BH&H

Community Gap – BH&H

In our small group, we discussed the section of Beyond Heroes & Holidays titled Anti-Racist Education: Pulling Together to Close the Gaps written by Enid Lee. In this section, she discusses the three gaps in academic performance: racial gap (the most talked about), individual gap, and community gap. While the first two gaps are legitimized in institutional learning, our group discussed the importance of closing the community gap. We felt that when we close the community gap, we will essentially close the other gaps.

The community gap is what robs a certain community of people from some of the basic rights they deserve: a good education, long healthy lives, and equal protection under the law. Things that were talked about was bridging the gap between community in the way that schools can move meetings to a common meeting place. Schools could survey what area most parents are coming from in order to attend school meetings and move the meeting to them (a community center of some kind). That way these parents aren’t taking two or three busses just to be able to see what their student and the school is up to. One of the sections that I found most intriguing was when Lee discusses a situation in which a teacher asks the class about where they would take a visitor to their community. Some students say that they would take the visitor to the mall, others say that they would take the visitor to a restaurant, and then one student said they would take the visitor to the museum. The teacher was enthused by this answer. This seems a bit irrational to think that there is one “right” answer for this prompt. The students were responding with their culture and then were essentially shut down. Learning about these students culture and incorporating it into our lessons is something that we should be doing as teachers.

Beyond Heroes + Holidays

Culture, racism, privilege, barriers, all of these topics have hit close to home for me.

Yesterday my group’s discussion centered around, “Teaching Whites about Racism”. The author was a white female teacher whom worked with preservice teachers in uncovering their own biases and slowly introducing questions that had her students question the institutional structure that promoted racist behaviors. I believe as a teacher it is really important to guide students to their own knowledge rather than tell. I myself have been striving (and will continue to) to develop a question-creating repertoire that can foster this type of powerful learning. Having students reflect on their own experiences as Professor Angela Lunda has us do for our cultural self study is an example of this type of guidance. Guiding someone to their own knowledge can reveal very powerful information to oneself. I myself called up my mother and began asking questions I never had asked before and reflected openly about my lack of connection to our Indian heritage (Subcontinent Asia Indian). As a young girl I rejected the connection due to the ignorance I faced in school from peers and even educators. I shared this story with my group:

When I was in Middle School, from 6th to 8th grade I was the only minority. By the end of my 8th grade year another girl of Indian descent had moved into the vicinity and was attending my Middle School. At lunch time we would have a news hour that would run for the classes waiting to go to the cafeteria. Schoolmates could come make announcements and it would be broadcasted to the entire school. Student government elections were going on, and this new young Indian girl was running for a position with the future 7th grade class. My teacher caught my eye and smiled at me in a weird knowing way. I was a lot surlier back then and responded with a pre-pubescent, “What?”. He responded, “Isn’t that your sister?”. A lot of thoughts went through my head, like “WT%” and “How can you think that? We have different last names and don’t look anything alike”, and most importantly the mantra I would create whenever I was around white people, “Oh we must be brown, we must be related!” I simply narrowed my eyes and said no. This man was my social studies teacher. I couldn’t imagine how he had come to such a position.

This story illustrates one in many examples from my life of inexperience, ignorance, and naivety. As we all enter into the teaching world, I hope it serves to illustrate the point that we all need to keep our heads and hearts open and be willing to learn alongside our students rather than make preconceived judgements that suit our biases.

{Photo: Shiva, god I was named after

Source: http://danielwamba.tumblr.com}

Beyond Heroes and Holidays- Jigsaw discussion

First of all I really enjoyed the forum of breaking down the text has a group- especially in our small groups. In our small groups, everyone had a chance to have their voice heard. It was the first time I truly heard certain cohorts articulate their thoughts on any subject matter let alone the heavy discourse of racism. By talking about these issues and our role within these shared experiences, we are walking on a path of much greater awareness. The 3 minute, 1 minute responses and “final word” was a great platform to truly listen in a respectful manner.

