Critical Multicultural Toolkit

There are very few spaces where students are acknowledged as experts of their own personal experiences and stories. My foremost goal as an educator and facilitator is to provide the space and resources necessary to allow students to find their own authentic voice. Many school settings offer a top down approach to teaching where teachers are the gatekeepers to knowledge and students are the empty receptacles waiting to receive knowledge. Photography provides a unique opportunity to subvert this kind of depository learning. Not only is it a medium that allows students the autonomy to tell their own stories, but also function as an authentic tool that allows students to talk back to the world. I value learning as an active experience of the environment in which students live, work, and interact with others. In my photography courses, photography is presented as a tool that can bridge neighborhoods, generations, and communities.

It’s important to me as a white teacher working in New York City to ask myself when writing curriculum, “Who’s missing?” and “why?” Whenever we look at work in class we consider the race, class, and gender of who is behind the lens as much as those in front of the lens. If we’re working on a topic or issue that I cannot speak to from personal experience, I let students generate the questions and drive dialogue or connect them to people who can speak with more authenticity and experience either by inviting guest artists or taking field trips. Beyond that I am committed to being open and transparent about my own privileges and positionality and keep myself accountable to modeling anti-racist ways of being and offer students opportunity to participate in those modes in the classroom.

I strive to provide students with a hands-on approach that provides context and tools to produce projects, instigate dialogue, and apply what they have learned to their lives. Through exposure to a varied array of content, I help students understand the historical context in which they are creating.

I have created this toolkit as a resource to draw on as I develop critical multicultural curriculum to utilize in my high school photography classroom. I view this toolkit as a living resource, something that continually changes and grows as I change and grow as an educator. I chose to integrate the toolkit into my website which functions as my teaching portfolio to situate these resources in context with the work I’ve done and value as an educator. Many of these resources continue to inform and inspire my practice.

The resources in the toolkit are divided into two categories: projects and teaching strategies. Projects are artist and community based projects that I draw on for inspiration and also use as examples in class. These projects exemplify how artists are responding to the world around them and taking action and revolve around themes relevant to my students’ lives. The teaching resources consist of books that promote anti-racist education and understanding, case studies of lesson plans from teachers, guides for how to incorporate social justice into the classroom, and methodologies for discussion around works-in-progress in the classroom, among others.