JEDI in our Teacher Professional Development

RECRUITMENT & COST

  • Currently, our Teacher Professional Development courses and workshops are offered free of charge to teachers through funding from King County Wastewater Treatment Division and state funding from ClimeTime.
  • Our ClimeTime courses also include a teacher implementation stipend to honor the time required for teachers to transfer workshop ideas into classroom learning.
  • We focus additional outreach efforts on teachers at schools with higher free and reduced lunch rates and higher percentages of children of color, because we know that systemic racism denies educational opportunity to low-income Black, Indigenous, and students of color. By focusing our outreach, we seek to interrupt that cycle.

CONTENT

  • We focus on local phenomena in our Community Science Course as we know that when teachers center local phenomena in the curriculum, it increases learning equity, supports student engagement, and contributes to antiracist teaching. This workshop includes a focus on connecting to the interests and identities of local tribes and other community members in relationship to the land.
  • We explicitly discuss the educational inequities that persist in science education, how they manifest in opportunity gaps among BIPOC students. We ask teachers to reflect on how their own identities have impacted what they teach and how they teach it, in order to build awareness of a teacher’s agency in creating change in the classroom.
  • We honor and incorporate Indigenous ways of knowing into our curricula.
  • In 2021, we began to offer a Teacher Philosophy & Positionality workshop. We use concepts from education and social justice scholarship to think about individual teacher philosophies of education and name the ways that intersectional identities position us in relationship to the world, students, and disciplinary content. Participants learn and unpack the concept of positionality as it relates to relationships, communities, institutions, and society.
  • We provide teachers with suggestions for children’s books that both connect to science lessons and represent BIPOC authors and characters.

COLLABORATION

  • In 2021, we began collaborating with teachers and other community leaders on content and facilitation for our workshops. All of our collaborators are offered a stipend for this work.
  • In our Community Science Course, we collaborated with a member of the Jamestown S’Klallam tribe and reshaped the central phenomena to focus more on the river that is central to his life experiences. He shared with teachers about his connections and understandings of the river, and participants saw how a native community member’s expertise could  inform scientific understandings. This is an approach we will continue to use in the future.

STAFF JEDI DEVELOPMENT

In addition to organization-wide JEDI trainings and external workshops, members of our professional development team have been participating in internal racial equity meetings aimed at growing their capacities as anti-racist educators. During the school year, our education team comes together for Building Antiracist White Educators sessions alternating weeks with a BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) affinity group and a white caucus group.

GROWTH AREAS

  • We are working on better serving teachers who speak a language other than English as their primary language, through technology/closed captioning, workshop pacing, and intentional delivery of content.
  • We are working on moving our curriculum from promoting a multicultural mindset in education to an explicitly antiracist teaching model.
  • We are challenging ourselves to consistently incorporate feedback from participants, collaborators, and community members.
  • We are working to increase the racial diversity of the teachers and community members that we collaborate with on the design and facilitation of our workshops.