Cuyamaca College English Department Anti-Racism Statement 

 

We commit to taking the following actions to promote anti-racist teaching and learning:

 

1. Infuse our teaching with compassion, understanding, and hope.
2. Develop a socially just curriculum in our composition and literature classes that promotes racial equity, dismantles white supremacy, and empowers and validates our students of color.
3. Create a community of practice to discuss and develop antiracist teaching strategies and practices that close equity gaps and promote the success of our Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) students.
4. Facilitate and participate in campus-wide events that validate and amplify the voices of BIPOC students and promote a more comprehensive understanding of the contributions of BIPOC writers, artists, and scholars.
5. Engage in ongoing professional development in order to continuously interrogate our own values, actions, and practices, and to ensure that faculty remain current in anti-racist teaching practices.
6. Consistently revisit equity data across the department and in individual classes in order to monitor our progress towards closing all equity gaps in success rates.
7. Participate in difficult conversations around dismantling white supremacy and racism that permeate the very fabric of our systems and institutions in order to dismantle and denounce the norms and values of white supremacy in all their iterations.
8. Develop a review process for our courses to ensure that the curriculum for all of our courses is anti-racist and equitable, and to ensure that all courses offered through the English department reflect our shared values.