Dharma Mirza (She/Her/Hers) is a Student Office Worker at the OSU Center for Teaching & Learning. Dharma is a senior studying Public Health, Queer Studies, and Medical Humanities, and hopes to pursue an MAIS and MPH at OSU when she graduates. Dharma also works doing community outreach and education on topics such as anti-racist organizing/education, health equity, and LGBTQ+ issues.
This summer we began a project here at the CTL to help engage our faculty/staff with issues of race and racism in education, the Are You IN(clusive)? Read, Reflect, Reform Book Club. CTL provided participants with a copy of either Cyndi Kernahan’s Teaching About Race and Racism in the College Classroom or Dr. Beverly Daniel Tatum’s Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? and placed participants into small reading groups. Both texts are available as e-books at the OSU Valley Library.
We started this program in response to wider movements for racial justice springing up all over the nation regarding the unjust death of George Floyd, among others. The program aims to help foster inclusive educational practices and ensure that we are doing our best to support our Black and marginalized students here at Oregon State. Due to the pandemic we have arranged digital spaces via Canvas to facilitate small-group discussions about the books, and the program will culminate in a live zoom meeting with one of our authors Cyndi Kernahan, followed by a group discussion on Beverly Daniel Tatum’s book, on Friday, November 20th. We are also working to provide anti-racist educational resources in the group and highlight OSU-specific resources to help empower our participants.
To help bring in the perspectives of students, I am excited to be offering a facilitated discussion on the books, and contextualizing my own struggles navigating higher education as a biracial person of color. I hope to also draw on my diversity education work in the OSU and Corvallis community over the past few years. My experiences as a first-generation Muslim immigrant and biracial student of color have informed my scholarship, activism, and community programming. So many BIPOC and immigrant students are disenfranchised due to the legacies of anti-Black racism and white supremacy in higher education, so I hope that engaging these critical POC-student perspectives will help to facilitate meaningful discourse on racial inequities in our campus community.
Please join us next Friday, 11/6 from Noon to 1:00pm (Pacific) on Zoom. (See Zoom Details below)
This event is open to all. We hope that you can join us, even if you are not a part of the Reading groups.
Live Captioning will be provided. For accessibility requests/concerns, or if you would like more information about our book club, please contact OSU Student workers: Kelby Hahn at kelby.hahn@oregonstate.edu or Dharma Mirza at mirzak@oregonstate.edu.
Zoom Meeting Info
https://oregonstate.zoom.us/j/96273290664?pwd=Vms4L2pEVXAzTy91bFBneFU5Z05mZz09 (Links to an external site.)
Password: OSUCTL
Phone Dial-In Information
+1 971 247 1195 US (Portland)
+1 253 215 8782 US (Tacoma)
+1 301 715 8592 US (Germantown)
Meeting ID: 962 7329 0664
Join by Polycom/Cisco/Other Room System
96273290664@zoomcrc.com
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