EDCT 5680 - Leveraging Privilege and Entitlement: Overcoming Barriers to Access and Equity

Course Description

Educators, as well as their colleagues are keenly aware of achievement gap disparities as well as issues of disproportionality with respects to student suspension, expulsion, special education assignment and placement into higher order academic classes. This course describes personal and institutional oppression in ways that
equips educators with knowledge and skills in how to leverage their levels of privilege and entitlement to effect individual and systemic change initiatives. Using the Tools of Cultural Proficiency, participants examine historical foundations of systemic oppression that underlie schools’ unstated, negative core values that regard some cultures
as deficits and learn Cultural Proficiency’s Guiding Principles as a means to developing intentional educator and school wide core values In which students’ cultures are embraced as assets.

Learner Outcomes

By the end of the course participants will:

• Understand the dynamic nature of systemic oppression in education as a barrier to access and opportunity connected to disparate academic achievement and issues of disproportional educational access and outcomes.
• Have taken a brief tour of the historical nature of segregation and marginalization in relationship to current levels of disparate achievement and disproportional representation in advanced placement and international baccalaureate programs, special education assignments, suspensions, and expulsions.
• Understand historical oppressions in terms of how institutions and people benefit from systemic oppression.
• Understand that though we may not have been a knowing participant in historical or current behaviors of discrimination or marginalization, the issues is ours to confront and overcome.
• Have explored personal reactions to feelings of anger and/or guilt that may surface when exploring issues of privilege and entitlement.
• Understand the manner in which historical oppressions in combination with systemic privilege and entitlement provide rationale for implied core values that inform school policies, school practice, educator values, and educator behaviors that regard students’ cultures as deficits that limit students’ ability and worthiness of high level educational experiences.
• Understand the manner in which the Guiding Principles of Cultural Proficiency inform core values that regard students’ cultures as assets on which to build their educational experiences.

Notes

Online course only. Web access Required. This course is hosted on Moodle, students will be automatically enrolled once payment is processed. Course materials are provided unless listed otherwise. Students must have access to a computer with high-speed Internet access. Not recommended for iPad-only access. Internet Explorer does not support Moodle and is not recommended. Students are asked to login into online environment using, Chrome, Firefox, or Safari. YouTube videos might not display on Opera or Internet Explorer. Some videos require Adobe Flash Player.