OTAN News

Sharing Our Equity Resources

As we mentioned in the Spring OTAN newsletter, one of the ways that we at OTAN have been addressing the topic of equity is by participating in trainings organized by our employer, the Sacramento County Office of Education, on a variety of equity-related topics. OTAN staff have attended sessions on implicit bias, working with students with disabilities and LGBTQ+ students, and equity and complexity. We are fortunate to have had some great training this winter and spring, and we would like to share some of the resources we have explored with our adult education colleagues.

We have been in two trainings led by the National Equity Project. For the first on implicit bias, we read two articles prior to the training:

• Don't Talk about Implicit Bias Without Talking about Structural Racism by the NEP
• Willing to be Disturbed by Margaret Wheatley

The training on equity and disability was led by Sam Drazin from his organization, Changing Perspectives. We read two articles prior to the training:

• 4 Ways To Understand The Diversity Of The Disability Community
• Ableism 101
• For Netflix subscribers, Sam also recommended the documentary Crip Camp: A Disability Revolution

The second training from the National Equity Project was on equity and complexity. The article we read prior to the training was Leadership in the Age of Complexity: From Hero to Host by Margaret Wheatley with Debbie Frieze.

Finally, one of the initiatives of the Human Rights Campaign is the Welcoming Schools training regarding LGBTQ+ students. On the Welcoming Schools website, you can learn more about how to support LGBTQ+, transgender, and non-binary students, the topic of intersectionality, and how to prevent bullying.

We look forward to sharing more of our equity resources with our colleagues in the adult education field and we hope that our fellow adult educators are working on creating equitable learning environments for their students and others they serve.