Embracing Inclusivity: Conversations on Identity in Education

Resource Download

Enjoy this free download sample from Dr. Talusan’s book, The Identity Conscious Educator.

All right, welcome, Liza. I’m so glad that you could join us today.

Liza 

Thanks, Susan. It’s great to be here with you. Thanks for the invitation.

Susan 

Of course, of course. So for people who may not know who you are or may not be familiar with your work, I’d love for you to just take this opportunity to share an overview a little bit about who you are, your work, and specifically about your book, The Identity Conscious Educator.

Liza 

Thanks so much. So I’m Liza Talusan. I use she/her pronouns, second generation, Filipina American, mother, runner, writer, trier of all things. And I teach at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and the graduate programs, the master’s and doctoral programs in education and educational administration. And I would just say, even as I introduced the book, what I just did was introduce my name and then led with my identity. 

The book, The Identity Conscious Educator, was an opportunity for people to essentially have me in their book bag or have me as a friend when they’re reading at night or on the subway. It was a chance for people to really explore what identity means to them. And again, I just gave examples of my identity, what it means to them, but also as a chance for me and the reader to have a dialogue together, for us to laugh together, maybe cry together, do some hard work together, celebrate successes together. And so I wanted to write a book where I could keep somebody company. This work can get really scary and isolating. And I wanted some sort of like journey and companion as people are learning how to be more identity conscious educators. So that was the book. It’s a mix of stories. It’s a mix of research. It’s a mix of questions and dialogues and there’s a little bit of drawing in there if you really wanted to, but it was just a chance for me and you to get to know each other and to be able to build some habits and skills for Identity Talk.

Susan 

Which is amazing. And what I love about your book is that it feels like I’m like walking this with a friend. I’ve always said in this whole journey that I wish that I had somebody that I could just run to and say, but what about this? Or I’m so uncomfortable and I don’t know how to ask this question. And it’s like, as I was reading this book, it felt like you were that person for me. So thank you ahead of time as we have this conversation, because that’s I love how you’ve written this book. It’s just felt like that the whole way through. I want to piggyback on just how you’ve introduced yourself because I’m just going to start there. I have found that sometimes even that makes people uncomfortable. Weirdly enough, when I’ve walked into situations in terms of introducing myself with she her pronouns, people will say, whoa, whoa, whoa. I.

Why do you have to do that? Why do you have to list your pronouns like that? Why do we have to do that now? And that makes people uncomfortable or standoffish right at the beginning. So I’m curious from your standpoint or from your viewpoint, why do we need to begin starting to do that? Why do we need to start having that dialogue or changing that dialogue?

Liza 

Yeah, I love this question. Listen, y ‘all don’t have to do anything. Like, you really don’t. I choose to share my pronouns. I choose to tell you about my ethnicity. I choose to tell you about the things that I’m interested in. But yeah, nobody’s making you. You might feel some peer pressure, like a little bit. If you’re the only one in the circle who hasn’t done it, there might be a little bit of peer pressure. But like, nobody’s making you do it. I think what I’m hearing in your question is why would I want to? And… especially with the pronoun piece. I mean, I live in a world where I don’t need to. I know we are doing a little bit of video and podcast. I identify as cisgender, which means my gender identity matches my assigned gender at birth. As you look at me, like I look pretty feminine, even though you and I were just joking, I have like no makeup on right now. And that would be maybe a feminine marker. Like if I were to ask you, if you were out somewhere and I said, can you point me to the direction of the bathroom? You would probably say the women’s room is over there, right? So I get read in a particular way, which aligns with who I am. So I don’t have to tell you my pronouns, but I also live in a world where I know that other people don’t share that identity and people make lots of assumptions about them. And so as someone who is an ally to transgender, non -binary, gender fluid people, the feedback that I’ve gotten is it’s helpful when you share your pronouns, Liza, because it creates space for me to share mine.

