W.I.S.E. EMPOWERMENT SERIES
Community College of Denver | Center for Special Programs
CONFLUENCE 109 | FRIDAY, JANUARY 30, 2015 | 11:00AM – 1:00PM
Dr. Cheryl Matias
Women, women of color, and motherscholars continue to lag behind men in occupying higher echelons within the professional, educational, and social world. A common rhetoric to explain this phenomenon is the “bootstraps mentality,” claiming that women simply need to “try harder.” Yet by doing so society unfairly renders social practices such as academic achievement as strictly an individual effort. That is not so. Educational systems continue to engage particular sects of society (often male, white, and economically privileged) while unfairly disadvantaging others (women, women of color, and motherscholars, in particular)
Through schooling practicing like Eurocentric & male-centric curricula, male-favored pedagogies, and institution-alized structures like racial and gendered tracking education continues to shut out the achievement of women. Needless to say, education is not designed to en-gage with us. As such, how do we engage in an educational system that has long refused to engage with us?
This interactive Q & A discussion unveils the facts about an unfair educational system while providing ways on how to empower ourselves to rise above.