Within this unit, I will take a three level design that is planned to make these courses more relevant to students and promote questions that interrogate the authority of statistics that students will encounter throughout the course and in their lives.

The skill of interrogating statistics is crucial for all adults in our society to become thinking consumers and users of data. In addition, it is important to deconstruct data to see implicit ideas of domination and subjugation that travel through numbers that can appear nuetral. Statistics shares a creation story with the field of Eugenics. Francis Galton, a mathematician who contributed many of the major ideas to statistics was also one of the originators of eugenics. The influence of eugenic thinking in statistics drives a notion of superiority, fitness and ranking alongside measurements. Milton Reynolds describes this in Shifting Frames:,” The term “eugenics” refers to a scientifically based, ideological movement dedicated to the reiification of race. It is the wellspring of scientific theories used to construct taxonomies of difference within the human family and to legitimize the subjugation of different groups.”.1 Statistics often does the work of justifying this subjugation through its “innocent” and authoritative work as a logical system. These embedded assumptions of superiority are validated by the seeming neutrality of mathematical calculations. The “taxonomies of difference” he describes are invalid and biased assumptions about difference that dominate our interpretations of data, however they appear as factual products legitimized by math.

Within the last few years, the demographics of Barnard Environmental Science and Technology School has changed significantly. When I began teaching there four years ago, there was a large Multilingual (ML) population, but not enough to have a full-time ML teacher. The majority of the students who qualified for ML services spoke Spanish. In my first year of teaching at Barnard in 2017, the school began enrolling refugee families from Western Asia, primarily Afghanistan. Between 2017 and 2020 the number of students from Afghanistan rose exponentially, to the point where not only did the school administration make the original ML teacher full-time, but also decided to hire another full-time teacher, which is how I came to have my current job. As of 2021, very close to 50% of the ML students at Barnard speak Pashto, one of the languages of Afghanistan. Spanish is the second most spoken language, followed by Arabic.

I have been looking at the materials that the district has provided as well as what the school might be able to purchase in the future. Most of what I see for Newcomer and refugee students are textbooks explaining how to survive in a traditional American school. There are common phrases, basic English and many smiling faces. These textbooks can be useful, but they oversimplify or do not address the complexities of what it means to be an American, an immigrant or a refugee. They do not address how and why English came to be the language of this country or the racialized structure of U.S. society. They certainly do not touch on the role race (and racism) have in “English as a Second Language” education. By curating resources at various English language levels that positively affirm the identity of multilingual, immigrant, and refugee students, the connection to the content will become more meaningful. Allowing students to have an active role in curating the content and being able to tell their own stories will ensure that the narratives showcase their personal identity and present the message that they would like others to see.

Rationale: Oftentimes, ML students, especially Newcomers, are seen as being in a deficit because they do not know English or are still learning English. They are excluded from many in-class activities and assignments. I want to disrupt this assumption about ML students as not being able to understand concepts that may be more complicated or require analysis and higher order thinking skills, like racism and its effects on education. Instead, I want ML students to feel as though they can not only grasp the content, but contribute to a better understanding for everyone through authentic representation and sharing of their experiences, languages, and cultures.

The Open for Antiracism (OFAR) Program – co-led by CCCOER and College of the Canyons – emerged as a response to the growing awareness of structural racism in our educational systems and the realization that adoption of open educational resources (OER) and open pedagogy could be transformative at institutions seeking to improve. The program is designed to give participants a workshop experience where they can better understand anti-racist teaching and how the use of OER and open pedagogy can empower them to involve students in the co-creation of an anti-racist classroom. The capstone project involves developing an action plan for incorporating OER and open pedagogy into a course being taught in the spring semester. OFAR participants are invited to remix this template to design and share their projects and plans for moving this work forward.