And guess what? Like mine actually aren’t what you might think or assume they are. So do I have to? No, nobody’s making me do anything, but I’m at a point in my heart where it’s a choice. So if you’re saying to me, it contributes to your sense of belonging, it honors your humanity. I just, I don’t know why I would choose anything else like other than to do that. But I mean, I think it’s always just so rude when I’ve heard, you know, certain stories where people are like, and my pronoun is American patriot. I’m like, that’s unknown. Let’s kind of go back to grammar for a second. And I’m just like, that’s not necessary. Like no one was making you say it’s not necessary. I will say the other pieces that I mentioned to you, like my racial and ethnic identity, things I’m interested in, my identity as a mom, I could have chosen not to say any of that. You have just such a friendly, open, loving, personal vibe that I did. If this was a very academic, where I should have had makeup and a dress on kind of talk, I would have just said like, I’m an associate instructor at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, and I researched this. I would have introduced myself in a totally different way, but because of you and your vibe and your, like, it’s what I chose to identify as. So all that to say, we have choice folks in how we wanna identify and what we wanna share. And the thing that you have to really uncover is why would you want to?

Susan 

Yes, yes, and I think that is the key is understanding why we want to have this understanding of the conversation around identity in the first place and whether or not we want to be the humans that allow that opening, right? And especially as educators, and we were having this conversation a little bit off camera about how education is a little different than everywhere else in the world and that.

The things that apply to the rest of the world sometimes are different. Not that they don’t apply in education, but they apply differently sometimes in education. So I want to make this episode a learning episode for as many people as possible. I think that’s important. So let’s start by identifying what you mean by identity. In the book, you address this. You talk about five different types of identities. Can you talk about a little bit about what they are a little bit about each one and how they show up for ourselves or in our school.

Liza 

Sure. Yeah. So, you know, this is probably not the most accurate psychosocial definition of identity. Someone academic is going to be like, that’s not it. So I’ll just talk to you about you like I talk about in my book, which is like you and me as a friend going for a walk. I always think about identity as an umbrella term for lots of different ways that people experience their world and their lives in themselves. Like hard stuff, right? Like that’s the biggest umbrella term.

Within there are lots of ways that people might choose to express who they are. So when I said I’m second generation, that actually talks about my immigration status. You can assume that my parents are immigrants. Otherwise, why would I say that? I said Filipino -American. So if you were to look at me, it’s probably clear that I’m Asian -American, but I chose to say Filipino because my ethnicity is like something very special to me. I talked about being a mother. My kids are at school. Like I talked about being a runner.

I’m sweaty and gross because I just came from the gym, which is why I have no makeup and I wanted to explain why I look like this. So there’s, I’m choosing to say things in terms of context. There are other ways that I could have identified. I could have talked about my sexual orientation, which I didn’t. I could have talked about my gender identity. I said she, her pronouns. Maybe that gives you a clue. I don’t usually lead with, and my socioeconomic status is blank. There are things that are private about our identities.

I didn’t tell you my political beliefs, that’s certainly an identity. I didn’t tell you my religious preferences or my religious practice, that’s an identity. I didn’t disclose if I have any disabilities, that’s certainly identity. So sometimes I think when people say, like, get a little rattled about the term, like, identity politics or there’s too much identity talk, I’m like, everything is identity talk, though. And when I listen to people who might identify as, for example, conservative and Christian,

I’m like, those are identities. Like, you have identities too. So broadly speaking, identity is just like all the ways that we see ourselves and experience the world. We have choice about how we want to talk about them. And in the book, I do tend to highlight the five that we tend to talk most about in schools. So things like disability, sexual orientation, gender, class, race.

There’s so many other ones, but I think to your point as teachers and educators, those are the ones that just tend to rise up to the surface a little bit more. At the end of each chapter though, I do invite the reader to say, hey, like we only did a couple of pages of disability. Like what are you noticing about disability and language, which is not covered in the book. What are you noticing about disability and body size and shape, which is not covered in the book. So there’s so many things that I invite readers to engage with that are not in there.

But for educators, like those five just tend to be the core ones that we experience every day. Did that feel true for you as an educator? Like those are kind of the five big ones that come up? Yeah.

Susan 

Yeah, I think particularly when a couple of things when when we’re looking at data, the only thing that we haven’t looked at yet in data, I think, was probably sexual orientation or in terms of gender when we’re looking at student gender. Although I would not put it past schools to start to to take a look at that as well.

But when we’re taking a look at student data, we’re certainly looking at socioeconomic status. We’re certainly looking at race. And we’re looking at how students of those identities are doing and then addressing those needs, you know, based on student identity. I think, and I think that’s so interesting is that in that dialogue of we don’t, we’re trying to avoid talking about student identities and we’re talking and.

