The events of the last year have led to more conversations among families, colleagues, and friends, about race. The Academic Services team at Risepoint has adopted Glenn Singleton’s Courageous Conversations framework: stay engaged, expect to experience discomfort, speak your truth, and expect and accept non-closure (Singleton & Linton 2006). If you are facilitating conversations about race in your online classroom, you can use the Courageous Conversations framework to guide discussion and set expectations.
Glenn Singleton and Curtis Linton’s book Courageous Conversations About Race: A Field Guide for Achieving Equity in Schools as well as the companion book More Courageous Conversations about Race, provides a framework to support conversations about race in your classroom. In addition to the Four Agreements of Courageous Conversations, the books also suggest six conditions for participants to consider.
You can use these conditions to guide how these discussions are introduced, facilitated, and revisited throughout your course:
- Focus on personal, local, and immediate by inviting students to connect the discussion to their own experiences, communities, or current events.
- Isolate race by keeping the conversation centered on race when it arises, rather than shifting to other factors like class or gender too quickly.
- Normalize social construction and multiple perspectives by acknowledging that people may experience and interpret race differently and encouraging respectful exploration of those differences.
- Monitor agreements and conditions by revisiting discussion norms during the conversation and setting clear expectations for respectful participation.
- Use a “working definition” for race by collaboratively defining key terms with your students to create shared understanding before or during discussion.
- Examine the presence and role of Whiteness by prompting reflection on how dominant cultural norms and perspectives may shape experiences and interpretations.
Depending on your course context and institutional guidelines, you may adapt these agreements to fit your classroom.
Further reading
If you want to deepen your approach or see how others facilitate these conversations, the following resources provide practical examples and research-based strategies:
Resources
- Asby, D. and Restrepo-Toro, M. (2020). Courageous Conversations in the Classroom Part 1: A Partnering Tool to Achieve Equity in Schools. Center for Educational Improvement. [Web]
- Carpenter, B. W., & Diem, S. (2013). Talking race: Facilitating critical conversations in educational leadership preparation programs. Journal of School Leadership, 23(6), 902–931. (https://doi.org/10.1177/105268461302300601)
- Gavrin, M. (2017). Starting with Ourselves: Preparing for Tough Classroom Conversations. Learning for Justice. [Web]
- Gonzalez, J. (2019). How One District Learned to Talk about Race. Cult of Pedagogy. [Podcast]
- Mansfield, K. & Jean-Marie, G. (2015). Courageous conversations about race, class, and gender: voices and lessons from the field. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education. 28, 819–841. (https://doi.org/10.1080/09518398.2015.1036950)
- Mitchell, D., Hinueber, J., & Edwards, B. (2017). Looking race in the face: Schools that achieve strong results with black students address race directly and teach in ways that empower students to learn. Phi Delta Kappan, 98(5), 24–24.
- Singleton, G. (2018). Beyond random acts of equity. The Learning Professional, 39(5). [Web]
- Singleton, G. E., & Linton, C. (2006). Courageous conversations about race: A field guide for achieving equity in schools. Corwin Press. Vetter, A., Schieble, M., & Meacham, M. (2018). Critical conversations in English education: Discursive strategies for examining how teacher and student identities shape classroom discourse. English Education, 50(3), 255–282.