Warren Chalklen and Gcobani Qambela: Anti-Racist Teaching Practices and Learning Strategies

HUMA Book Lunch Series

Authors: Warren Chalklen and Gcobani Qambela

Introduction: Anti-Racist Teaching Practices and Learning Strategies is a tool of love and justice. We compiled this text to honour the lives of those before us, those with us, and those to come who continue to struggle for a dignity-centred world. The workbook is deeply imbued in our own research, teaching experiences and learning strategies developed over two decades between us. The reader is presented with theories, practices and personal narratives that reveal our own embodiments and commitments to an anti-racist and love ethic in education. We do this to encourage deep reflection through various exercises, theory and lived realities.

Anti-racism, as opposed to non-racism, is measured by the extent to which the presence of racism is challenged or maintained. We developed this workbook for those who have a basic understanding of anti-racism and for those who have an acute sense of their practice in challenging racism. It is designed to equip you with skills to think through an anti-racist lens, practice from an equitable foundation and build socially just relationships. This workbook is useful to think about and practice teaching that dismantles the systems that degrade all human beings.

This work is not original. The struggle of Black, Indigenous, People of Color and White activists for justice has laid the foundation for all anti-oppressive work. This workbook is a conduit for their brilliance and encourages every reader to seek and read the original texts mentioned throughout this book. However, while the workbook builds on this genealogy of anti-racist and anti-oppressive work globally, we do hope to offer new insights and contemporary examples of everyday practices and strategies for anti-racism and anti-oppression in your spaces.

We drew from a generous and wide-ranging body of work and thinking. We are informed by scholars, activists, students and various other knowledge producers in formalized institutional settings and outside mainstream learning institutions. Thinkers such as Danai Mupotsa (Mupotsa, 2017), bell hooks (hooks, 1994) and Pumla Gqola (Gqola, 2018), among others, remind us that pedagogy doesn't only exist in the ivory towers of the academy, but rather that pedagogy is everywhere. Pedagogy is in public transport conversations, popular cultures and many other social spheres of society.

See the workbook: Anti-Racist Teaching Practices and Learning Strategies (Warren Chalklen, 2021)

About the authors: 

Dr Warren Chalklen is a passionate advocate for equity and justice. His current work advances health equity by deepening cultural competency, diversity, equity, and inclusion practices at an international health system based in Texas, United States. He leads language access services as well as the execution of system-wide diversity and inclusion educational and operational strategies. Within his broad scope of responsibilities, Dr Chalklen achieves patient, associate, and organizational transformation by integrating data, technology, and high impact diversity, equity and inclusion learning experiences. His team increases patient access and improves patient experience through coordinating language access equipment, providing Qualified Bilingual Staff training, and harnessing language data to inform strategic decisions. Concerning diversity and inclusion, Dr Chalklen serves as an instructor, resource, and subject matter expert to facilities throughout the system. He designs high quality, cost-effective learning solutions by collaborating with system-wide, clinical, non-clinical, and leadership teams, community partners and other experts.

Dr Chalklen began his career as an urban school teacher in South Africa, where he witnessed the impact of racial inequity on educational outcomes. He pursued a Master’s degree in Public Administration focusing on education policy and a PhD in Urban Education from Texas A&M University focusing on curriculum and instruction. Dr Chalklen has authored two book chapters and published peer-reviewed articles on racial equity, pre-service teacher education, and technology-based learning.

Upon graduation, Dr Chalklen moved to New York City, United States, where he trained teachers how to use data to advocate for equity in their classrooms while working for a nonprofit education organization. He was also responsible for supporting the diversity and inclusion training and development program for internal staff members. Dr Chalklen’s passion for deepening anti-oppressive practices with – rather than for – communities continues to shape his commitment to building a just world. Read more on warrenchalklen.com

Gcobani Qambela (PhD) is a multi-award-winning educator and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology and Development Studies at the University of Johannesburg, teaching Medical Anthropology, Anthropological Theories and Childhoods and Youth. He is a Research Fellow at The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH), Oxford University, UK. He is the co-author with Dr Warren Chalklen of the "Anti-Racist Teaching Practices and Learning Strategies” workbook. Currently, he is working on a monograph broadly around what he terms “The Anthropology of Boyhoods”, in which argues for considered attention to the interior lives of boys. His PhD, passed with no corrections, was an ethnographic exploration of the lives of AmaXhosa men and boys living in a rural and peri-urban context in the Eastern Cape, South Africa.