Groups advocate increasing Black teachers
By Asia Ashley, CNHI News
Sharif El-Mekki said increasing teacher diversity starts with motivating and engaging Black students in high school.
“For them to have such negative experiences and under oppressive conditions and then just want them to imagine themselves in leading the classroom, I think for some of them it is a challenge," El-Mekki said. "For some of them, they’re not experiencing educational justice so it's hard for them to see that teaching could be a form of activism, because they may not experience that and may not be what their lived experience in those seats."
His decision to become an educator came after graduating college when his Black male mentor said to him: “The purest form of activism was teaching Black children well.”
