Speaker Series: Sherice Clarke
Equitable Rationality: Designing Teacher Learning to Support Embodiments of Equity
Speaker: Sherice Clarke, PhD
Assistant Professor, Department of Education Studies
University of California at San Diego
Abstract: The accumulation, ubiquity and sheer density of racial projects (the everyday performances and processes of racism) in U.S. public schools mean that teachers are well embedded within social systems (professional learning communities, classrooms, schools, communities, districts), where racial projects are constantly being made and maintained as the way of schooling in the United States. These everyday ways of racism in public schooling cumulatively shape a normative hegemonic culture of educational inequality and inequity for BIPOC youth. The ubiquity of racial inequality in U.S. public schools means that teachers may or may not be fully cognizant of the systems that inform their beliefs, actions and knowledge about BIPOC youth’s capacity to learn – and thus may not be fully cognizant of the ways in which they participate or contribute to maintaining the racially unjust status-quo.
This talk centers these issues as the design space for teacher learning. In this talk, I will examine teacher thinking, reasoning, and embodied practices in order to ground designs for teacher learning that support the of development of equitable rationality. I define equitable rationality as ways of thinking and doing in practice that center the assets of BIPOC youth as levers for educational equity.
Bio:
Sherice Clarke is Assistant Professor at the University of California’s Department of Education Studies. Her research focuses on the ways in which equity is structured at the micro-level, in classroom dialogue. She uses these insights to design teacher learning that can support educational equity for minoritized youth. Dr. Clarke received her PhD in Education from the University of Edinburgh’s Moray House School of Education. Prior to her appointment at UCSD she was a postdoctoral fellow and research associate that the University of Pittsburgh’s Learning Research and Development Center.