On today's episode Dr. Audrey Brutus, a Culturally Responsive Education Specialist, helps us unpack how disciplinary policies are creating disproportionate outcomes for Students of Color.

Full transcription and references available here. 

Dr. Brutus: So the gist of the workshops that I do around cultural responsiveness and what it means to be culturally responsive is really to send a pretty concrete message that there's not-it's not a list of strategies. It's not a list of things that I'm going to give you and then you go ahead and do, and all of a sudden you'll have a culturally responsive classroom and everything is great. It's a way of being. It's an essence of who you are and what you bring to the classroom, and a lens that you're building your lesson plans from. That you're looking at the curriculum, that you're teaching your students and the language that you're using, how you view inappropriate behaviors. It's a whole way of being. And really getting people to kind of understand that and unpack that is really a big part of my role in those kind of workshops.

Noelle: Yeah, it makes me think at least, that this would be work that I would hope our education system and lots of societal systems start doing on the front end. [...] Not waiting for there to be these outcomes, you know, but that we start trying to-like you were talking about-equity committees, and starting to try to do these things just as our natural processes within our systems to try to prevent some of these things from becoming worse. 

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Dr. Brutus: The public school system was never really created with students of color in mind. Right? So it's a system that's not designed for them, that was never created for them, and that's why we kind of see that we've never really recovered for that, because we still see Students of Color being mostly taught by predominantly White staff, for the most part, White women tend to be who the teaching staff are. So the idea that Students of Color are being, you know, mostly educated by teachers who don't look like them, teachers who have not had the experience of having to live in a racialized kind of society, and who are, you know, for lack of a better way of putting it, are racially privileged themselves. But they're making these consequential decisions about students and their futures and their lives. So I think all of that definitely plays a role in the inequities that we see in education.

Miranda: Yeah, I mean that's such a great point, a lot-most of our systems were designed for predominantly White, male, cisgender...so all those things. We see that across the board. So, that's a lot, right? [...] where do you even begin, because it feels like a lot.

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Join us for season one as we explore bias, systemic racism, the roots of oppression and barriers found within education and the criminal "justice" system.

The Unpacked Project is produced by Vicky Lee with Branding and Marketing by Raquel Avalos.

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