Equity Literacy

WHAT IS EQUITY LITERACY?

The Equity Literacy Institute web site equityliteracy.org contains a variety of free resources related to educational equity, including frameworks, handouts, and brief articles. Equity literacy is a comprehensive approach for creating and sustaining equitable schools.

The foundations of equity literacy are:

(1) a commitment to deepening individual and institutional understandings of how equity and inequity operate in organizations and societies, and

(2) the individual and institutional knowledge, skills, and will to vigilantly identify inequities, eliminate inequities, and actively cultivating equity.
At the individual level, when we embrace equity literacy we learn to become a threat to the existence of inequity and an active cultivator of equity in our spheres of influence.

Five Abilities of Equity Literacy

The knowledge and skills of equity literacy cultivate in individuals and institutions four equity abilities:

1. The ability to recognize even the subtlest biases and inequities,

2. The ability to respond skillfully and equitably to biases and inequities in the immediate term,

3. The ability to redress biases and inequities by understanding and addressing them at their institutional roots,

4. The ability to actively cultivate equity by applying an equity commitment to every decision, and

5. The ability to sustain equity efforts even in the face of discomfort or resistance.

Facilitator of Equity Literacy

Paul Gorski

Paul is the founder of the Equity Literacy Institute and EdChange. He has 25 years of experience helping educators, nonprofit workers, and others strengthen their equity efforts. He has worked with educators in 48 states and a dozen countries. He also is the research director of the Equity Literacy Institute, conducting and collaborating on research and other scholarship related to maximizing the transformative potential of equity efforts. Paul has published more than 70 articles and has written, co-written, or co-edited twelve books on various aspects of educational equity including Reaching and Teaching Students in Poverty: Strategies for Erasing the Opportunity Gap and Case Studies on Diversity and Social Justice Education (with Seema Pothini). Paul spent nine years on the board of directors of the National Association for Multicultural Education and five years on the board of the International Association for Intercultural Education. He earned a PhD in Educational Evaluation at the University of Virginia. He was a teacher educator at several universities for 15 years. He is also a father, a published poet, a black belt in Tae Kwon Do, and the biggest fan of Buster, his cat.

Resource

Detailed description of the four abilities of equity literacy, read our free printable handout, "Equity Literacy Definition and Abilities."

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