The Antiracist Writing Workshop
“The anti-racist workshop is a study in love,” says Felicia Rose Chavez, author and teacher of The Antiracist Writing Workshop: How to Decolonize the Creative Classroom.
While this book was written by a teacher who works primarily in MFA programs in universities, her lessons learned about how to cultivate and facilitate communities of learners who bring their full selves and all their identities to their writing and to their learning can support all of us as teachers, no matter what grade or subject area we teach. She specifically focuses on inviting writers of color into MFA programs and challenges traditional workshop approaches that center the study of white literary “masters” of craft and that focus on “tearing” each other’s writing apart through aggressive critiques.
Chavez’s framework for an anti-racist writing workshop that “advances humility and empathy over control and domination” and that “teaches engagement, mindfulness, and generosity” is front and center of the design process and facilitation of retreats at The Teacher Sanctuary. Some specific teaching strategies that Chavez advocates for and that The Teacher Sanctuary tries to live out in workshop-based retreats include:
“pairing creative writing exercises with personalized check-ins and freewriting exercises to unmask the psychological, emotional, and cultural barriers to creative expression”
“reading rituals that begin first with workshop participants’ own words—handwritten, raw, messy—read aloud to the group”
“reading contemporary writers from a living archive that features people of color, women, queer, differently abled, and gender-nonconforming artists”
“train participants how to check their egos, exercise kinship, and read in service of an author’s agenda” when giving feedback on writing
“individual, process-based assessment where participants go inward with perspectives and intention to gauge their personal progress”
Learn more from Felicia Rose Chavez here. For us as teachers to create classrooms that honor student agency and differences, we, too, need learning communities like that for ourselves.
