Dr. Shayla Reese Griffin is the co-founder of The Justice Leaders Collaborative, an author, educator, and mother. As the challenges of school for the fall have come into focus, finding solutions based in equity has been a struggle. Dr. Griffin has written about it, calling for space in buildings to be prioritized to those with the highest needs, for us to consider where our time and energy might best be spent in this moment of crisis, and for parents to be paid to stay home to take care of their kids.

She joins us for a conversation about the fall, but also about justice and race in schools more broadly. Her 2015 book, Those Kids, Our Schools: Race and Reform in an American High School is an inside look at a racially and socioeconomically diverse high school in America. It explores the way students recreate existing racial hierarchies when not giving the time, space, and instruction for how to have productive conversations about race.

This work led her to co-author Race Dialogues: A Facilitator’s Guide to Tackling the Elephant in the Classroom which aims to give teachers (and others) the tools to facilitate more helpful and hopeful conversations.

LINKS:

• Dr. Griffin on Medium – including the three posts about COVID
• Dr. Griffin’s Those Kids, Our Schools: Race and Reform in an American High School
• Dr. Griffin’s Race Dialogues: A Facilitator’s Guide to Tackling the Elephant in the Classroom
• Race: The Power of an Illusion – documentary
• Clara Totenberg Green’s Op-Ed in the NYT
• JPB Gerald and Mira Debs’s Op-Ed in the Washington Post
• L’Heureux Lewis-McCoy’s thread on Twitter
• Courtney Martin and Garrett Bucks wrote letters to each other about pods
• Erica Turner created this guide to Equity in Pandemic Schooling
• Our own blog post about pods
• The newly updated resources page from our website
• The recording and resources from our first ever webinar
• And, in proof that everyone is talking about pods . . . this excellent piece from Good Housekeeping

Use these links or start at our Bookshop.org storefront to support local bookstores, and send a portion of the proceeds back to us.

Register for our upcoming bookclub in early December. We’re reading Mia Birdsong’sHow We Show Up.

Join our Patreon to support this work, and connect with us and other listeners to discuss these issues even further.

Let us know what you think of this episode, suggest future topics, or share your story with us – @integratedschls on twitter, IntegratedSchools on Facebook, or email us [email protected].

We are a proud member of The Connectd Podcast Network.

The Integrated Schools Podcast was created by Courtney Mykytyn and Andrew Lefkowits.

This episode was produced by Andrew Lefkowits. It was edited, and mixed by Andrew Lefkowits.

Music by Kevin Casey.

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