Dr. Bree Picower to Discuss Racism at Town Hall Talk on March 13th

Dr. Bree Picower, Professor in the Teaching and Learning Department, will give a virtual Town Hall talk on racism in the classroom on March 13, 2022. Dr. Picower will share her philosophy on reshaping the teaching of race and discuss her latest book, “Reading, Writing, and Racism: Disrupting Whiteness in Teacher Education and in the Classroom.”

Dr. Picower argues that to eradicate racism from schools and curriculum, the U.S. needs to start further back: with teacher-education programs, adding that “whiteness” is embedded in education and that teachers’ ideology of race, consciously or unconsciously, shapes how they teach about it. To change that will require reframing educators’ understanding of race.

Dr. Picower draws on her experience teaching and training teachers and also her study of racist curricula in U.S. classrooms, focusing on showing how racial justice can be built into the teacher-education process.

Dr. Bree Picower is a Full Professor at Montclair State University in the College of Education and Human Development. She is the Co-Director of two innovative teacher education programs, the Urban Teacher Residency, Newark Teacher Project as well as the Critical Urban Education Speaker Series with Dr. Tanya Maloney at MSU. She is the author of Reading, Writing and Racism, Practice What You Teach: Social Justice Education in the Classroom and the Streets and the co-editor of What’s Race Got To Do With It? How current school reform maintains racial and economic inequality and Confronting Racism in Teacher Education: Counternarratives of Critical Practice. Across her writing and teaching, Picower examines the role of racism in education and how to prepare teachers to disrupt Whiteness in order to advance social and racial justice. She has taught in public elementary schools in Oakland, California and New York City.