A curriculum to build learning assistants' critical consciousness and racial noticing lens

Undergraduate learning assistants (LAs), as near-peer supports and educators who facilitate student-centered pedagogies, have the potential to transform STEM classrooms to be more equitable and just. However, LAs often receive little pedagogical training in equity and justice, especially training that frames racism and anti-racist work through a structural lens. Consequently, as they make sense of racial disparities in their disciplines and classrooms, LAs, like STEM faculty, draw on inaccurate color-evasive explanations instead of recognizing and challenging systemic barriers. This adversely impacts their equitable teaching practices, including their ability to notice and respond to racialized events and practices in their classes. By introducing LAs to frameworks of racial noticing and color-evasive racism, and by centering the experiences of marginalized students, our curriculum aims to provide LAs with tools to identify and challenge dominant narratives and racist events. It empowers LAs to view racialized social interactions not just as isolated events or the result of "a few bad actors," but as shaped by dominant societal narratives within a racially structured system. In doing so, it develops their ability to notice and challenge racialized events, making immediate and long-term changes to their teaching-developing their "racial noticing lens." We find that through this curriculum, LAs develop their critical consciousness, shifting from feeling overwhelmed and disengaged to grappling with tensions between their prior assumptions and new understandings of systemic inequities in STEM, and committing to transformative changes in their perspective and practices of equity. Thus, LAs begin their journeys as anti-racist STEM educators.