In this first reflection, I respond to a series of questions asked by the facilitators of my OFAR course; specifically, I share how I am actively implementing, revising, and adapting my teaching practice to incorporate different anti-racist teaching practices from the OFAR Professional Development course that I completed in November 2023. 

In this second reflection about how I am actively incorporating inclusive, and anti-racist teaching practices, I discuss a few classroom writing rituals to generate class discussions on the reading topics; specifically, the kinds of discussions students and I were having about language, literacy, culture, and communication, and our discussions about who has a right to dictate how we use language?  In this reflection, I also share how I challenge students to re-think what influences voice, perspective, and personal lived experiences, and using the critical reading questions I assign, students on their own wrote about the limitations (presented in writing questions and rationales of their questions) of Melzer's (2020) definition of a discourse community as it pertains to academic writing. After students on their own identified the limitations of what constitutes a discourse community, we discussed what might enrich 'academic writing'? Further, we also unpacked the myth of standard English, and I share a prompt of the first essay I assign students, in addition to my instructional video, where I unpack the prompt keeping in mind our class discussions. 

In this final OFAR reflection, I address the following as requested by our OFAR facilitators: 

• Describe or show one resource you introduced or an activity or practice that was adapted to specifically address antiracism, and please explain.

• Have you co-created content with students or have your students created any openly licensed content?

• What lessons have you learned that would be helpful to others embarking on this journey?

• How have you or how do you plan to share this experience with others on your campus? How have your colleagues reacted? Please be specific. 

In this narrative reflection you will read about WHY I wanted to implement an assignment that would allow students to discover HOW embodied solidarity is ENACTED and explore HOW oral-history stories have the potential to lead to a more inclusive democratic society. To scaffold students' learning, I modeled what solidarity is for my students, by asking Greg (a colleague) if I could interview him, and if he could interview me, to share aspects of our personal story, because as Brene Brown writes: "having the ability to embrace vulnerability "is a prerequisite for all of the daring leadership behaviors. Further, Brown writes, "if we cannot handle uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure in a way that aligns with our values and furthers our organizational goals, we can't lead." I hope my intentional teaching practices inspire other faculty to challenge their existing teaching practices, and interactional behaviors- to embrace their power and responsibility as educators to model the behaviors you expect from your students, to lead to a more just and fair society-and to understand the role discourse and 'stories' have in constructing what is true and not true about humans. And more importantly a message to the leaders already taking up space, and exercising their power in a ring-leader kind of way--you know, making the rules and sustaining those rules with no openness to learning from the people they are serving or supposedly 'leading'--who conflate what Academic Freedom Means, or what a Democratic Society is in action- I end with Brown's words: "stop choosing comfort over courage."