From White Privilege to Social Justice: Creating School Libraries that Center Racial Justice

I'm white, but not all of my students are. How do I work towards racial justice in my school library? How do I respond when one of my white students says something racist? How do I teach racial justice if the curriculum centers whiteness? Join your fellow preK-12 educators to tackle these questions and to dialogue about how we can and must leverage our white privilege to create school communities that center racial justice--no matter how many white students or students of color that we serve.

Lani Blechman

Lani Blechman is a white library teacher at Fort River Elementary School in Amherst, MA. She has over 4 years of preK-12 school library experience in public, private, and charter school settings; 13 years of working across the urban/rural and college-town/post-industrial-city divides of Western Massachusetts; and over 15 years of working for racial, gender, and social justice. She is the 2017 recipient of the Massachusetts School Library Association’s President's Award - West.