“Anti-Racist Change: Inquiry Tools for Interrogating Racism in School Policies and Practices”

Anjalé Welton, Ph.D. is the Rupple-Bascom Professor of Education and Chair of the Department of Educational Leadership & Policy Analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. 

Dr. Welton's scholarship examines how educational leaders both dialogue about and address race and racism in their school communities. Her most recent co-authored book (with Sarah Diem, University of Missouri), Anti-racist Educational Leadership and Policy: Addressing Racism in Public Education, challenges school leaders to question the racial implications of the policies they design and implement. In 2020, their book received the Taylor and Francis “Outstanding New Textbook” Award in Behavioral Sciences and Education, and in 2021 it received the AESA Critic’s Choice Book Award.

In this presentation, she will discuss how most school leaders feel unprepared to address racism, racial politics, and facilitate anti-racist change in their schools. Given the politics school leaders may face when they do attempt to be anti-racist in how they lead, they can’t embark on this type of change alone. Thus, it is important that school leaders do anti-racist work with and alongside others in their school community. In this research talk Dr. Welton introduces policy inquiry and decision-making tools school leaders can use in collaboration with their school community to interrogate racial inequities that exist in school policies and practices.