I am absolutely aware that teachers are in survival mode at the moment, and their least precious commodity is time. However, as we all know, there are situations where investing a bit of time at the beginning can result in a much larger return later on — especially when crowdsourcing is involved. If you are feeling a bit helpless when it comes to doing anti-racist work, this is a contribution you can make that will probably take you no more than 15 minutes.
The Care Resource Review Tool is an online tool from the Center for Anti Racist Education. It is meant to be used to analyze educational materials “through an antiracist lens.” After registering (free), reviewers go through a simple process through which they consider a self-selected teaching material based on 5 Principles. After answering 3 questions for each principle, reviewers get an overall score and some recommendation. Below, you can see the one I received after reviewing The Giver, a somewhat tricky book to analyze since its lack of diversity is what makes the fictional community dystopian. The tool is not just for literature, though. It can be used for textbooks, podcasts, non-fiction, or whatever type of resource is being used in the classroom.
CARE is currently gathering information from reviewers, but they intend to make a searchable database once they have gotten enough contributions to make it useful. Once that is up, you will be able to find materials that have already been reviewed and make better decisions about what you should use in your classroom to better serve all students.
I will be adding this post to my Anti-Racism Wakelet, which is a free collection of links to tools and articles about how to be an Anti-Racist educator.
