In our reflection form, we encouraged BARWE participants across the country to share Action Steps they have taken. Please share your own when you fill out the reflection form!
- Distribute the Helm's White Racial Identity Development Model to our Diversity Assessment team.
- Continue to recruit more staff to join our meetings.
- Bring this conversation to the whole faculty.
- Remember that everyone needs high expectations. Everyone needs love and warmth and belief in them.
- Talk more about race in the classroom.
- Assume good intentions, listen and then listen some more, and really pay attention to how we treat all youth we work with as young adult librarians.
- Name race in all meetings, site wide, departments, grade level, etc; whenever we are talking about students (or our colleagues), we need to bring race into the conversation.
- Several of our teachers talked about the idea of doing a better job of highlighting Black joy and Black beauty in the classroom.
- We reached out to our principal to set up a follow-up meeting to discuss our recruitment strategies and ideas we have for how we can take on ownership as teachers.
- We can make time in our schedules to observe each other and offer feedback
- Address our anxieties with our colleagues.
- In May, we may not use reading/s but instead do some planning for next year and think about how we may partner with our colleagues of color, so that they can do some of this work, as well, in affinity. There has been some interest expressed by some of our African American colleagues.
- Bring back to our grade teams ideas for developing relationships with students and keeping them in our classrooms!
