Ohio TESOL Statement On Teaching about Racial Injustice

The following statement was adopted by the Ohio TESOL board in the summer of 2020.

         As our country continues to share in a struggle to process the many deaths caused by the racism and systemic inequality in our country, Ohio TESOL believes we must commit ourselves to being active participants in making meaningful change beyond this collective moment in our history.  Since the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Rayshard Brooks, Elijah Mcclain, and others, we have seen the outrage that has brought hundreds of thousands of people around the world to take action and call for justice, summoning a renewed movement for civil rights. Many teachers, our students, and their families are among those who have lent their voices to advocate for real and lasting change. 

           We, as teachers, must contemplate the challenges that lie ahead for our children and our society. Our profession calls upon us to support and comfort our students as they try to process these traumas that are all too real and ubiquitous within our communities. We know our students will look to us to present facts and context that lead them to a full and honest understanding of the racial inequities that have historically been woven within our institutions; we can help to guide them towards positive actions that contribute to a future that is free from injustice and built upon the foundation of equal rights for all.  To prepare for this, we can build upon the perspective we have acquired from our multicultural work.  As teachers of English learners, we aid students in navigating American culture. We support and comfort our students as they face many cultural and language challenges, and we advocate for the resources that help to pave their way to success.  These are some of the skills we can bring to the table as we engage in the difficult but necessary conversations about race and the history of racism in our country. 

       To ensure that we are prepared and informed, we must continually educate ourselves, our colleagues, our school leadership, and our community-elected officials about culture and racial inequity. We must draw upon the many resources readily available that expose the truth about our long history of slavery, the origins of our racial inequality, and about our past and ongoing fights for civil rights. Traditional teaching sources about the founding of our country have excluded the horrors of slavery and have ignored the complicity that this nation must now face. Most American students have learned history from instructional materials that do not include any African American perspectives and that flagrantly omit tragedies like the 1921 Tulsa Massacre.  Most students do not learn about the numerous contributions and success stories of so many Black Americans or about freedom celebrations such as Juneteenth within our instructional curriculum. We can and we must do better.

         As an organization, we will work to support our teacher members in gaining a better understanding of what is true about our past, being inspired by the present activism, and helping to affect change for our children’s future.  Over these past weeks, many valuable resources have been shared by professional education institutions and news organizations and posted on social media. We intend to share many of these that we have found to be helpful on our website, Facebook pages and within our interest section listservs.

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Webmaster’s Note: We acknowledge that between the time of adopting this statement and posting, even more high-profile incidents have occurred and even more names could be added to the list in the 1st paragraph.

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Resources for Talking about Racial Inequality, Civil Rights Action and Reconciliation:

NAACP: https://www.naacp.org/issues/education/

Teaching Resources: 

• Southern Poverty Law Center: Teaching Tolerance
  • https://www.tolerance.org/classroom-resources/lessons
• From Privilegetoprogress.org
  • https://fromprivilegetoprogress.org/

Advocacy Resources: 

TESOL International:

• TESOLers for Social Responsibility newsletter – http://newsmanager.commpartners.com/tesolsris/issues/
• TESOL blog post about using literature to combat racism – http://blog.tesol.org/using-literature-to-combat-racism-in-young-children-2/

Additional sources are available to members of TESOL International 

• NEA:
  • https://educationvotes.nea.org/2020/06/05/demand-social-justice-and-an-end-to-police-brutality/?ms=edaction20200605&utm_source=edactionincongress&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=congress&j=5717569&sfmc_sub=747605177&l=59609_HTML&u=157229898&mid=1059756&jb=1007

Advocacy/ Teaching Unions: 

OEA:  https://www.ohea.org/

Public Media: