Emerson College Library: Teach-in on Race 2023: Panel 6: Teaching While Black

Panel 6: Teaching While Black: How Cultural Legacies, Creative and Communication Arts Education and Institutional Racism Have and Are Impacting the Experiences of Black Professors

ProArts Consortium

Friday, February 17, 3:30pm-4:30pm

Description: In this era when calls for anti-racist approaches and the rejection of anti-Blackness are reverberating in both US American society and across academia, it is critical that both institutions and professors take concrete steps to respond meaningfully. In this session, Black professors at multiple intersections of identity will discuss how their pedagogy, creative works and scholarship function as embodiments of the histories, cultures and communities racism and colonialism endeavored to silence, demean and destroy. They will also share how Arts and Communications programs in Predominantly White Institutions can intentionally and ethically make structural and pedagogical decisions that not only make space for but advance anti-racism.

Moderator:

James Mason, Associate Provost and Dean of Faculty, Massachusetts College of Art and Design

Location

Online Only

Pre-registration required: https://emerson.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJ0kc-2rrjsoH9ISWXKl4VkgyyYqNlEi0rd6

Attendees should not share their confirmation link, as it will be unique to each participant.

Spark Prompts

Spark Prompts are a tool to generate curiosity and interest in this year's Teach-In on Race sessions. The presenters have generated the following prompts as a way to spark dialogue while also inviting attendees to deepen their learning by reflecting on the sessions themselves.

Spark Prompt(s)

Resisting Anti-Blackness through Anti-Racist Pedagogical Lenses (for faculty-faculty dialog)

In what ways do your life experiences and background inform your approach to content and instruction?
How might your experiences and backgrounds be assets to your work or create areas for needed reflection as you consider why and how to employ anti-racist approaches to education?
What types of support would help you to begin or continue resisting anti-Blackness within the academy? How would you describe your current access to those resources?
What factors should colleges/universities consider in order to hire and retain faculty well-poised to teach courses that specifically address racism and anti-Blackness? What types of factors typically go unrecognized?

Books and Media @ Emerson

Dismantling Institutional Whiteness
Dismantling Institutional Whiteness: Emerging Forms of Leadership in Higher Education focuses on the experiences of women of color in leadership roles in higher education. Top roles historically have gone to white men, and leadership has not reflected the range of identities and people who make up higher education. Why? And why does this problem continue to this day? Most importantly, what can be done to bring about meaningful change? Dismantling Institutional Whiteness gathers a range of first-person narratives from women of color and examines the challenges they face not only at a systemic level, but also at a deeply personal level. Their experiences combined with research and statistics paint a sobering portrait of higher education's problems when it comes to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Related Resources and Further Reflections

UPCOMING EVENT: Contextualizing the Impacts of COVID-19 Within Higher Education
This panel will explore how COVID-19 has disproportionately impacted students along the lines of race, the ways in which faculty members' teaching methodologies have permanently shifted, and how the pandemic has impacted the way in which students and faculty approach the arts as a career path.
Berklee College of Music Mission Statement
MassArt Mission statement
Berklee College of Music - Black Scholars Initiative
The Black Scholars Initiative (BSI), which was established in 2017, is a campus-wide program for entering Berklee College of Music and Boston Conservatory at Berklee students who self identify as Black and/or African American and was designed in content and focus to reflect Berklee’s roots in African American musical traditions with the goal of fostering a strong sense of community, support, belonging, and cultural history on campus.
A Report from Occupied Territory by James Baldwin
"'I can’t believe what you say,' the song goes, 'because I see what you do'"
Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One's Reason and of Seeking Truth / René Descartes
This is the source of Descartes' famous phrase "I think, therefore I am," which appears at the beginning of Part IV.
Descartes / BBC Worldwide Learning
"I think, therefore I am." Rationalist philosopher and mathematician René Descartes, considered the father of modern philosophy, held this as self-evidently true. In this program, world-renowned author and professor Bryan Magee and Bernard Williams of Kings College examine Descartes’s theory of knowledge and his use of skeptical inquiry to affirm reality, including the existence of God.
'I Am Because We Are': The African Philosophy of Ubuntu
Rene Descartes is often called the first modern philosopher, and his famous saying, “I think, therefore I am,” laid the groundwork for how we conceptualize our sense of self. But what if there’s an entirely different way to think about personal identity — a non-Western philosophy that rejects this emphasis on individuality?

Art on My Mind by Bell Hooks
In Art on My Mind, bell hooks, a leading cultural critic, responds to the ongoing dialogues about producing, exhibiting, and criticizing art and aesthetics in an art world increasingly concerned with identity politics. Always concerned with the liberatory black struggle, hooks positions her writings on visual politics within the ever-present question of how art can be an empowering and revolutionary force within the black community.

Garrett Morgan
American inventor and lifelong activist for the advancement of African Americans.
AUDIO: DJ Kool Herc (1998)
1998 audio from the Bronx DJ whose activities in the 1970s contributed to the emergence of hip-hop music.
Bessie / HBO Films
Biopic that focuses on Bessie Smith's transformation from a struggling young singer into 'The Empress of the Blues', who became one of the most successful recording artists of the 1920s and is an enduring icon today.
The Negro In Our History by Carter G. Woodson
A representative historical work by Woodson, founder of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History and the only American child of formerly enslaved parents known to have received a PhD.