Woodring College of Education

As a person of color, I found my experience in the Woodring teaching program to be traumatic and racist. Washington State has one of the lowest retention rates of people of color and overall teachers of color in the nation. The culture of this program is to protect the white fragility of it's overwhelmingly white staff and students over the challenging and dismantling of racist power dynamics within schools and America. I have heard racist comments from students in this program with alarming frequency about how white people are genetically superior to brown or black people, or how white culture is superior to other cultures. It is deeply saddening to me to have graduated hoping to go into social justice through schools, only to learn that our teaching profession is incredibly racist and discriminatory, and completely unaware of the difference in their experience with school as white people compared to people of color. Attending this school was a soul crushing experience that frankly caused me to lose all faith in white American teachers altogether.
7 years ago (24-08-2017)

I am angry and hurt by my experience at this college. As a POC, I can't think of a time I felt as silenced as I did within Woodring. Being staffed almost entirely by white teachers and students, POC end up having to silence themselves or risk being labeled 'racist' or attacked for making the class 'uncomfortable.' I have a degree in LLC from this program, but all it means to me now is that I let white people yell at me for three years. Don't bother bringing concerns of racism to the head of the LLC program, unless you want to have another white male use his position of authority to tell POC's how we can't possibly understand racism ourselves. I feel like I lost a lot of my identity and sense of self trying to survive this program. I went into this program hoping to learn how to make schools and education more accessible to people of color and other marginalized groups. After graduating, I had to unteach myself many of the racist lessons and messages that I internalized from this college, and am still working to regain a voice I feel was threatened out of me by this program. I would say attending Woodring was an awful choice for my well being and education and probably one of the greatest regrets of my life.
8 years ago (15-05-2017)