Resources for Integrating Anti-racism in Course Development

While we pick up our biases from the world around us every day, we also absorb these biases from a young age through curriculum choices and textbooks. What we learn in school profoundly shapes us and our worldview.

When you’re sitting down to develop a course or write a textbook, how can you minimize unconscious bias in your content and design? SRM editors and learning experience designers shared their go-to sources to help think about racism and other biases in content development. This is not an exhaustive list; we hope this helps you start to think about your writing and course design and inspires you to find the resources most relevant to your work.

Print Resources

• An African American and Latinx History of the United States, Paul Ortiz
  “Incisive and timely, this bottom-up history, told from the interconnected vantage points of Latinx and African Americans, reveals the radically different ways that people of the diaspora have addressed issues still plaguing the United States today, and it offers a way forward in the continued struggle for universal civil rights.”
• An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz
  “Spanning more than four hundred years, this classic bottom-up peoples’ history radically reframes US history and explodes the silences that have haunted our national narrative.”
• Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future, Asao B. Inoue
  “Inoue helps teachers understand the unintended racism that often occurs when teachers do not have explicit antiracist agendas in their assessments.”
• “Dismantling Anti-Black Linguistic Racism in English Language Arts Classrooms: Toward an Anti-racist Black Language Pedagogy,” April Baker-Bell
  “The author offers Anti-Racist Black Language Pedagogy as an approach that English Language Arts teachers can implement in an effort to dismantle anti-black linguistic racism and white cultural and linguistic hegemony in their classrooms.”
• Performing Antiracist Pedagogy in Rhetoric, Writing, and Communication, Eds. Frankie Condon and Vershawn Ashanti Young
  “The contributors to this collection, drawn from a wide range of disciplines, urge readers to renew their commitment to intelligently and publicly deliberate race and to counteract the effects of racism. The book is both theoretically rigorous and practical, providing readers with insightful analyses of race and racism and useful classroom suggestions and examples.”
• Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks
  “bell hooks speaks to the heart of education today: how can we rethink teaching practices in the age of multiculturalism? What do we do about teachers who do not want to teach, and students who do not want to learn? How should we deal with racism and sexism in the classroom?”
• Teaching Community, bell hooks
  “Combining critical thinking about education with autobiographical narratives, hooks invites readers to extend the discourse of race, gender, class and nationality beyond the classroom into everyday situations of learning.”
• “To Correct or Not Correct: Confronting Decisions about African American Students’ Use of Language Varieties in the English Classroom,” Tanki Reed Marshall
  “The author addresses the tensions teachers face in the classroom when they make decisions about how African American students should use their language.”
• “Why ‘Correcting’ African American Language Speakers Is Counterproductive,” Alice Lee
  “This article offers practical suggestions for how AAL can be incorporated in curriculum and instruction.”

Online Resources

• The 1619 Project
  “The 1619 Project is first and foremost an invitation to reframe how the country discusses the role and history of its black citizens.”
• Anti-racist Pedagogy Guide
  “This guide provides resources for developing anti-racist pedagogical strategies and syllabi.”
• Anti-racist Pedagogy Resources
  “This is a list of essays, books, and news articles on anti-racist pedagogy, put together by the University of Texas.”
• Anti-racist Reading List for Designers
  “This list seeks to begin a dialogue challenging the privilege, biases, and assumptions of designers.”
• Racial Justice Is Climate Justice: An Open-Sourced Library to Educate, Advocate & Take Action
  “This is an open-sourced library with resources that are focused upon education, advocacy, and action for anyone, anywhere, to play an effective role.”
• Syllabus for Introduction to Critical Race Theory, Weeks 8 and 9
  Weeks 8 and 9 of this course explore CRT methodologies and CRT in education.
• Zinn Education Project
  “This website offers free, downloadable lessons and articles organized by theme, time period, and grade level. The teaching materials emphasize the role of working people, women, people of color, and organized social movements in shaping history.”