ECS Student, Hannah Blomgren, Pens Op-Ed
Silence On Racism Is Not Neutral
Dr. Leticia Alvarez Gutiérrez teaches students how to apply theoretical concepts in her ECS 6820/7820: Juvenile (IN)Justice and Education course. As part of the course, Alvarez Gutiérrez requires assignments that "link theory with praxis and contextualize what young people are experiencing in schools/communities today in relation to the school to prison pipeline." Such activities include writing op-eds, as two students, Hannah Blomgren and Javier H. Hernandez, recently did.
Hannah Blomgren, a master of education student in the Department of Education, Culture & Society with an emphasis in secondary physics teaching, took what she learned in Alvarez Gutiérrez's class and penned an op-ed in the Salt Lake Tribune: Utah's Teachers and Students are Afraid to Speak Out about Racism. And Blomgren did an excellent job of applying the course concepts! Her op-ed starts out with two powerful anecdotes about local high school students donning Halloween costumes that represented the bullying racial stereotypes of their peers. One dressed as a cockroach and the other as a "human-eating cat" because that is what their peers have labeled them.
These troubling narratives demonstrate the individual harm (e.g., bullying, name calling, personal distress and decreased mental, emotional, and social well-being) that children experience when educators and students are prohibited from having conversations around racism and white privilege. But, of course, the harm doesn't stop there and Blomgren goes on to detail how the Utah Legislature's recent audit labeling the topics of white privilege, racism, settler colonialism, slavery, genocide, and land theft as "potentially questionable content" will lead to systemic harm in poorer educational outcomes and no disruption of the school-to-prison pipeline for students of color because it leaves these issues unaddressed.
"Teachers are knowledgeable experts in pedagogical standards, but they are not being treated as such," writes Blomgren. And if we are to truly combat racism, then as Blomgren notes at the end of her op-ed, "We must be able to confront racism head-on as teachers, explicitly and meaningfully with our students in the classroom."