Cultural Competency Resources

This website by equity coach extraordinaire Elena Aguilar and her team at Bright Morning is full of wonderful tools and resources that can help both teachers and education coaches. However, you don't have to have an official job as a coach to use her helpful materials!

Hear directly from scholar giants in the field of education bell hooks and Bettina Love as they discuss racism in education, Abolitionist Teaching, and what educators can do to strive for justice in their classrooms. Like many other sources, they discuss k-12 schools, but there's still so much to prompt us to reflect on our own adult education teaching.

Brazilian educational activist Paulo Freire originally published the seminal book The Pedagogy of the Oppressed in 1968. This book is essential reading for any educator interested in adult literacy and equity. Freire explains how traditional schooling perpetuates colonization and domination over oppressed classes of people and the way to liberation is through literacy and evoking critical consciousness in education.

This book offers educators tools to increase democratic participation in the classroom and to think about education as a practice of freedom. From the back cover: "Teaching students to "transgress" against racial, sexual, and class boundaries in order to achieve the gift of freedom is, for the author, the teacher's most important goal."

In this phenomenal panel discussion, Bettina Love, Genevieve DeBose Akinnagbe, and Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz discuss Dr. Love's book We Want to Do More Than Survive, which addresses the racism in education. Dr. Love suggests Abolitionist Teaching as a way of life that all educators need to commit to. Check out this fascinating talk to reflect more on how racism shows up in our own classes and what we can do about it.

For those looking for more information on Critical Race Theory, especially since it is mentioned in the news daily, take a look at this article. What truly is CRT? The author provides the definition and history of CRT while connecting it to our education system today. They also address myths surrounding CRT which cause many people to misunderstand its purpose in our classrooms.