Shayla Reese Griffin, an expert in the field of diversity and education, will deliver a lecture titled “Race and Education” for the annual Fall Forum hosted by Dickinson’s chapter of Kappa Delta Pi, the national educational honor society. Griffin’s talk will be held on Tuesday, Nov. 17 at 7 p.m. in ATS.

A small group discussion with Griffin will be held from 4 to 5 p.m. in the HUB side-rooms 204 and 205. At 7 p.m. the main forum talk will be held in ATS. The series of events will conclude with a student-led brown bag lunch discussion on Nov. 19 from 12 to 1 p.m. in HUB side-rooms 201 and 202.

Olivia Calcaterra ’16 is the chair of the Fall Forum Committee, and said “the KDP Fall Forum is an event designed to bring a speaker to campus who is doing research or work related to educational issues.”

Griffin is the author of Those Kids, Our Schools: Race and Reform in an American High School. As stated in her book, Griffin is “the diversity and school culture consultant for the Washtenaw (Michigan) Intermediate School District and director of Creating Culturally Proficient Communities, a five-year initiative to improve racial and economic justice in Ypsilanti [Michigan] Community Schools.”According to KDP secretary Giulia Pagano ’17, Griffin has experience in dialogue facilitation, diversity training and social justice education. She has worked with high school students, college students and hundreds of K-12 teachers around issues of race, class, gender and sexual orientation, and consults with a number of nonprofit organizations on issues of social justice.

Griffin has taught courses on race, social justice, and diversity at the University of Michigan and is the recipient of a number of research grants. She received her PhD and MSW from the joint program in Social Work and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor.

Calcaterra says Griffin was chosen as speaker because she is “a professional facilitator of dialogue,” especially in issues of race.

“[Griffin] speaks a lot about… the surface level issues of integration, but also what goes beyond deeper,” Calcaterra said. “Even though a school might be integrated, there still are a lot of deep-rooted issues that need to be addressed.”

Calcaterra hopes that the lecture will offer a timely continuation of conversations about race and inclusivity on Dickinson’s campus.

“In the past on campus we’ve had a lot of dialogue [and] controversy about racism on campus, and we thought [this forum] would be a great way to in a productive and academic way have a discussion about race, education, how those two are related and how we can be productive in that space,” she said.