Upcoming Events

Achievement Gap Summit II 
October 18, 2008

Registration Form

Puget Sound Student/Faculty/Staff Registration Form 

Parents Conference
Spring 2009

Race and Pedagogy National Conference
October 2010

About the Race and Pedagogy Initiative
The Race and Pedagogy Initiative is a collaboration of the University of Puget Sound and the South Sound community, which educates students and teachers at all levels to think critically about race and to act to eliminate racism. The attention of the Initiative to racial diversity is inextricably linked with, and yet not subverted to, other categories of difference and disparity.

Emerging from six years of work under the rubric of the Race and Pedagogy Program, the Initiative is rooted in organized, ongoing campus discussions through regular brown bag lunch forums and special events on Race and Pedagogy since 2002. These Race and Pedagogy gatherings concluded that there was an imperative to inculcate such conversations into our institutional practices and to undertake a focused program of broad engagement, namely, the entire Puget Sound community, multiple community constituencies, and teachers and scholars from the Northwest and across the United States. Such a vision led to the organizing of an Achievement Gap Summit, April 29, 2006 and a three day Race and Pedagogy National Conference, September 14-16, 2006. The Summit brought together over three hundred persons to explore this crisis in k-12 public education and the National Conference which deliberated on ways to improve the racial-cultural experiences of all students and prepare them for leadership in a diverse world, where race continues to matter drew more than 2,000 participants from 39 states, as well as Canada and Great Britain.

Since these pivotal events, faculty, staff, and student conversations on race have been ongoing and the university’s work with Race and Pedagogy partners from the South Sound community continues. One significant development has been the growth and generative role of the Race and Pedagogy Community Partners Forum. This Forum, consisting of more than fifty (50) persons, representing ranging community constituencies, met bi-weekly since December 2005 in working sessions modeled on the participatory pedagogical processes of adult and popular education employed, for example, by the notable Highlander School, to (re) chart, challenge and hone the vision for the first Summit and National Conference and identity and discuss matters affecting the larger South Sound community. Through the energies of this Forum and a varied cadre of persons from different facets of the university campus, we held a Race and Pedagogy Conference Anniversary Summit, September 13-15, 2007, to deliberate about the future of our work in Race and Pedagogy. Arising from these deliberations and sustained thinking, meeting and organizing through the end of 2007, we developed a proposal for a Race and Pedagogy Institute. This proposal has received the full support of the university and we are now engaged in the long term process of exploring the resources to bring this institute to fruition.

Race and Pedagogy Institute
The Institute is guided by principles of responsiveness, coherence, synergy, reciprocity, flexibility, and sustainability. The Institute accomplishes its work by:

• Promoting exemplary diversity models through scholarship, teaching, engagement across constituencies, and efficacious, innovative action.
• Weaving together scholarship and action in order to reduce racism and improve pedagogical practices at all educational levels.
• Building alliances throughout the university and community.
• Collaborating with individuals, groups, and organizations on campus and in the community to research, develop, promote, celebrate, and support programs consistent with the mission of the Institute.
• Developing ongoing processes for individuals as teachers and learners to recognize and address personal and structural racism.
• Establishing processes to examine how racism threatens our ongoing work, and attending to tensions within the Institute so as to ensure its stability and permanence.
• Supporting projects that benefit and attract the participation and interest of national and international audiences and that bring national recognition to the university as a leader in the dialogue on race and pedagogy.
• Pursuing the strategies above in part by staging of a National Conference on Race and Pedagogy every three years.