Stanford University

Graduate School of Education

Beyond Equity and Schooling, EDUC 299A
Pre-Fall 2023
Instructors:
Antero Garcia (he/him/his) [email protected]
Mike Hines (he/him/his) [email protected]
Jonathan Rosa (he/him/his) [email protected]

Section Leaders:
Kevin Anderson (he/him/his) [email protected]
Ed’d Luna Bhagwandeen (they/them) [email protected]
Rubén González (Rubén/Ruben) [email protected]
Geraldine Mukumbi (she/her/hers) [email protected]
Jackelyn Rivera-Orellena (she/her/hers) [email protected]

Course Meetings: See meeting schedule below

Office Hours: By appointment
Location: CERAS 101
Section Locations:
1. CERAS 300 (Kevin)
2. CERAS 527 (Ed’d)
3. CERAS 302 (Rubén)
4. CERAS 101 (with the exception of Friday, August 4, which will meet in CERAS 435) (Geraldine)
5. CERAS 308 (Jackelyn)

Course Description
Discussions focused on equity in education are both profoundly important and highly limited. These
discussions are profoundly important insofar as they push us to consider how mainstream schools are
structured in ways that systematically (re)produce disparity; they are highly limited in that they often center
on broadening access to existing institutions rather than seeking to fundamentally transform or dismantle
those institutions and the broader societies in which they are situated. This course approaches issues of
equity in teacher education by simultaneously cultivating conceptual and pedagogical tools for existing
within and beyond current institutions. The argument is that in order to ethically serve communities,
educators must humbly learn to honor multiple perspectives, interrogate existing sense-making schema, and
envision possible worlds. Practically, this work involves learning to perceive skills, wisdom, and educational
opportunities in contexts that are often framed as problematic, pathological, and endemically deficient.
Thus, we will use the notion of equity as a placeholder for the envisioning and enactment of radically
alternative educational realities.

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Essential Course Questions
The course is designed to support you as you engage with questions including the following:
1. How are your personal experiences positioned in relation to wider cultural, political, economic,
social, and historical power structures? How does this shape your lenses for the purpose of
schooling?
2. What kinds of “problems” are educators in the United States going to run into--and reproduce--
when teaching in U.S. schools?
3. How are we conditioned to perceive students? What are the alternatives? (How might we perceive
them? How might we be in community with them?)
4. What should school be and what are some strategies for enacting this vision in our own classrooms?
5. What does it mean to be a transformative force in schools and beyond?
Evaluation
We expect you to receive an A in this class. This requires full participation and completion of all activities.

A note about reading and participation:

This class depends on you preparing for text-based discussions in advance. It is essential for you to come to
class prepared to share your thoughts on the texts for each day. Recognizing that this is a particularly busy
year for all of you, we have limited the texts to two-three articles or chapters per class. Further, all other
assignments will be mainly completed in class with minimal prep work done prior to coming to class to
prioritize engaging with the texts in your out of class time. Finally, we recognize that these texts are
challenging--both in form and content--and may warrant multiple readings.

A note about the work:

Positionality Portfolio (to be completed in class daily)
Reading Reflections and Discussion Question Generation (to be completed before class daily)
Collective Book Project (to be completed in discussion sections)

- Viral Justice (Section 1; available through Stanford libraries)

- Elite Capture (Section 2; available through Stanford libraries)
- Border and Rule (Section 3; available through Stanford libraries)
- Mutual Aid (Section 4; open access)
- Abolition. Feminism. Now. (Section 5; open access)

Accessibility & Respect for Diversity

Students with Documented Disabilities: Students who may need academic accommodation based on the
impact of a disability must initiate the request with the Office of Accessible Education (OAE). Professional
staff will evaluate the request with required documentation, recommend reasonable accommodations, and
prepare an Accommodation Letter for faculty. Unless the student has a temporary disability,
Accommodation letters are issued for the entire academic year. Students should contact the OAE as soon as

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possible since timely notice is needed to coordinate accommodations. The OAE is located at 563 Salvatierra
Walk (phone: 723-1066, URL: https://oae.stanford.edu/. We are also committed to working with students
to address accessibility concerns that do not fit into the category of “documented disabilities”; please contact
us as soon as possible to address any such concerns should they arise.

Additionally, we understand that the legal names and gender designations on the class roster with which the
University has provided us might not correspond to the name and gender pronouns you use. We are happy
to use your chosen name and pronouns and we will be sure to provide space for you to share these
preferences in our initial meetings. Please also let us know if any of this changes at any point during the
course so that we can work together to share this information in a way that is safe and comfortable for you.

