Professional Development

We have developed an 18 hour professional learning series to prepare educators to teach Ethnic Studies, available as nine virtual modules, facilitated by our Executive Director, Tracy Castro-Gill. These modules are offered quarterly. Please see the schedule below.

These modules were designed to be completed in order and all participants must complete one before moving to the next.

Upon completion of this series, educators will be able to:

1. begin to contextualize anti-Blackness, race, anti-Black bias, racism, and all forms of oppression at all levels (personally-mediated, institutional, and internal);
2. identify pedagogical practices that perpetuate oppression and transform their praxis into liberatory practice that is culturally sustaining and humanizing; and
3. identify and create culturally relevant and sustaining curricula and instructional practices that directly confront oppression and coloniality.

Registration fees apply to each module, and need-based discounts are available on a sliding scale. Module 1 must be completed before access to register for subsequent modules is provided.

WAESN is now an OSPI approved clock hour provider. If you have completed PD with WAESN, you can pay for your clock hours here for $3/clock hour or you can send a check for $2/clock hour.

Professional Learning Series Modules Outline

• Module 1: Historicizing Race & Contextualizing Anti-Blackness

A crash course on the origins of race in “anthropology,” this module connects the past 400 years to the present by comparing primary source documents during the European Enlightenment with modern media portrayals of Black people to create a timeline of race and anti-Blackness.

• Module 2: Pulling the Weeds; Rooting out Whiteness in the Classroom

Before transforming pedagogy, educators must take an inventory of their current practices and pull the weeds that are preventing them from implementing a culturally sustaining praxis.

• Module 3: Dispelling Myths of Multiculturalism

In this introductory level module, we learn what ethnic studies is not and begin to understand what it is from the perspectives of students and ethnic studies scholars, Dr. Duncan-Andrade and Dr. Acosta.

• Module 4: “Isms” Exploring Oppression and Intersectionality

Ethnic studies must include an intersectional approach to understanding identity, agency, power, and oppression. In this module, we bring it all the way back to Dr. Kimberlé Crenshaw to remind us intersectionality is about intersecting oppressions, and not everyone has them.

• Module 5: What Does Liberatory Education Look Like?

In Module 5 we begin to think about what liberatory education looks like in practice and challenge the claim that ethnic studies is “radical” by comparing the traditional to the revolutionary. We also consider the impact of the white gaze on liberatory education.

• Module 6: Ontological Distance; The Educator’s Answer to Opportunity Gaps

Education doesn’t meet the needs of BIPOC students. To fix this, we must turn inward, not outward. The ontological distance is a framework created by Dr. Dominguez. We use it to identify where we are in our praxis, where we want to be, and how to get there.

• Module 7: Critical Race Theory; Levels of Oppression

Using systems theory, we map Dr. Jones’ Levels of Oppression framework and identify our role in systemic racial oppression. Understanding how the three levels of oppression function in a systems model shows us exactly where to disrupt systemic racial oppression.

• Module 8: Culturally Sustaining (and Disruptive) Pedagogies

Following the lead of Dr. Ladson-Billings and Dr. San Pedro, we interrogate contemporary applications of culturally responsive teaching and examine our own praxis for what Dr. Ladson-Billings calls the“Three Corruptions of CRP.”We then examine our praxis to understand how we intentionally disrupt and confront whiteness.

• Module 9: Ethnic Studies Frameworks and Content

Module 9 is all about the WAESN frameworks! WAESN has created 13, content-specific, curricular frameworks to support educators in implementing the learning from this series and creating their own ethnic studies content.

*Modules 1-3 will not be available in January, 2022, because of the New Year Holiday.

Scholarship Fund

If you would like to donate to a scholarship fund to help others attend the Professional Learning Series, you can do that here!

If you would like to request a scholarship to help fund your registration fee, please contact us. Scholarships will be available for anyone with equitable distribution to BIPOC and LGBTQ folx, so be sure to include how you identify in your scholarship request.

Scholarship amounts vary depending on the balance of the scholarship fund.