Project Proposal

 Project Proposal

For our final project, April and I would like to work together to train my summer camp staff. The theme of the camp is "Understanding my Identity and my Impact on the Environment." So we would like to focus our teach out on personal identity, power and how it shows up in a classroom.

The articles/authors we will focus on are Delpit, "The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People’s Children" and Armstrong and Wildman, “Colorblindness is the New Racism.”

Professionally, our organization has deep values of diversity, race, equity and inclusion (DREI) and antiracism. I have been trying to think of more ways to encompass these values into our trainings in hopes that our facilitators, site locations and program partners will begin to intentionally practice these values in their daily lives and within their systems. While we greatly value the previously mentioned ways of life within our executive team, we offer a train the trainer model and therefore, have no real authority or say in the direct implementation of our environmental conservation, STEM model.

So the real challenge has been what are staff and site partners actually ready for and how can we offer them resources to these values in easy to digest and practice steps. By doing this staff training with April, I am experimenting in hopes of creating a DREI and antiracism pathway for our staff. Starting with self identity and understanding power, which I feel are two most important steps to comprehend and call out.

My goals are for my staff to leave with knowledge of self identity that they can bring into their classrooms and explore with youth. Appreciate each other's values and skills because they do not know each other and will be working a very brief, but intense period of six weeks together. And that they will want to come back for future program and/or pursue more DREI and antiracism learning opportunities.