National social work teach-in on police brutality as a form of structural racism
#SWEduActs, a grassroots group of social work educators, has organized a national social work teach-in on police violence as a form of structural racism for the last week of October 2020.
We are a grassroots group of SW educators responding to Dr. Desmond Patton’s (@DrDesmondPatton) call for social work educators to take action in response to police brutality against Black and Brown people. We are organizing on two fronts, a national anti-racist teach-in on police brutality as a form of structural racism and an effort to influence national social work organizations on taking anti-racist action. We invite all social work educators to join us and consider that many voices & actions will only strengthen our profession’s commitment to anti-racist progress! We organize on Twitter through the use of this hashtag: #SWEduActs and you can learn more about us during an upcoming #MacroSW chat on October 15th, 2020.
There are two ways for social work educators to participate in the national social work teach-in:
1) You can bring your students to our keynote event on October 27that 7 p.m. EST. Together we will watch the TED talk by Kimberlé Crenshaw on intersectionality as it relates to police violence, followed by a discussion featuring Dr. Sharon Moore, Dr. Tina Sacks and Mel Wilson from NASW national which will be introduced by Dr. Desmond Patton. Participants will need to register for the event at this link:
https://fordham.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZYud-GgrDgoGdVJwRDEoaEfOHwOPkbNiXLd
2) You can also teach about police brutality as a form of structural racism in one of your class sessions in the last week of October. We have prepared slides, a lecture recording, a difficult conversations guide and a resource reading list to assist you with this work:
–25 minute lecture you can assign to your class: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YnebwmNRqm8&t=17s
–Slides from the above lecture: https://www.slideshare.net/eslayter
–Reading list on police brutality: https://elspethslayter.com/2020/08/19/readings-and-resources-for-social-work-educators-on-police-brutality-and-structural-racism/
–Guide to difficult conversations in the classroom: https://elspethslayter.com/2020/08/19/having-difficult-conversations-about-police-brutality-and-structural-racism-in-social-work-classes/
For help on preparing to teach about this, you can also attend a teaching prep session with #SWEduActs organizers on October 16that 11 a.m. EST.
https://salemstate.zoom.us/j/92859283067
Passcode: 669616
For more info on the teach-in, check out our Twitter hashtag #SWEduActs. Should you have additional questions, please contact the co-organizers, either Dr. Lauri Goldkind (goldkind@fordham.edu) or Dr. Elspeth Slayter (eslayter@salemstate.edu).
Let’s get our students talking about police brutality as a form of structural racism, and let’s move the profession forward in addressing it!
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