Hello and welcome! I’m Dr. Grier-Reed and this website stems from my work listening to Black college students in the African American Student Network (AFAM) reflect on their experiences in education for the last 15 years. I want to thank the Agricultural Experiment Station (Hatch Funding) that supported these efforts to try and cull and capture lessons learned.
In this website, we bring together student voices, resources, and scholarship to help teachers and professors in Minnesota and beyond support Black students. Although most resources are focused at the high school and/or college level, included is a resource from the National Child Traumatic Stress Network which is particularly useful at the K-12 level.
This toolkit is not exhaustive, but I hope that you can find it useful and perhaps a site to facilitate discussions and new ideas in your own communities of practice. We are living through tumultuous times in which it is easy to become unmoored. I welcome and encourage you to anchor yourselves to a higher order, and I share with you one of my favorite quotes from Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead:
“The world had whispered its rules to him for his whole life and he refused to listen, hearing instead a higher order. The world continued to instruct: Do not love for they will disappear, do not trust for you will be betrayed, do not stand up for you will be swatted down. Still, he heard those higher imperatives: Love and love will be returned, trust in the righteous path and it will lead you to deliverance, fight and things will change“ (Whitehead, 2016, p. 195).
