As a teenager, I was trained in inter/intragroup dialogic pedagogy in the Program on Intergroup Relations at the University of Michigan and co-facilitated semester-long undergraduate courses on race, white racial identity, and gender—prioritizing pedagogical approaches that centered student agency, experiences, and power. Upon graduation, I received the Patricia Gurin Certificate of Merit in Intergroup Relations, awarded to students who demonstrate academic mastery in intergroup relations. I intimately know the power of inclusive and engaging pedagogy that creates room and support for students to be caretakers of their own intellectual and affectual learning—these experiences motivate me to show up for each student uniquely and holistically, so they feel prepared to thrive as learners, leaders, and agents of change.

In October 2019, I co-founded the Space for Uprooting Whiteness (SfUW)—a weekly dialogic space for social work graduate students to grapple with their relationship to white supremacy and domination—to create a space for white-identifying students to grapple with whiteness without a normative and emotional reliance on the labor of people of Color. The SfUW met over 140 times in a three-year span, and during the summer of 2020 had over 40 weekly members in consistent attendance. It was well-attended because the space addressed unmet needs of students who wanted to have deeper conversations about race, whiteness, and social work that were not happening in their formal course load. Since I founded the SfUW, we received grant funding from the Office of the Vice Provost at Columbia University to evaluate and expand the space, published the foundational pedagogy of the space with vignettes from student participants in Advances for Social Work, and co-founded a dialogic space for white faculty, administration, and staff, which still meets. As students and faculty from these dialogic spaces approached me for resources on race, racism, and whiteness, I developed and curated a publicly accessible resource list on whiteness, white supremacy, and domination with 300 books, articles, videos, and podcasts (Link).

Learn more about the Space for Uprooting Whiteness.