It was interesting the other day in a Facebook group that’s in my own local community, a parent was being very vocal about saying that a teacher had addressed her child and saying that had addressed an identity about her child that she didn’t like. It was about being a conservative. And that the teacher had said something about her child being a conservative.

And it was very mundane. I don’t think the teacher actually meant to say something about being a conservative. I think she referenced something about a gun, that the child had said something about gun violence and the teacher said, we don’t shoot people in the school, right? And the parent was upset about that. You don’t need to teach my child about gun violence. That’s my right as a conservative and that liberal teacher. And so it was a discussion around identity and I was like, why?

Why are we so upset about identity when we track identity all the time? We do, we track identity all the time. So…

Liza 

We do. Yeah, we really do. We really do. And what’s interesting even about that example is when it starts to get sticky is when people confuse information. So there is a difference between like gun ownership, gun rights, and the belief that everyone should be armed. That is a different conversation from gun violence. And so what I heard in that example, right, the parent kind of like conflated the two or the teacher might have even, and they’re actually different issues.

Right? I know a lot of gun owners who support gun rights and believe that we should have access to it, who abhor gun violence. Right? Those can both exist. But I think oftentimes when it gets just like, ugh, is when people start to mash issues together that are actually very separate. And people can have separate beliefs and ideas about them. And so to report, like, that’s identity also. Like, that is talking about identity.

Susan

Absolutely, and I know gun owners who are liberal. So to make the assumptions. And again, that’s also, I think the importance of discussing identity is because so many assumptions get made when we’re also not being able to discuss about or even share about our identities and have that space to do so. So the other piece that I wanted to kind of discuss was how you framed the book. So.

I’m actually in the middle of starting to write a book myself. And one of the things that was so helpful for me was the outlining of it. So I’m a student of outline right now. And so the way that you outlined and framed this, I really appreciate it because you started with the idea of getting ready for this work and how to do that and kind of having us reflect and think about our own identities, right, how to build our practice and then turning that into action, which I think is so important. It’s not just about the reflection. It’s not just about thinking about this, but actually doing something with it. But I was curious as I was reading this, which one you have found to be the most challenging and some of your favorite ways to address those challenges.

Liza 

Woof. Wow. Amazing question. So what’s interesting is the book. So the reason why the book feels like Liza in a pocket is because the book is written in the way that I talk and see the world. Like it’s not like overly stuffy. It’s, you know, even right now I’m like animated and talking with my hands. It probably feels like that way in the book. And so the way that I outlined it is just how I see the world and how I see the world tends to happen in a rhythm of the rhythm and flow of three is what I call it. The first is we always have to build knowledge. So like the beginning of each chapter is some sort of story about me, which tends to be unflattering, some research that backs it up, not an overwhelming amount of research, just like undigestible amount. So there’s build knowledge. So even for me, as I was writing the book, even though I had these personal stories,

I was looking for research that would support or dismantle whatever was happening to me. So I wasn’t always looking for like research that would agree with me. So build knowledge is important. I think it’s important to find people who do affirm you. I also think it’s incredibly important to find people who disagree with you. And in research that totally blows through your argument. And so those both show up in the book. The second thing after we’ve built some knowledge, gotten some information is we have to engage in reflection.

And engage in reflection is just asking ourselves the question, like, why should I care about this? Like, what in the world does this have to do with me? I chose those five chapters because they have something to do with me. People have often given me feedback like, Liza, why didn’t you write about religion and faith tradition? Or why didn’t you write more about like health experiences? And those are very important. They don’t happen to be on my top five right now. It’s not to say they wouldn’t ever be. At the time of the writing, it just, it wasn’t.

And then I say, why don’t you write a book that includes religion and faith tradition and I will buy it and read it and book club it to the ends of the earth. So some of it is just what I was interested in, what I wanted to reflect on. So in the middle of the book, there’s these activities, these reflection questions that are meant for you to do by yourself. Some people are in really isolated communities where they actually don’t have anyone else to talk to about these issues or maybe like in their family, it’s not accepted to talk about this. And…

They just kind of want like a friend to go back and forth with. So the middle of the book is activities or the middle of the chapter is activities and questions. The last part of the book, the last part of the chapter is like, so what are you gonna do about this? Like, congratulations for reading all the studies. Way to go for reflecting, which is so important. Now what? Like, what are you doing? So those last couple of questions are always what happens now? What happens next?

