CodeRVA teacher Joy Beatty, seen here at right tutoring students, has been part of a wider push within the school over the past year to integrate equity, inclusion and anti-racist education into its curriculum. (Photo courtesy Joy Beatty)
Joy Beatty, a humanities teacher at Richmond magnet school CodeRVA, is trying to bring subjects like geography out of the realm of textbooks and into the lives of her students.
She begins a lesson in her ninth grade global studies class by showing a map of the precolonial kingdoms of Africa and asking students whether they recognize it. Most don’t.
“Then I'll show them a picture of Africa once it's all carved up and colonized,” Beatty says. “They are more familiar with that picture.”
Throughout the lesson, Beatty bounces between older maps, such as those of the Indian Removal Act, and maps of today — they discuss the gentrification of Jackson Ward, for instance. The whole time, she says, she is asking questions about power and authority and trying to connect the material with students’ actual lives.
By centering questions like these in her lesson planning, Beatty is able to make the curriculum more culturally relevant. This culturally responsive teaching (CRT) protocol is emblematic of a push for inclusivity, equity and diversity that CodeRVA has been pursuing over the past year.
“There's a lot of thought and planning that goes into the transportation efforts to get our students to our school,” Beatty says. “I just wish that that much energy was also placed in the inclusivity efforts and in the equity efforts as well.”
CodeRVA is a small magnet school specializing in computer science education, currently with 320 enrolled students. It admits students from the city of Richmond and its surrounding 13 counties using a lottery system that ensures the demographics of the school adequately reflect the demographics of the region.
“Right now, 62% of our students are of color, which is a great representation of how the school's original model and purposely desegregating has come to fruition,” says Kume Goranson, the school’s executive director. The school is successful in eliminating barriers of admission, she says, but now is shifting its focus to ask: How equitable is it once students walk through its doors?
This school year, CodeRVA brought in the VCU School of Education’s Office of Strategic Engagement (OSE) for a six-part professional development series with its teachers and staff to address equity, inclusion, anti-racist education and CRT. CodeRVA regularly collects and analyzes demographic data to gauge the school’s equity — for example, the number of students in each of the school’s different graduation tracks by race or gender. Robert Stevens, the associate principal, also has been facilitating an optional book club about CRT for teachers and staff.
“We're a regional public high school, and … we serve [14] different districts. Rural students, urban students, county students,” Beatty says. She adds that, for some of her students, she is their first Black teacher. “When I'm someone's first teacher of color, how they receive messages and history from me may be different, simply because of the packaging, simply because of what I look like.”
“It just starts with awareness,” says Joshua Cole, the executive director of VCU’s OSE, who facilitated the professional development classes at CodeRVA along with Cassandra Stanley, OSE's assistant director. He says that CRT is about connecting teaching to the real lives — and cultural backgrounds — of students.
“Students are then more engaged with their learning because they have connections through not only the relationship with the instructor but how the content is being presented and how it connects to their real-world lives,” he says.
Cole says that teachers and staff need to be aware of their own implicit biases before interacting with students. He says they need to actively reflect on how to be an anti-racist educator — an educator who is directly working to change racist practices and policies — instead of simply being a “nonracist.”
The OSE is planning to conduct another professional development series with CodeRVA during the next school year. “All this work is not a ‘one and done’; it's ongoing, it's lifelong,” Cole says.
“I have been pushing to have more professional development since 2017,” says Beatty, who was one of the school’s original six staff members — the only one of color. She likens equity and inclusion training to other required training for teachers, such as CPR.
Jasmine Simmons, a tenth grader at CodeRVA, says that in some of her classes, such as her computer science classes, her teachers rarely touch on such topics.
“I think they just feel uncomfortable and they don't want to say the wrong thing,” she says, adding that although she knows that all of her teachers care about her, she wishes that they were all able to go the extra mile and not avoid subjects such as race and equity.
Ricardo Kunkel, a senior, says that most students don’t shy away from hard conversations. “If they do, it might be because they're afraid to say something wrong or they're afraid they don't know anything,” he says, or because they come from a household that has very different views from those of students at the school.
Simmons, who is Black, says she was hurt when she saw others call Black Lives Matter a “terrorist” organization in response to protests about racial justice over the summer, or when a fellow student had the Blues Lives Matter flag as their profile picture on Google.
“You definitely have the right to do that,” she says. “It just hurts me because it’s a person I've talked to.”
Simmons says that there are other areas where the school could work to be more equitable — in some spaces on campus, she feels that her light-skinned classmates are given preference over those with darker skin.
“I think that the staff should be required to be more culturally responsive and aware,” Beatty says.
“Our school board is in a very privileged position at CodeRVA," Beatty says. "They simply have to look back four years [since the school's founding] and make changes. That's it. And I think that can be done. I think it’s really about understanding power and authority and how to use it to better serve the masses.”
