Believing It & Being It
These learning networks are imagining a better future for students all along the education pipeline.
MDC’s State of the South is storytelling and analysis of regional strengths and system failures. We envision a South where all people thrive. The 2021 series will focus on how the COVID-19 pandemic, racial injustice, and climate change demand commitments that make us all safer, resilient, and more free. Today’s piece is from MDC program director Micah Anderson.
“We are all inclusion officers, responsible for making space for people and helping people see that they belong.”
Quincy Jenkins, Executive Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Chattanooga State Community College in Chattanooga, TN, shared this great advice during a recent Network for Southern Economic Mobility webinar. Quincy’s proclamation imagines a world where we (yes, you and me) are transforming this world into a place where young people, especially those currently and historically excluded from opportunity and facing systems of oppression, are thriving.
At MDC, we are energized, rejuvenated, encouraged, and emboldened by our partners and teachers, like Quincy Jenkins, that are working towards this region-changing future reality.
During the April 4 webinar, Postsecondary Perspectives: Working Towards Equity in the Year Ahead, Quincy and Dr. Toya Corbett, Assistant Vice President for Student Affairs for the University of North Carolina System, highlighted the ways they serve as inclusion officers in the midst of a historic time of individual and collective suffering. Some of their work includes:
- Connecting students to mental health services and destigmatizing seeking help through virtual appointments. Dr. Corbett shared that the University of North Carolina System campuses have seen an increase in attendance rates for scheduled appointments in the virtual setting.
- Reimagining the role and impact of campus police on the campus environment and student experience.
- Working to care for faculty and staff and consider their needs as workers and parents during the pandemic. Quincy Jenkins shared that at Chattanooga State instructors can flex their time in a way that serves them and their students well. It may mean less time in office hours during traditional operating hours, but more availability during evening or weekend times that may also work for students.
Just like Inclusion Officers Jenkins and Corbett, MDC has been facilitating a network focused on building a joyfully equitable future. The network of hardworking visionaries consists of nine organizations, the Oak Foundation Learning Differences Programme, and MDC. Together, the Learning for Equity: A Network for Solutions North Carolina (LENS-NC) is learning about the intersection between educational equity, race, class, and learning differences and seeking to create more equitable outcomes for the young people and families at the intersection of these experiences. All of the LENS-NC members are working to create spaces where young people with learning differences belong — and not just belong but achieve and succeed.
Through a facilitated peer-learning approach, the network is seeking to understand how race and economic status influence the experience of students with learning differences, uncovering the challenges and the roots of those challenges for students and their families. As we learn, we can envision, with the leadership of those most impacted by the challenges, what a different reality will look like and we seek to create that future. The nine organizations represent diverse institutional and individual experiences, approaching this learning from at least nine different lenses and are making an impact across North Carolina.
One of the organizations, Education Justice Alliance (EJA), was born out of executive director, Letha Muhammad’s experience with her children in the Wake County, North Carolina school system. The disparities and disproportionate discipline rates for black and brown students led Muhammad and EJA parents to envision a different school system, one that addressed and reduced issues of racial inequities. This vision, and the accompanying work, has contributed to changes in the school system: a reduction overall suspension and expulsion numbers. But in the face of continued disparities, the work continues. (You can read more here from EducationNC.) EJA envisions and works towards schools that employ peacebuilders instead of police. And a school system that develops educators and peace builders who are trauma-sensitive and able to recognize and counteract the trauma experienced by students and educators, during extraordinary times like these and beyond.
Another LENS-NC organization, El Futuro, envisions a future where Latinx folks across North Carolina have the mental healthcare they need, and where communities support students and parents alike. El Futuro provides mental healthcare, creates supportive community, and positions parents as experts. This simple but sometimes challenging shift in mindset has changed how they operate and work alongside families.
Education Justice Alliance, El Futuro, and all of the organizations in the LENS-NC network imagine a different future for students and families and push and pull on the existing systems to create it.
At MDC, our work with network members has been a reminder to acknowledge how the past has shaped the present, in ways that create challenges as well as positive experiences to build on and the challenges within each. Despite the overwhelming challenges and continued uncertainty, the disruption caused by COVID has been an invitation for imagination: Imagine a post-COVID, post-poverty, post-racist, post-sexist future characterized by thriving and healthy people, life-giving systems, and empowered communities. What a future that would be! What a future that will be for students, parents, and educators all along the pre-K to 12 to postsecondary education pipeline! What a future for communities and for the South!
A few steps towards this future have taken place in recent months. First, after a 15 year legal battle, Maryland has begun to make right past injustices in funding and education by agreeing to send an additional $577 million to four Maryland HBCU’s — Bowie State, Coppin State, Morgan State, and the University of Maryland Eastern Shore — over the next decade. In North Carolina, advocates continue the many decades-long fight for equitable funding to ensure a sound, basic education for all students in NC through the Leandro case. These are two steps along the journey. What is happening where you live?
At MDC we work towards a future American South where all people thrive. In the face of past, present, and future challenges in the region, it is sometimes difficult for us to imagine what a thriving future can be. We are grateful to our partners who illuminate simultaneously those challenges as well as a joyfully equitable future.