I think what people appreciate is that I don’t tell them what it is. I mean, what happens for a science teacher in sixth grade is gonna be different than what happens to a college professor who’s teaching senior dissertation. Like, there’s no one way to do this. So people are either really happy that I’m not like, here’s what you’re supposed to do, or they’re incredibly frustrated, because I’m not telling them what to do. And I get that a lot, like, just tell me what to do, Liza. And I’m like, well, I can’t, because what I would do is what…

I would do, it might not work for you. So to your question about which is the hardest, I do think move to action is the hardest because you can’t do what I do and I can’t just do what you do. And we have to spend time really thinking about how does our identity inform an impact, these decisions that we make, these actions that we engage in. And I can do all the research and I can give you reflection questions. I actually, I can’t do that part for you. And for myself, I think move to action is the hardest piece as well.

Susan 

Yeah, yeah, for sure. And I think that’s for anybody, at least for, well, I don’t know. I go back and forth because that middle section when you were talking about not having a person to be able to go back and forth with, I think I probably do have people to go back and forth with. But when I think about, as I was reading this, in my family, it is very just normal to debate, but in, but debate in my family means something very different than debate in most families. It’s debate to hold your position until like the other person crumbles to the ground, right? So, oftentimes as I was reading this, I was thinking, I can’t go to somebody else in my family to with this because they will have an opposite position on this. And it would feel on almost not uncomfortable, but unsafe. And I want to talk about the difference because you point this out in the book.

And so that was a real challenge for me, that middle section almost, because I can take action. It’s uncomfortable sometimes for me to take action, but it’s not unsafe. It felt a little unsafe for me to have those discussions with family members though in that middle section. So I do think that I do wanna ask you that you define this in the book. I think it’s really important that the distinct difference between unsafe, and uncomfortable and I think this is something we get confused a lot.

Liza 

We totally get confused. So I’ll give you like a non -education example. So I mentioned, I just came back from the gym. I’m attempting to like be a better runner. And in order to be a better runner, I have to move past like my normal comfortable run, right? Like I have to run a little bit faster every time I’ve got to like increase the incline a little bit more. And I happen to use a particular app that is very popular in the world. And there’s an instructor who I really, really like because… she will say when I’m like getting ready to like reduce the speed or like reduce the incline, she’s like, stop, you can do this. It’s uncomfortable. You’re fine. You’re fine. You’re fine. She’ll just keep saying like, you’re fine. You’re fine. And in my head, I’m like, I’m not fine. But then before I realized it, like, she’s like, okay, three, two, one, drop your speed, drop your incline. And then I go, well look at that, I did it. So I want to mention that because I think it’s sometimes hard to talk about discomfort in conversations, but there’s like lots of other ways that we’re uncomfortable. Again, for me, it’s like running faster and lifting heavier. For other people, it’s learning a new language and like trying it out for the first time at a restaurant or with a friend or something. There’s lots of things that we do that don’t feel awesome. We don’t feel great. I might look silly. I mean, I don’t even, I don’t choose the treadmill in front of the mirrors, everyone, because I’m like, I know I look ridiculous, but like we’re just going for it. So,

I mention that because I feel like people can relate to that. There’s something that you’ve done. The first time you brought your kid to T -ball or the first time you showed up to a parent event and you didn’t know anybody. Like we do it all the time. Discomfort is something we need to get used to. I happen to, I’m a martial artist. I switched karate schools. I know nobody. I don’t know how it works. The first two weeks I came home crying.

And I was just like, nobody likes me. I don’t know anybody. I used to know everybody at the old karate school. Like this is so different. I had conversations with myself, like, I’m gonna quit. So I want you to know, I too sit in discomfort all the time. And I’ll even say I choose to put myself in discomfort because I need to know the difference between uncomfortable and unsafe. And so that’s like why I do that a lot. So unsafe means like,

you are being threatened. I mean, you’re, I mean, I hate to use like the word in the definition, but your actual safety is being compromised. And I fully will say, if you are unsafe, high tail it out of there. Like, do not be in that situation. I do think sometimes people stay in unsafe conditions because we’re like, we gaslight ourselves, like, I should be able to tough this out. Ugh, this should be fine. No, get out if it’s unsafe.

