PSV's Good Trouble Institute for Equity & Justice

** Special acknowledgement of appreciation to Crossroads School for the Arts & Sciences and Harvard-Westlake for their additional sponsorship of this program to help ensure its low cost to participants. ** 

Series Dates: Aug 20, Aug 27, Sept. 10 & Sept. 17, 10 am PT

Mission: Led by Dr. Jamila Lyiscott, aka Dr. J., PSV’s Good Trouble Institute is a youth-centered program that equips Black youth and families (caregivers and upper elementary to middle school students) with tools for sustaining the power of Black culture, contending with the precarity of racism, and cultivating possibilities through youth activism. Guided by Black liberatory traditions, PSV’s Good Trouble Institute serves Black families’ need for kinship, freedom-dreaming, and holding predominantly white institutions accountable towards true racial equity. Built into this program’s model are ongoing opportunities for participating families to offer wisdom and reflection on the growing capacity to serve students in these spaces through our village.

Overview: Black life in America is marked by what W.E.B. DuBois has conceptualized as a double-consciousness; an ever two-ness where we see ourselves as ourselves and ourselves through the eyes of whiteness. For Black children navigating the space of (predominantly white) private schools, this duality is significantly prevalent. The pressure to code-switch, the white-washed curricula, the everyday microaggressions, etc. all painfully permeate the realities of navigating two worlds. Private School Village (PSV), a constellation of Black families with shared values for the holistic success of our children, is committed to ensuring that every member of its community is equipped to be actively engaged in the work of racial healing, community-building, as well as educational advocacy in private schools around race and racism. PSV is also invested in orienting each family into a beautiful village that celebrates Black genius, culture, kinship, and joy beyond the scope of any school environment. Complete with assigned readings and media as essential texts to be read in advance of convening, PSV’s Good Trouble Institute will prepare students and their families with racial literacy skills, as well as foundational knowledge for navigating predominantly white school contexts in the areas of advocacy and accountability for racial equity.

About Dr. J:

Jamila Lyiscott aka, Dr. J, is an aspiring way-maker, a community-engaged scholar, nationally renowned speaker, and the author of Black Appetite. White Food: Issues of Race, Voice, and Justice Within and Beyond the Classroom. She currently serves as an Associate Professor of Social Justice Education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where she is the co-founder and co-director of the Center of Racial Justice and Youth Engaged Research. Dr. J is most well known for being featured on TED.com where her video, '3 Ways to Speak English,' has been viewed over 5 million times, and for her commissioned TED Talk, '2053'. Dr. J is the recipient of the AERA Outstanding Public Communication of Education Research Award, the AERA Scholar-Activist & Community Advocacy Award, and the CIES Ernest D. Morrell Emerging Scholar Award. She has been invited to keynote at 100s of institutions nationally and internationally. 

Dr. J's scholarship and activism work together to explore, assert, and defend the value of Black life globally. Her research examines the liberatory capacity of literacies in the lives of youth of color, racial healing, youth-led research, and the capacity of African Diasporic culture to transgress white coloniality.

Dr. J serves as co-editor of the journal of Equity & Excellence in Education, and holds faculty fellowships at the University of Notre Dame, and Teachers College, Columbia University.  In her active efforts to disrupt the bounds of the academy, she has also been featured in Spike Lee's "2 Fists Up," on BBC Radio, NPR, Cosmopolitan, NowThis, and many other media outlets nationally and internationally.

Note: Dr. J's definition of racial literacy is grounded in the work of Dr. Yolanda Sealey Ruiz who writes:

Racial literacy is a skill and practice by which individuals can probe the existence of racism and examine the effects of race and institutionalized systems on their experiences and representation in US society. Students who have this skill can discuss the implications of race and American racism in constructive ways. A desired outcome of racial literacy in an outwardly racist society like America is for members of the dominant racial category to adopt an antiracist stance and for persons of color to resist a victim stance.

** Special acknowledgement of appreciation to Crossroads School for the Arts & Sciences for their additional sponsorship of this program to help ensure its low cost to participants. **