over, to narrow the window of access that parents have to Board members. She even says in her message - "...with decisions made in public." Hmmm - She also says that th
Read more