Liza 

I tell a story in chapter nine and I have very complicated feelings about the story and even telling it about a time when I was at a park and I encountered two young black teens who were driving and a white man was being very aggressive. And I’m constantly asking myself, was I unsafe? Because I did actually feel physically threatened or was I uncomfortable? As the chapter says, I chose the safety part. I got the heck out of there.

I have a lot of guilt about getting the heck out of there, because I left these boys to fend for themselves. But I think people inherently know the difference between unsafe, like my physical, emotional, mental, everything, safety is being threatened, get out of there, versus like, this does not feel great. I do not like this feeling. right. It’s giving me like the chills. And I think if we can build the habits of being in that like, and I’m like this, then that’s probably.

Right? We know that that’s progress. But to me, that’s the difference between unsafe. I do think sometimes people throw the word unsafe around as a way to get out of things that they probably could stay in longer. It’s like when I am about to turn the knob down on the speed and the instructor’s like, you got this, stay in it. You’re fine. You’re fine. I don’t think people always have that friend to go, you’re fine. This is awkward. It’s uncomfortable. I don’t like what’s happening either. But like,

I’m committed to you. I’m committed to me. We can do this and learn together. And I just think we’ve gotten to a point where it’s like, you said something mean, I’m out. And I think we just need to build better habits for staying in the conversation.

Susan 

Yeah, absolutely. And it’s hard. I mean, it’s really, really difficult. And I want to use that as a pivot into the next question, because I think this is where we’re headed, especially in education. And it’s the piece that outsiders of education don’t get. But it’s the one that most, this is the most common question that I get from educators. They are nervous about discussing identity in school.

Liza Talusan

It’s so hard.

Susan Riley 

because of the backlash of parents or community members that they’re gonna get. And some of that can be uncomfortable and some of it sometimes can be unsafe depending on how far some of those parents or community members go. So can you share your perspective on that piece and maybe some strategies that educators can use to address that challenge?

Liza 

Of course, yeah. So I’ll say it’s multi -pronged, right? It’s never just like A to B. There’s lots of wiggly squiggly things that happen. So I’ll say one piece of that is teachers will only be as brave as their principals and principals will only be as brave as their superintendents and the superintendents will only be as brave as the school committee, right? So there is an actual kind of hierarchical influence that occurs. So,

If I’m experiencing a teacher who’s in a kindergarten teacher who’s feeling very, very nervous, my first question is always, well, what does your principal think? And so on one hand, we have to gauge that piece. I do think, you know, if the person answers like my principal is not on board, then I would say, well, then we probably should have a really nuanced conversation around one, whether this is the right school for you, or two, what kind of conversations you should be having with your principal. And then three, how like risky do you want to be?

So notice I’m not going to that classroom and saying, you should do this. Like that’s not appropriate. We have to figure out context. The other thing that I would say is, and this is not going to be popular with teachers, but I’ve been in like 400 schools. So I’ll just say this part. I do think sometimes adults try to work out their issues with their students. I know, and it’s like super, I know someone right now is being like pause, rewind, record, but it’s true. Like I think,

Yeah, I think sometimes I’ve met teachers who have told me what they’re doing because they’re trying to like show off or be proud about their DEI work or their identity work. And honestly, I have a reaction where I go, no, like, what did you do? Because they’re, like I said, they’re trying to like work out their position with sixth graders. And I think we have to remember this work has to be age appropriate. I mean, I think that’s some of the fear of parents and outsiders is that we are having inappropriate conversations at grade levels. And so I would remind teachers, and listen, 99 .9999 % of the teachers are doing this, where they’re doing it age appropriately, right? So remember age appropriateness. And then the final, again, prong of this is I do a lot of parent workshops and I have found that parents, and I mean, I’m a parent too, are often really scared about not knowing things. Like.

I mean, I don’t know what happened in math curriculum, y ‘all, but like, I do not know how to do the math of my children. It freaks me out. Every time I did it, it was wrong. And my kids’ teachers, when they were younger, would be like, tell your mom not to be so helpful. Like, I just don’t know how to do it. And I think the same thing happens with this identity talk. So if you are a parent who’s kind of my age, 30s, 40s, 50s, whatever, we grew up at a time where it was emphasized to be colorblind in some of our communities or…

It was impolite to talk about issues of race or gender or sexual orientation. So if that’s us, and we know that this generation is much more comfortable with it, like incredibly comfortable, you now have this gap between what parents and caregivers experienced when they were in school and what children are experiencing, and they are way ahead of us. So the solution is making sure that you are bringing parents and caregivers along.

