Document Type

Article

Disciplines

5.3 EDUCATIONAL SCIENCES

Publication Details

In Re-imagining higher education through equity, inclusion and sustainability (RISE). Proceedings of the 2nd. EUt+ International Conference on Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, Technical University of Sofia, Sozopol, Bulgaria, 1-3 September.

doi: 10.21427/pqq1-1q52

Abstract

Racism is and has been a persistent feature in Irish society (McVeigh, 1992). Higher education institutions (HEIs) and practice education settings are a microcosm of Irish society and therefore also sites where racism is experienced and/or witnessed by students. Research (Poole, 2019) found that some students on our Community Development and Youth Work (CDYW) programme witnessed racism on placement but did not feel equipped to respond. We were awarded IMPACT funding in partnership with the EDI Directorate in TU Dublin to embed anti-racism in CDYW teaching and learning in 2020/2021 and have continued this work to date. For the purposes of this paper, we will focus on the importance of positionality for future community development and youth workers and its impact of their practice. First, we argue that developing racial literacy, embedding anti-racism at a programme level, and developing a broader awareness of dynamics of advantage and disadvantage at multiple levels - individual, institutional, structural, and historical – is a long-term endeavour. It requires intentional scaffolding across programme modules. Second, we argue that the success of this is significantly dependent on raising educator and student awareness-levels of their own positionalities and how they are shaped by ‘how things work’ at an institutional and structural level. Storytelling is one way of raising awareness of positionalities and their connections to wider power dynamics. We argue that to build racial literacy in a classroom context, students need to learn about each other’s life stories and an orientation toward curiosity and a willingness to stay with discomfort must be fostered. Conceptual and theoretical frameworks must be introduced at multiple points with students enabled to build their understandings and the complexity of same incrementally over time. Finally, we argue that a key component of developing racial literacy among White settled students and educators, is the need to locate and understand their racial/ethnic position within the dominant contemporary norms which have been shaped by the specific Irish historical complexities.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.21427/cd2h-wr59

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License.

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