Brave Community: Teaching Race in the American Classroom w/ Janine de Novais

Welcome listeners to the second installment of our Diversity and Inclusion crossover series, bringing together This Anthro Life with Brandeis University. For those of you who are new to the show, This Anthro Life (TAL) was launched as a scholar-practitioner program designed to bring anthropological and social science research and thinking to interdisciplinary and public audiences. The original idea behind the podcast is to use our skill sets and toolkits  as anthropologists to translate and socialize data, cultural patterns, and research into accessible open format dialogues and conversations that provided solutions for social impact and actionable insight.

On this episode, TAL hosts Adam Gamwell and Ryan Collins are joined by Dr. Janine de Novais  of the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) to expand on the  ideas behind “Brave Community” (discussed in episode 1 of the Diversity +  Inclusion in Higher Ed series) and to understand the major hurdles she  finds with diversity and inclusion in higher education today. With her  dissertation Dr. de Novais explored the ways in which classroom  experiences in higher education do and do not contribute to deep  learning that influences students understandings of race. Dr. de Novais’  scholarship also focuses on a practice-based question: what kind of  learning about race do college students need given our racially diverse  and deeply unequal society? Her answer: Brave Community–a  pedagogy that relies on academic grounding, the distinctive culture of a  classroom, to support students. As we learned in our interview, much of  Dr. de Novais’ interests today are influenced from life experiences. 

Read more here on thisanthrolife.com