#EquityFootprint: The Impact of Equity
A few months ago, I was in a meeting with eight other teachers who are extraordinary educational leaders from North Carolina. These leaders are practicing classroom teachers who represent the eight regional areas of North Carolina and our charter schools. Additionally, they represent elementary, middle, and high schools; charter schools, choice schools, alternative schools, and traditional schools; every subject area in core content, the arts, music, and special education; and a variety of social and political standpoints. If you were ever looking for a group of teachers who had a passion for public education, and the experience and expertise to truly represent every teacher and every student in our public schools, this was the group!
As a conversation ebbed and flowed that evening, we started to form a plan. As a team, we agreed the number one issue in public education today is equitable education. Teaching through the pandemic, we each realized that the inequities we knew existed were being highlighted and magnified to the general public, and we wanted a way to begin the conversation about different areas of equity. We sought to generate productive discussions about equity issues and to encourage transformative solutions. We were jazzed, we were excited, we were ready to go!
Following the brainstorming session, we started to refine our ideas and we worked together to identify some of the inequities and barriers that students in classrooms experience. To engage other educators and the public in the conversation, we decided to focus on eight different categories of equity and deep dive into each area for a month. To introduce each topic, decided to form several well-developed questions designed to generate conversations around each topic. We launched our project in December 2020 with a focus on Social Economic Status Equity and expanded the conversation to Gender Equity in January 2021. Each month, through June 2021, we will continue to explore different topics related to equity in education through blog posts, interviews, and Twitter and Facebook Chats.
We decided to hashtag our project #EquityFootprint and we’d love to have you on this journey with us as we explore equity and how inequities affect kids in our classroom. If you’d like to join in the conversation, we’d love to have your input. You can learn more about our project, and see ongoing conversations, by liking our Facebook page North Carolina Educators for Equity at https://www.facebook.com/EdForEquity or follow us on Twitter @Ed_for_Equity.
Our next chat will be Tuesday, January 9th at 7:00 pm. You can engage in the chat on either Facebook or Twitter. We look forward to seeing you there!
