Courageous Conversations About Race

Background: The Need

The academic achievement gap is characterized by low test performance by African American, Native American, Latino, and many refugee Asian student groups, compared with higher performance by White and other Asian student groups. Researchers have demonstrated that when factors such as parent income are accounted for, the achievement gap cannot be wholly explained by factors other than race. The racial achievement gap is often the outcome of school-based support mechanisms themselves, such as tracking and discipline practices. Educators often do not explicitly discuss the role that race, racial identity, or institutional racism play in racial disparities such as school tracking—the practice of assigning students to high and low ability groups for instruction—which consistently leads to racial sorting and a caste-like learning system. Rather, educators most often refer to factors external to schools' contexts—family support, poverty, mobility, and lack of English language proficiency—as the cause of racial disparities in schooling. Courageous Conversations About Race is a professional development strategy in which educators effectively address the role that race plays in these disparities.

Courageous Conversations about Race

Jenifer Lyn Simpson, a communication theorist, describes dialogue as productive when it is transformative; that is, when participants think together in a way that creates new meaning and understanding of themselves and their circumstances. For Simpson, dialogue is at its most transformative when people engage in “radical encounters with otherness,” when their everyday understandings [Page 462]and beliefs are challenged “through juxtaposition” with experiences and perspectives significantly different from their own.

As U.S. demographic trends continue to shift because of internal migration of urban families to suburban communities and immigrants arriving from abroad, the need for educators to interact productively about topics of race and cultural difference is necessary for the process of engaging families and students in schooling. Courageous Conversations About Race is a dialogic strategy for productive conversations about race in multiracial settings, the space in which White people often function as if they are color blind and people of color frequently reveal a high-level racial consciousness. This juxtaposition of perspectives on the role race and racism play in schooling offers the potential for radical transformation of common understandings about why racial disparities in schooling exist. And without knowing why racial disparities in schooling exist, it is difficult, if not impossible, to design and develop interventions and strategies that engage all students in learning.

The formal structure of Courageous Conversations, a productive form of dialogue, is defined as “utilizing the agreements, conditions and compass to engage, sustain and deepen interracial dialogue about race in order to examine schooling and improve student achievement.”

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