Course Schedule
Readings have been uploaded to the Canvas site for this course; students are expected to come to class having
reviewed all of the required readings assigned for a given day. We have taken into account the profound
demands on your time in selecting these readings in hopes that you will be able to meaningfully engage with
each reading prior to class.

Day 1: (Tuesday, 8/1, 1-4pm): Beyond Frameworks

Question: What worlds are possible?

Required Texts:

Baldwin, James. 1963. “A Talk to Teachers,” in James Baldwin: Collected Essays, New York, Library
of America (pp. 678-686).

Brown, Adrienne Maree. 2017. “Introduction,” in Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing
Worlds, AK Press (pp. 1-39).

Day 2: (Wednesday, 8/2, 1-4pm): Beyond Equity

Question: What are some comparatively normative and radical visions of equity in education and what is
your role in realizing these visions? Who is served by equity discourse? How is it manufactured or made?

Required texts:

Shange, Savannah. 2019. “‘A Long History of Seeing’: Historicizing the Progressive Dystopia,” in
Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, Antiblackness, & Schooling in San Francisco. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press (pp. 22-43).

The Daily. 2022. One Elite High School’s Struggle Over Admissions.

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Day 3: (Thursday, 8/3, 1-4pm): Beyond Inclusion
Question: How can we strategically demand access and resources without reproducing normative
institutions on their own terms?

Required texts:

New Books Now Podcast in Disability Studies. 2023. Crip Negativity with J. Logan Smilges

Mayes, Keith A. 2022. “Disabling Black Poverty, Supporting White Underachievement: Race and
the Construction of Federal Special Education Policy,” in The Unteachables: Disability Rights and
the Invention of Black Special Education. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press (pp. 111-
147).

Day 4: (Friday, 8/4, 1-4pm): Beyond Deficits, Binaries, and Labels

Question: How are particular populations and communities systematically presumed to be educationally
deficient, in what ways do normative approaches to schooling reproduce these presumed deficiencies, and
what alternative educational approaches are possible within these contexts?

Required texts:

Keenan, Harper. 2017. “Unscripting Curriculum: Toward a Critical Trans Pedagogy.” Harvard
Educational Review, 87(4), pp. 538-556.

Flores, Nelson. 2015. What if we talked about monolingual White children the way we talk about
low-income children of color?

Ladson Billings, Gloria. 2006. “From the achievement Gap to the Education Debt: Understanding
achievement in U.S. Schools.” Educational Researcher, 35(7), pp. 3-12.

Day 5 (Monday, 8/7, 2:15-5pm): Beyond the Colonial

Question: What are the pedagogical and broader educational implications of understanding relations among
historical and contemporary colonialisms?

Required texts:

Tuck, Eve, and Yang, K. Wayne. 2018 “Introduction: Born Under the Rising Sign of Social Justice,”
In Toward What Justice?: Describing Diverse Dreams of Justice in Education, edited by Eve Tuck and
K. Wayne Yang. New York: Routledge (pp. 1-17).

Kelly, Matthew Gardner. 2016. “Schoolmaster’s Empire: Race, Conquest, and the Centralization of
Common Schooling in California, 1848-1879.” History of Education Quarterly 56(3), pp. 445-472.

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Day 6: (Tuesday 8/8, 3:15-6pm) Beyond Discipline
Question: How are approaches to justice, discipline, and surveillance enacted in classrooms? How are the
histories of discipline intertwined with socio political aspects of schooling and identity? What does a
liberatory approach to schooling structure look like?

Required texts:

Laura, Crystal T. 2018. “Against Prisons and the Pipeline to Them,” in Toward What Justice?:
Describing Diverse Dreams of Justice in Education, edited by Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang. New
York: Routledge (pp. 19-28).

Kaba, Mariame.2021. “Moving Past Punishment,” in We Do This ‘Til We Free Us. Haymarket
Books (pp. 148-156).

Day 7: (Wednesday 8/9, 3:15-6pm): TA Panel & Book Sharing Preparation

Day 8: (Thursday 8/10, 1-4pm): Beyond Individualism/Book Share Out

Question: How are you staying with the trouble?

Gumbs, Alexis Pauline. 2020. “a note,” in Dub: Finding Ceremony. Durham, NC: Duke University
Press (ix-xiii).