Dean's Perspective
Dear Alumni and Friends:
During my first year as dean, I invited current master’s and doctoral students to meet informally over lunch and share their experiences with me. As I listened to students discuss the opportunities and challenges of studying at HGSE, I gained an important perspective on the school. Students told me about the instructors who inspired them, their struggles to finance their education, their plans following graduation, and more. One topic emerged in every discussion: the difficulty of having authentic and productive discussions about race in some HGSE classrooms. A few of the stories were about students’ perceptions that instructors and teaching fellows were shutting down conversations; not surprisingly, students felt silenced as a result. Other stories were about discussions of race differences in achievement, which some students perceived as blaming victims of oppression. Students also shared stories of instructors who got it right. Typically, these instructors learned their lessons the hard way.
I decided to ask our communications team to do a piece for Ed. magazine on how race is discussed (or not discussed) in class — both at HGSE and throughout the country. This article is not intended to be a comprehensive look at race in the classroom, nor was it intended to leave the impression that we have all the answers. As my conversations with students have demonstrated, we still have work to do. Instead, my hope is that by putting this issue on the table, we can share our stories, as well as some of the best practices of our faculty and alumni, and learn from them.
Interestingly, as this cover story was being completed, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against school choice programs in Kentucky and Seattle that considered race in student assignment decisions. This decision, which will limit districts’ ability to create diverse classrooms, makes these conversations even more important.
After you read this story, I’d like you to think about your own experiences and share your stories by writing letters to the editor. As leaders in the world of education, your stories of success and failure will serve our entire community well and will allow all of us to continue the kind of self-reflection that leads to needed change.
Sincerely,
Dean of the Faculty of Education
July 2007
