The role of schools in shaping your understandings of yourself, your community, your history, and your life (and your understandings of the same as it relates to others). How do you think schools (mis)educated you about yourself and others?

Ta-Nehisi Coates (2015) Between the World and Me shares the epistolary form and profound sentiment of James Baldwins (1963) My Dungeon Shook: Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation. In both texts, the authors consider the state of the world for historically marginalized individuals, cultural narratives that communicate the (lack of) value on their existential and material place in the world, and a message for a young loved one who has to navigate it all. To prepare for
this paper, you should do two of the following: a.) Read the excerpt from the Coates book found on Canvas or watch the Between the World and Me documentary streaming on HBO, b.) read the Baldwin piece on Canvas, and c.) listen to at least two episodes of
the Between the World and Me podcast. Next, you should reflect on the major themes discussed in these texts and how they connect to (or depart from) your lived experience.

In particular, you should think about:
The cultural narratives that tell you who you are, can be, or should be as a function of single and/or intersectional markers of social identity (i.e., race, sexual orientation, gender, disability, etc.);
The role of schools in shaping your understandings of yourself, your community, your history, and your life (and your understandings of the same as it relates to others). How do you think schools (mis)educated you about yourself and others? How did the
community you live in enable or inhibit opportunities to know people who were culturally and/or linguistically different from you?
Use the domains of identity (i.e., race, gender, disability, etc.) introduced in Johnson (2006) to reflect on your educational experience. You might consider some of the
following guiding questions:
-How do you think the relative presence or absence of disability/racial/gender/sexual orientation/linguistic/etc. diversity in your schooling influenced your educational experience?
-What do you remember about the disability/racial/gender/sexual orientation/linguistic/etc. diversity composition of the teachers and administrators in you schooling experience?
-How was diversity represented in the curriculum and in school activities?!
Explore the contributions of schooling to your assumptions about the other. You might consider some of the following guiding questions:
-What did your k-12 schooling experience teach you explicitly (or implicitly) about diversity?
-How do you think the relative presence or absence of diversity prepared you to interact with individuals from backgrounds that differ from your own?
Identify critical passages from course texts to illustrate your points. You may also use relevant texts from outside of our course. You might consider the following guiding questions as you identify critical passages:
-How did your educational experiences specifically connect to or depart from the
ideas presented in the chosen text(s)?
-What is it about this passage that drew your attention? Why is it significant? !
– What essential insights do I gather about my own experience given what is in this text?

Finally, you should write your paper in the form of a letter to a young loved one. This letter could be to a person currently in your life or a future someone special. Share the wisdom youve gained from this deep reflection about how cultural narratives and schooling experiences intersect to shape how we see ourselves and others. Structure your paper around a 3 or 4 organizing themes. Use our course concepts to enrich your analysis.

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