Their reaction tends to be because they are scared. Like, help them. I say that as a parent, help them, support them, understand that you might be doing similar lessons with parents and caregivers that you’re doing with your students. They are freaked out, they’re terrified. I have found when sometimes we’ve had parents if they know I’m coming and I’m doing a program and they’re kind of like irritated and I can’t believe you’re bringing her. And then we meet.

And I’m like, well, hey, I’d love to support you. What kind of questions? I’m not here to convince you or force you of things, but if you have questions, I’d love to kind of be in your pocket and help you out. And I think like that compassionate understanding that parents are sometimes worried that there’s a gap and we don’t always know what the support levels are contributes to the fear. So, I mean, those are, again, like three, also three strategies for how I would address this, but.

I do think a lot of it comes from fear, from the unknown, from lack of support, and then just making sure we’re doing things in age -appropriate ways. It’s just general teaching advice, isn’t it? It’s not even identity advice. Yeah.

Susan 

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. And I also I loved what you said about making sure we’re not working ourself out with the kids. I think sometimes I find that more with middle school, more than probably any other age group, just because I think there’s something special about middle school and particularly middle school teachers. But it’s such an odd age group in the first place. But in general, you know, as we’re with the kids all the time, but it’s, it’s, as you said, it’s uncomfortable sometimes for us to deal with it. And so until you figured it out for yourself, I wouldn’t start working on it with the kids until you yourself are comfortable. You yourself know your own identity and have worked through your, your own process, because if you can’t speak to your own identity and know yourself, then how can you help others? Right. and to, I’ll give another example.

Liza 

Yeah, build some knowledge.

Susan 

It’s taken a long time for me to be able to confidently be able to talk about my own identity and not feel uncomfortable in a room with others who don’t look like me. It has felt weird to come into a room and say, I am a white female. And to be okay with that in a room with people who don’t look like me and not feel some level of, I don’t know, like as people are judgment. And that feels weird. I don’t know why that feels weird. And it took a while for me to figure that out. But my daughter has no problem talking about this at all. My father the other night, out of nowhere, he was trying, God bless him. He’s an older generation. He was working, we were at an event and he happened to see someone playing the drums. And God bless him. My daughter was with us and he said, that oriental person over there. And my daughter just collapsed, I mean collapsed on herself. And I looked at her and I said, you can’t collapse because she was like, she looked at me and she’s like, I cannot believe he said that. I just she just and I said, you have to you have to teach him. He doesn’t know he and he’s going to embarrass himself. If he says it to someone else, so you have to teach him. And so she just looked at him and said, pop up. You cannot say that. That is not okay. And he just looked at her and he was so confused. He said, I didn’t understand. That’s a region of the world. And she said, no, it is not. That is what white people labeled it. And she just went into the entire dialogue of explaining why that is not OK. And he kind of looked at her and he’s like, I never thought of that. I never. Like, the conversation naturally evolved. And to your point, being able to teach and taking the opportunity to teach people who never, never have never had the opportunity to think of something else other than what they learned.

Liza 

Correct. Right. Right. Yeah. And I’ll just pick up on two things. So that last piece around, like, we have to teach them. I do think it’s also OK for people, especially of marginalized backgrounds, to be like, I’m so done teaching y ‘all. I don’t want to have to address that anymore. So that there has to be also space for that. And that and. That is how we’re going to get through this. If we engage with some level of compassion. I don’t know who to credit, but I was like watching TV the other day and someone said, what would it mean if you just assumed that people were like 10% right? Like that they’re not totally your opposition. Maybe there’s like a glimmer of truth in what they’re saying or what they believe. So if you approach a conversation with the belief that that person could be 10 % right, it opens up the doors just a little bit, right? Just a crack. The only thing I’ll also say, cause I know some teachers have said things like, Liza, I can’t talk about identity until I’ve mastered it for myself and I can’t teach it in the classroom. I just want to emphasize it’s also okay to learn along with your students. So especially in the younger grades, I’ve had amazing lower elementary teachers who have been introduced to a new book, for example, a book on like Native Americans. And they have said like, I was reading this, I was doing this read aloud Liza, and I didn’t even know that. And I said, well, what did you do next? Did you just pretend that you knew it? And some of them do. They’re like, I just kept going. And a couple of teachers have said, you know what, I actually stopped and say, class, I am learning something today. I did not know this about history. What do you think? And I was like, yes, that’s amazing. Because what did you just model? You modeled curiosity. And isn’t that what we’re supposed to be teaching in class? So it is OK if you don’t know everything about Native history in the world. It’s OK if you don’t know everything about busing and civil rights and…

