Dr. Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz (Teachers College, Columbia University) presented a multimodal workshop, Developing Racial Literacy: A Foundation to Sustaining Culturally Relevant Pedagogy, to Guttman OAA staff and faculty, OSE staff, and administrators on February 26th. This is the first in a series of professional development workshops she will conduct in the College’s forthcoming Culturally Responsive Pedagogy Institute. This time with her helped to begin to develop the deeply personal racial literacies needed to bring culturally responsive and sustaining practices fully into the Guttman community so it is not reduced simply to tools, but is instead ingrained in our hearts, heads, and spirit.
Dr. Yolanda Sealey-Ruiz (Ph.D., New York University) is as an Associate Professor of English Education at Teachers College, Columbia University. Yolanda is former Research Associate with the NYU Metropolitan Center for Urban Education, and has worked for Business Week, The New York Times, and New York University in Marketing and Promotion positions. Her research interests include racial literacy development in urban teacher education (with a specific focus on the education of Black and Latino males), literacy practices of Black girls, and Black female college reentry students.
Yolanda’s work has appeared in several top-tier academic journals. Yolanda is co-editor of three books including (with Chance W. Lewis and Ivory A. Toldson Teacher Education and Black Communities: Implications for Access, Equity, and Achievement (IAP). At Teachers College, she is founder and faculty sponsor of the Racial Literacy Roundtables Series where for ten years, national scholars, doctoral, and pre-service and in-service Master’s students, and young people facilitate informal conversations around race and other issues involving diversity and teacher education for the Teachers College / Columbia University community. She is also the co-founder of the Teachers College Civic Participation Project which concerns itself with the educational well-being of young people involved with the juvenile justice and foster care systems in New York.
Yolanda and two of her students appeared in Spike Lee’s “2 Fists Up: We Gon’ Be Alright” (2016), a documentary about the Black Lives Matter movement and the campus protests at Mizzou.
