Race Talks

Goals for a New Approach to Shared Problems

We ask participants to stretch their conventional conceptions of race, class, gender and power. We strive to...

	Bring together a diverse group concerned about race, gender and class or whose jobs involve issues of social justice or disadvantage
	Reveal, critique, trace, and experiment with problems at the intersection of race, class, gender, power and injustice
	Create an active learning space that challenges the distinction among personal, political and professional choices, integrates research with teaching, and experiments with democratic participation
	Encourage innovation in professional and advocacy roles that reflect critical thinking and effective problem solving

"Our experience revealed the importance of having the participants actively involved by creating the project, defining its goals, and shaping its methods of inquiry. Even with a group motivated to work together, careful attention must be paid to the method of interaction, the approach to conflict, the allocation of responsibility, and the definition of goals."

Guinier & Sturm

Challenges

In our experience, learning environments discourage engagement when they:

	produce bi-polar thinking on complex issues
	silence or exceptionalize race, class and gender
	rely on the adversarial process as the main way to resolve conflicts
	emphasize one type of learning that downplays multiple learning styles and personal or emotional involvement
	socialize people to learn their place in a hierarchy, discouraging experimentation, collaboration and innovation, encouraging passivity, and undermining motivation to take intellectual risks
	uncritically accept underlying assumptions and categories

Multi-racial learning communities challenge these familiar framing techniques and invite learning to take place on multiple levels. They encourage sustained connection to the learning project even in the face of conflict.

“Our class challenges the silence by questioning traditional legal pedagogy, professional identities in the law, and our position–as students– relative to this pedagogy and identity."