In this episode, Kamille Bostick interviews Dr. Munro Richardson of Read Charlotte a community initiative to improve children's literacy from birth-to-third grade and Steffany Stanic, a middle school teacher in Charlotte. They share their personal connections to reading proficiency, the challenges associated with getting students reading on grade level, and what they hope to achieve in their respective fields of work. Literacy is a huge equity issue and is tantamount to liberation. From the time it was illegal for enslaved people to read, to the life chances of those below proficient by third grade, the consequence are far-reaching. Our commitment to closing these gaps has to be a priority. Learn more about Read Charlotte here

In our first episode of Season 3, Janeen Bryant talks with two young Black and Brown community organizers with roots in North Carolina about their trajectory into the space of activism and what they see as the most pressing issues facing the state. Clarissa Brooks is a Charlotte native, independent movement journalist and cultural worker. Mayra Stefanía Arteaga is a Charlotte-based immigrant rights advocate, and co-founder at Comunidad Colectiva. Both draw on their experiences with the education, law enforcement and North Carolina-based movements to inform their approaches to community-based work. Listen as they identify particular challenges for the state and cast a vision for the future. 

On the Margins Podcast is produced by CREED (or the Center for Racial Equity in Education).  Even though this is our second season of the program, it's the first year CREED has officially been in operation publicly. In this episode (recorded on 8/19/20) co-founders James E. Ford and Janeen Bryant reflect on the work of CREED, successes and challenges with discussing race and offer some highlights from Season 2 of the podcast. They share insights about what they envision for moving the organization forward and reflect on ways the state of North Carolina could adopt more race conscious practices for systemic change in education. To commemorate our One Year Anniversary, we have an individual giving fundraising goal of $10,000. If you want to support our work, feel free to click on this link: https://secure.givelively.org/donate/center-for-racial-equity-in-education/creed-s-one-year-black-philanthropy-month OR text the code "GIVECREED" to 44-321

The Leandro vs. North Carolina lawsuit has become a foundational court case in defining the educational rights of students in North Carolina. In 1994, five rural districts sued the state making the case that they did not have enough resources to provide the constitutionally mandated education. From this litigation, the language of all students being entitled to a "sound basic education" emerged. This case and it's implications continue to reverberate in our present context, as the fulfillment of this mandate remains unresolved. In 2018, Judge David Lee ordered the research organization WestEd to assess North Carolina's progress toward this goal. The WestEd Report, released in December 2019, offers a well-documented evaluation of the State's movement or lack thereof. However, Dr. Cooper argues that although race was not the central consideration in the original case it should be focused upon, and is largely absent from the WestEd Report. In his paper, WestEd's Leandro Report: The Missing Pages he asserts the need to acknowledge the ways race and educational rights intersect as we plan for the future. 

CREED has just completed it's inaugural year of the North Carolina Equity Fellowship, a leadership development program created to equip advocates for educational equity by deepening their knowledge, skills and understanding of racialized disparities in North Carolina schools. We selected FOUR initial fellows: Rodney Pierce (Teacher Fellow), Dr. Jonita Taylor (Principal Fellow), Porcha McMillan (School Board Fellow), and Emiene Wright (Journalism Fellow).  As we open up the application for our 2020 NC Equity Fellowship (included a Superintendent Fellow), we wanted to give the public a chance to meet these outstanding individuals, learn more about their experiences and hear the ways they intend to disrupt the inequities in our education system. If you live in North Carolina, are a classroom teacher, principal, school board member, superintendent or journalist, and are interested in applying for this fellowship, please click this link.  This episode is dedicated to the memory of Porcha McMillan. RIP

North Carolina is home to 8 Native American tribes. There is beautiful diversity, tradition and complex history that characterize each group that predates the formation of the United States. While the stories of First Nations people tend to be fixed in the past, the fact of the matter is they are still here! Indigenous students make up 1% of the student population in the North Carolina and often experience depressed education outcomes. Over-suspension, dropout, and poor academic performance are prevalent issues that do not always get the attention they deserve. In this episode, we talk with Native North Carolinian and Indigenous Education scholar Dr. Susan Faircloth about her own personal experience and how we can do better by American Indian students in our state.  *BONUS* The North Carolina General Assembly created the State Advisory Council for Indian Education (SACIE) in 1987 to advise the State Board of Education on how to better serve Native students. Additionally, the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) has very specific protocols for engaging indigenous communities when developing accountability plans. 

When discussing educational equity for minoritized racial and ethnic groups, many advocates tend to focus on non-Asian students of color. The Asian-American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) category is a massive catch-all demographic that includes groups from Far East Asia, South East Asia, South Asia, and even the Arabian Peninsula. Failure to properly understand the diversity within this group and different experiences would be a tremendous mistake. Dr. Lan Kolano, an education professor at University of North Carolina at Charlotte and Cat Bao Le of the South East Asian Coalition (or SEAC Village) join the program to talk about the misconceptions about AAPIs, the multifaceted nature of racism, and need to center immigrant experiences in racial equity. You can learn more about SEAC Village and their work by clicking on this link. 

Matt Scialdone is an African American Literature Teacher at Middle Creek High School in Wake County. He's a teacher who takes a problem-posing approach to teaching and learning that looks for explicit ways to connect text-to-context. His teaching philosophy is one that honors the agency,  various cultural orientations, and ways of knowing that his students embody. For him, teaching is about "lighting the fuse" and getting out of the way. As a white male, he works constantly at modeling culturally responsive teaching in his classroom and being a continual work-in-progress.

Dr. Tracey Benson is co-author of the recently released book Unconscious Bias in Schools: A Developmental Approach to Exploring Race and Racism. He is an associate professor, race scholar, former teacher and principal. His depth of knowledge about issues of race and schools is born from both extensive personal experience and research in the field. In this episode, he shares the ways that teachers and leaders can begin the work of adopting deliberately anti-racist approaches to learning,  confront their own biases and increase their understanding of systemic racism in the United States context. 

Harvey B. Gantt is known for many things. Among them is being the first African American admitted into Clemson University in 1963. But what is less talked about is his K-12 experience in the all-Black segregated schools of Charleston, SC. Harvey's alma mater, Burke Industrial School, was the subject of a research article that makes the powerful argument that Black teachers in the South helped catalyze the Civil Right Movement through their unique pedagogical approaches. Many civil rights leaders just like Gantt, first sat the feet of expert Black teachers long before they engaged in activism that sought to break the color line in America. In this episode, he reflects on the memory of his teachers, the profound impression they left on him as a person and offers a critical counterstory in the discussion of school segregation.