You can also just have these catchphrases like, you know what? Isn’t that interesting? Golly, I did not know that. So cool. Like you don’t even have to make up a huge deal about it. So there are opportunities if you have not felt like you become an expert in an issue to also learn alongside your students. And that is beautiful modeling of teaching and learning.

Susan 

Absolutely, absolutely. Okay, so before we go, I want to just capture your, because you’re such a, you have so many things to share, and I could just go on forever. But there’s so many strategies that are built into this book, and I know that my audience would love to have just a couple of more. So what are some of your favorites? If you could pick your top two, what are your favorite two to share?

Liza 

Yes, so this is something that I embed in my own practice as well. There are lots of things we don’t know. Right, there’s lots of like communities we don’t know. So I take every summer and I pick a category and I devote my reading to that. So I am learning a lot more about the deaf community. It is not a community I have any closeness to, nobody in my family is deaf. There’s like a couple of distant connections who use ASL but it is absolutely not a community that I know about. So all of my books for the summer are like fiction, young adult books about deafness and ASL. It’s awesome. Like I had no clue. I might not encounter anyone who’s deaf in the future, but it’s just, yeah, I’m building some knowledge about it. As I’m reading it, I’m going, wow, as a hearing person, like I never, huh, like I never thought about that. It is making me so curious and I enjoy it. A couple of summers ago for me, it was about native and indigenous authors a couple of summers before that, obviously when everything was happening in 2020, I did certainly want to better understand the perspective from the black male perspective, which I don’t have. So I would say if you were interested for your summer reading, just grab a couple of books. They don’t have to be the history of the world, y ‘all. They can literally be a hundred page young adult fiction. Like go for it, right? Read some of that. And then the second thing I would say is just continue to ask yourself, so what does this mean?

So I am now reading these books around deaf culture and I have to, like, what does that mean for me? I realized that when I do presentations, I don’t always put closed captioning on. I almost never ask people like, will there be need for ASL interpreters? Like that’s not part of my contract. That’s not even part of like my writer or anything. And I’m realizing my action is I should probably put that in there to just make it more accessible. I never would have thought of that had I not read some of these books.

So figure out what it is that you wanna learn and be curious. And then for the follow -up question is just ask yourself, so what am I supposed to do about it? What does that mean? Yeah, those are the strategies.

Susan)

So good. Wonderful. Okay, so if there’s one thing that you would like all educators to know about identity consciousness, what would it be?

Liza 

That everyone has identity. We all have it. Whether or not you’ve like unmasked or revealed it, you have it. And for some of us, we don’t bring our personal identity into our classroom. So not everybody has pictures of their family on their desk. Not everybody likes to tell everybody their business about what they did on the weekends. That’s fine. But know that it still is with you. You still carry it even though you don’t talk about it.

So just operate from the perspective that everybody has identity and that it informs and impacts how we act and how we interact and see the world around us, but everybody has it.

Susan

Alright, where can people learn more about you and stay in touch?

Liza 

Sure, I think I’m pretty much the only Liza Talusan out there. So if you Google Liza Talusan, you’re gonna find my website, I’m on there. There’s a bunch of videos on there too. I tend to be speaking all around the country and internationally. So there’s usually open workshops that you can attend. And I run a couple of master classes if you’re interested in identity conscious facilitation, or even if you just need me in your pocket and you have some questions, feel free to reach out. It’s how we get better in this world.

Susan 

Fantastic and we will put links to all of that in the show notes for today. I said, thank you so much for being a part of the podcast today, I learned so much from you. I learned from so much from your book, but also from being a part of today Thank you so much for the gift of who you are and what you share

Liza

Thank you so much, great to be here.

Dr. Liza Talusan’s website

The Identity Conscious Educator on Amazon