Community Engagement Speaker Series

Building Healthy Multiracial Communities: Our Role as Parents and Why it is Important for Everyone. 

Monday, October 23, 7:00-8:30 p.m. | Converse Auditorium | 1150 Goodrich Ave. St. Paul, 55105 | SPA families register here | Community members register here

Dr. Michael will draw on her research and share many of her own stories as a white parent learning how to help her children contribute to a healthy multiracial community. This workshop will focus on the role we all play in building a healthy multiracial community, and the value for families in developing the skills to talk about race, a question we hope families of all racial backgrounds will help answer. She will offer guidance for parents of white children about the specific racial skills and competencies that are necessary for developing a positive identity and becoming a full member of the racially diverse environments in which they learn. 

As Co-Director of the Race Institute for K-12 Educators, Ali Michael, PhD, works with schools and organizations across the country to help make research on race, whiteness, and education more accessible and relevant to practitioners. In fall of 2022, Ali released two publications: Our Problem, Our Path: Collective Anti-racism for White People, co-authored with Dr. Eleonora Bartoli (Corwin, 2022) and White Fragility: Why Understanding Racism Can be so Hard for White People (Beacon Press, 2022). She is also the author of: Raising Race Questions: Whiteness, Inquiry and Education (Teachers College Press, 2015); winner of the 2017 Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award; and co-editor of the bestselling Everyday White People Confront Racial and Social Injustice: 15 Stories (2015, Stylus Press); Guide for White Women who Teach Black Boys (2017, Corwin Press); and Teaching Beautiful and Brilliant Black Girls (2021, Corwin Press). Ali sits on the editorial board of the journal of Whiteness and Education and teaches in the Diversity and Inclusion Program at Princeton University and the Equity Institutes for Higher Education at the University of Southern California. When she is not writing, speaking, or training, Ali is striving to be an anti-racist co-parent to two amazing kids.

Preview Dr. Michael's work on racial literacy in this article on the NAIS website.

More information is available at alimichael.org.

Building Healthy Multiracial Communities: Developing Emotional and Racial Literacy

Monday, November 13, 7:00-8:30 p.m. | Converse Auditorium | 1150 Goodrich Ave. St. Paul, 55105 | SPA families register here | Community members register here

Navigating the stress of racial conflict or conversation is not easy. The recent politics of policing in Black and Brown communities has led to societal institutions reforming how they conduct their work to address racial injustice. Additionally, the rise in hate has found itself in schools, and educators are overwhelmed as to what to do. Research shows that parents and educators who talk directly with youth about race help them develop the protective factors to navigate racially stressful situations resulting in positive benefits to their emotional, mental, and physical health and well-being.  Additionally, direct conversations with white students empower them to speak up when they witness harm.   

Racial socialization happens both in the home and at school.  All parents communicate to their children about race, whether verbally, non-verbally, or in the absence of communicating at all. Our children make decisions based on these messages and skills.  This talk will discuss ways parents can understand how to manage racial stress in conversations through racial socialization and literacy. 

We hope parents will:

1.  learn and be able to identify the differences between the definitions of racial stress, coping, self-efficacy, socialization, and literacy  

2.  learn different ways racial trauma can undermine health and learning 

3  practice racial story-telling, a conversation using racial mindfulness 

4. increase awareness of how thoughts, body reactions, and feelings influence racial decision-making

Dr. Howard Stevenson is the Constance Clayton Professor of Urban Education and Professor of Africana Studies in the Human Development & Quantitative Methods Division of the Graduate School of Education at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also the Executive Director of the Racial Empowerment Collaborative, which was designed to promote racial literacy in education, health, and community institutions. He is a nationally recognized clinical psychologist and researcher on negotiating racial conflicts and his book, Promoting Racial Literacy in Schools: Differences that Make a Difference summarizes this work.

Additionally, Howard was awarded the 2020 Gittler Prize by Brandeis University, for outstanding and lasting scholarly contributions to racial, ethnic, and/or religious relations. He was also listed in the 2021 RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Influence Rankings of the top university-based scholars in the U.S. who did the most to shape educational practice and policy. In 2021, Dr. Stevenson was elected to membership in the National Academy of Education (NAED), which advances high quality education research and its use in policy and practice. Members consist of U.S. and international associates who are elected on the basis of outstanding scholarship related to education.

His research focuses on helping children and adults assert themselves during face-to-face microaggressions and the key to this racial healing work is the use of culture to reduce in-the-moment threat reactions, increase access to memory, physical mobility, and voice, and prevent long-term health detriment.

Learn more about Dr. Stevenson's work in this podcast and this video.