Welcome our two new AIELOC Cultural Wealth and Lifelong Learning Practitioners to our team.
Nayoung Weaver is a College Counselor and AP Math teacher at an international school in Asia. As a “Third Culture Kid (TCK),” she is raising her second-generation TCKs while working to make mathematics education global, equitable, and inclusive to diverse learners.
Rama Ndiaye is a 3rd-grade teacher who has been working in the international school world for a few years. As an anti-racist educator, she strives to guide her students to actively challenge and critically examine the world they live in while helping them foster the interconnectedness that unites our shared humanity.

Cultural Wealth & Lifelong Learning Practitioner

Cultural wealth is defined as: “an array of knowledge, skills, strengths and experiences that are learned and shared by people of color and marginalized groups; the values and behaviors that are nurtured through culture work together to create a way of knowing and being” (Yosso, 2005).

The Association of International Educators and Leaders of Color (AIELOC) is devoted to amplifying the work of international educators and leaders of color with a focus on advocacy, learning, and research. We bring our personal experiences into “speaking up, learning, advocating for change, taking action in addressing racism and discrimination in the international
school ecosystem, amplifying the work of BIPOC, and researching topics of our own interest” (2022). In this community work, we stand on the efforts of our ancestors and commit to a lifelong practice of making a global impact by centering diversity, equity, inclusion, belonging, and anti-racism.

Our goal as Cultural Wealth and Lifelong Learning Practitioners is to move AIELOC’s work forward by holding space for those of us with cultural wealth. At times, this might mean that we gather to share and practice transformational skill sets. On other  occasions, we might remind each other of the strength of our cultural capital and the ways in which white supremacist systems function in order to stifle that acquired knowledge through various means of oppression. We choose to center People of Color and marginalized groups and guide each other to explore our capacity, capital, and community.

We are not counselors, mentors, or any other kind of positional leaders – we are simply educatorswho want to learn in community. Thank you for being in solidarity with us.

 

References

AIELOC. (2022). About Us. Association for International Educators and Leaders of Color.
Retrieved September 5, 2022, from http://aieloc.org/about-us/
Yosso, T. J. (2005). Whose culture has capital? A critical race theory discussion of Community
Cultural Wealth. Race, Ethnicity and Education, 8(1), pp. 69–91.
https://doi.org/10.1080/1361332052000341006