Description:

This workshop commences with the reading of a personal essay, "I'm Afraid of White People" written for and by a teacher of colour. It then looks at how white privilege and white supremacy continue to be on the rise, seeping into the classroom, including teacher education and graduate studies. Once this is taken into consideration, the workshop delves into the ways antiracism, drawing on the (un)learnings from the keynote speaker workshop, continues to be dominated and hijacked by performative [white] allies and those with complicities/proximities to whiteness. Considering this, the workshop will ask, "What can we do to shift from perfomative politics — whether well-intentioned or not — towards transformative practices?"

Facilitator Bio:

​Shyam is a current MA student a part of the Faculty of Education at the University of Ottawa. He is a former teacher candidate from the University of Ottawa (2018-20) and a former fellow from Teach for India (2014-17). He was one of the founding co-organizers of the Teacher Candidates of Colour (TCC) Collective and now one of the organizers of the Education Graduate Students of Colour (EGSC). For his thesis, he will focus on the experiences and stories of teacher candidates of colour (TCCs). To learn more about his teaching work, visit his teacher blog at www.monstersandmuchmore.com. ​

Additional Information:

Due to COVID-19, all our events will be online on Zoom. At the moment, we regret that will be unable to provide ASL interpretation and live captioning (in English) for this event. We are working, however, on making our online events and workshops more accessible.