Redesign: An SEL Toolkit to Designing Culturally Sustaining and Antiracist Practices

There is no doubt that educational policies and practices require an overhaul, a redo, a redesign. While this is true, a critical question is, Where should practitioners and school leaders start when redesigning instruction in ways that are antiracist, inclusive, and culturally sustaining? In this highly anticipated work, Dwayne D. Williams argues that schools often rush to make surface-level changes that don’t address the racist beliefs and practices that result in inequity. He contends that educators side-step the hard conversations by starting with curricula: purchasing new curricula and inserting into their lessons something of cultural relevance for Black and Brown students. In a compelling argument, Williams problematizes this approach. He contends, It is possible to design highly engaging, culturally responsive programming for students of color, yet maintain racist and oppressive beliefs and attitudes about their cultures, abilities, languages, literacies, and identities. Instead, educators must engage in surgical work of the mind by interrogating and rejecting racist, deficit-based thinking concerning students of color, which Williams describes as the prep work that precedes designing antiracist and culturally sustaining programming. Williams employs CASEL’s five SEL competencies as both a framework and a toolkit to interrogate beliefs and attitudes, and then to prepare for antiracist and culturally sustaining teaching. Redesign includes a host of practical activities that educators can engage with individually, as well as within problem-solving teams and department meetings, to prepare for antiracist and culturally sustaining work.