Portland State University (CorruptED)

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• The College of Education’s “Touchstones” guide future teachers in becoming “anti-racist” educators who are able to “identify oppressive conditions, including micro- and macro-aggressions.”
  
• The course titled “Identity and Social-Emotional Learning” includes the use of a “Social Identity Mapping” exercise, the “Wheel of Privilege and Power,” and Tema Okun’s “White Supremacy Culture.”
  
• The “Equity-Centered Mathematics Methods” course states it helps educators in “developing anti-racist/anti-bias pedagogy by interrupting the notion of mathematics as neutral through exploration of instructional practices that center, support and affirm often-marginalized identities.”
  
• The course “Culture, Law, and Politics” states that “education is inherently political” and covers critical race theory and Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed.

The Portland State University College of Education offers students two paths to teacher certification in elementary education—a bachelor’s degree or master’s degree. Both degree tracks are identical and require the same exact courses such as “Identity and Social Emotional Learning,” “Social Studies Methods: Teacher as Activist,” two courses of “Equity-Centered Mathematics Methods,” and “Inclusive Practices.”

The College of Education’s Vision states that its “educators and counselors create a just and equitable world.”

The college’s “Touchstones for Anti-bias/Anti-racist Educators” states that the Elementary Education program is guided by “recognizing the histories of colonization, settler colonialism, white supremacy, imperialism, and neoliberalism upon which the United States and its systems of education have been built and sustained.”

The program “offers culturally-affirming/sustaining, meaningful, rigorous, transformational learning experiences to prepare a critical mass of aspiring anti-racist/anti-bias teachers.”

Touchstones include engaging in “challenging conversations and critical self-reflection around power privilege to raise awareness and take ownership of and responsibility for their own actions and complicity with humility, curiosity, and an eagerness to grow and change,” identifying “oppressive conditions, including micro- and macro-aggressions, and engaging in intentional, concrete, courageous actions to interrupt oppression and change inequitable classroom and school systems in the interest of liberation for student and communities,” and “actively work to change inequitable systems and disrupt institutional racism and white supremacy within and beyond the school.”

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COURSES

ITP 456/556: Identity and Social-Emotional Learning

The course description for “Identity and Social-Emotional Learning” states that “prospective elementary educators will examine core components of and factors influencing social emotional learning, identity formation, and executive function development in this course.”

The document states in the course introduction that “teachers play a significant role in establishing classroom and school environments that promote culturally elevating social-emotional learning (SEL) among students.” It also shares that the “teacher candidates take a deep dive into their own identity, vulnerability, and social emotional experiences in preparation for managing a classroom of learners” and that they will utilize a “lens of transformative social emotional learning (tSEL), teacher candidates center anti-racist and restorative justice practices that correspond with elementary students’ lived experiences and community-sustaining practices in classroom procedures, instruction, and daily interactions with students.”

During week one of the course, students engage in an activity titled Social Identity Mapping which has students list various forms of oppression in which individuals land on a spectrum of target and agent status. When evaluating the form of oppression, white males would occupy the category of “agent” while a female “Person of Color” would occupy the “target” category.

Other identity examples of “agents” of oppression include “heterosexual,” “rich, upper class,” born in the “USA,” “media beauty,” “married” and “monogamous,” “of appropriate age,” and “Christian.”

Another week one course activity includes students engaging with the Wheel of Privilege and Power which promotes the idea that those identity categories listed closest to the center are the most privileged/powerful.

During week four of the course, students engage with a document titled White Supremacy Culture which lists characteristics that are “damaging because they are used as norms and standards without being pro-actively named or chosen by the group.” Listed characteristics include “perfectionism,” a “sense of urgency,” “defensiveness,” “quantity over quality,” “worship of the written word,” “paternalism,” “power hoarding,” “fear of open conflict,” and “individualism.”

The course focus for week five is “Addressing Racial Injustices: Acts of Oppression, Microaggressions and Implicit Bias” and includes “affinity spaces.” The syllabus includes a document on “Caucuses” (also known as affinity groups) that states that causes are “times when people of color and white people within an organization meet separately in order to do” different work.

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ITP 465/565: Equity-Centered Mathematics Methods 1 for Elementary Educators

The course description states that it “prepares candidates to teach mathematics for social justice through equity-centered, research based instructional practices.” It also “supports candidates in developing anti-racist/anti-bias pedagogy by interrupting the notion of mathematics as neutral through exploration of instructional practices that center, support and affirm often-marginalized identities.”

One of the course sessions asks, “how can we leverage our mathematics instruction to combat racism and anti-blackness?” and “Where is power in mathematics to identify and push back on gender oppressive structures embedded in curriculum and our everyday lives?”

Required reading for the session includes Supporting LGBTQ+ Students in K-12 Mathematics which features an elementary classroom task titled “Progress Pride Flag Task.”

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ITP 557: Culture, Law, and Politics

The “Culture, Law, and Politics” course introduction states that “education is inherently political” and that the “experience of schooling contributes to the socialization of individuals and inevitably legitimates some forms of knowledge while excluding and marginalizing others.” The course will challenge students to “mine history and think critically about the dominant narratives in current educational issues that impact teaching and learning environments for K-12 students and teachers.”

Topics for session three of the course include “critical race theory,” Derrick Bell’s Brown v. Board of Education and the Interest-Convergence Dilemma, and “school de/resegregation.”

Other session topics include “Disability Critical Race Theory (DisCrit),” the “Evolution of Gender and Sexuality Education in the U.S.,” and “Queer and Feminist Theory.”

One of the course assignments includes students reading a chapter from Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and engaging in ‘”dialectical” way of thinking.’ Students will use the Problem-Posing document to aid them in the assignment.

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ITP 560: Social Studies Methods: Teacher as Activist

The “Social Studies Methods: Teacher as Activist” description states that the course “considers bias and oppression in instruction of elementary social studies classes.” It continues: “We recognize that subjective social and structural systems frame our understanding” and that in this course “prospective elementary educators will study persistent historical, social and political issues, conflicts and compromises in regard to power, inequity, and justice and their connection to current events and movements.”

Students will study “central topics” such as “Black, Indigenous and Peoples of Color histories, the racial histories of Portland, as well as the Holocaust and other genocides.” The course will utilize an “ethnic studies lens” to “identify and analyze the nature of systemic oppression in the pursuit of justice and equality in Oregon, the United States and the world.”

Additionally, students will “understand and apply instructional practices of social studies education to reduce bias, including methods in selecting and organizing inclusive materials and resources that reflect the classroom culture.”

The required text for the course is Social studies for a better world: An anti-oppressive approach for elementary educators.

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ITP 473/573: Community Engagement and Collaboration

The course “Community Engagement and Collaboration” introduction and “working assumptions” states that “school norms are typically based in whitestream, patriarchal ways of knowing and doing” and that “teachers must be able to connect with all families, including those whose ways of knowing and doing do not align with school norms.”

One of the course sessions focuses on “White Supremacy in schools” and asks students “How do race and racism impact family engagement?”

Required course readings includes Tara Yosso’s Whose culture has capital? A critical race theory discussion of community cultural wealth.