It was amazing how as an entire group we were able to break down a fairly weighty text in a short period of time. Individually reading the text took a few nights of head scratching, pondering and questioning a subject matter that is rather tricky and foreign to most of us- our own whiteness. As a group, I feel the concepts and the importance of understanding these concepts though uncomfortable (as it should be I learned) created a solid jumping off point to deconstruct and reconstruct the ever changing landscape of the classroom and our world in general.

Beyond Heroes

The highlight of our discussion revolved around how the past still affects the present. The best example of this that we have covered in class was the boarding schools. People are still around who went through that and some people still feel alienated either from western culture or their own because of their experiences. There are also still people who feel guilty, uncomfortable or defensive over what happened. We alot talked about how intercultural interactions would be so much simpler without all the history and past mistakes complicating the issues.

Everyone’s story is O.K.

We have been reading about and discussing some powerful and uncomfortable topics in our classes over the past week. It isn’t the first time I have been introduced to thinking and talking about things such as privilege and ‘isms’, but what strikes me as powerful is that we are discussing these difficult topics- as required by the State of Alaska. The fact that the State of Alaska recognizes that these conversations need to be had, deems them important- and believes that educators need to have spent time hearing classmates stories and thinking about things such as racism and privilege before teaching in a classroom, is powerful and I believe a step in the right direction. We have a long ways to go, but this seems a positive step.

In the section of reading that my group of four was assigned to dive deeper into today, one take-home learning for me as an educator was that ‘everyone’s story is O.K.’ It sounds simple, but through our own biases and perceptions, it is easy to forget that simple lesson. No matter how difficult a students life-story, how seemingly easy a story, how boring a student thinks their story is, or how challenging a particular personality or students story is for me to hear, all life stories and perspectives should be heard, validated and recognized. From listening comes understanding. From understanding comes tolerance. From tolerance comes transformation.

I have spent many years helping to facilitate study abroad programs for U.S. high school youth. If you don’t yet know that about me, it is time I put this in a blog– because it is something I am passionate about. One particular company I have worked for, which I believe does amazing work, has at its’ programatic goal getting groups of diverse U.S. students together into small groups (12 students) and then send them to a foreign country for the summer where they live with families. What is brilliant, to me, about this design is that the students meet up on almost a daily basis and become each others support group. Students from all over the U.S., with different languages, religions, colors, living arrangements and abilities begin to learn about and rely on other students– whom they may have never met or chosen to befriend without being put into this intense learning environment. I have had many amazing student transformations occur on these programs. But one sticks out. The learning came from a white male student that was from somewhere in the midwest. During our closing ceremony, when we were all given the time to say what we wanted and reflect on our 7 week experience together, he thanked the program and told me and the other students that he had been racist before this experience, and that after having spent time with our group, he now realized that. He was around 16 years old. Our trip had been the first time he had ever talked to someone with a different color skin than himself and the learning had been profound. I just wanted to share the story. His story is O.K.

Thank you for facilitating the space for these conversations, Angie. I still have and always will have a lot to learn.

Systems of Oppression vs. Cultures of Oppression – BH&H

Everyone can see Systems of Oppression. Whether it’s Slavery, or Jim Crow, or even arguably Domestic-Dependent Sovereignty (the basic legal framework that underlies all Native American Reservations in the U.S. and a true oxymoron), these were/are institutions of society. Agreed upon and sanctioned by the Powers That Be.

There are less of these around today (gerrymandering and restrictive voting practices notwithstanding) and we should rightly see that as progress. However, for people of privilege (like me) it’s harder to see Cultures of Oppression, because cultures don’t have offices staffed by bureaucrats who tend to their upkeep, they don’t issue rules and decisions and they aren’t officially sanctioned by the Powers That Be. Also, and just as importantly, cultures don’t have to affect all members of society to be real.

It’s hard for me to see Cultures of Oppression in America because of my cultural status, but I know that they are out there. Why? Because I occasionally hear disparaging or reductive comments aimed at certain cultural groups, or because my non-white friends let me in on their experiences. But these things are still almost abstract for me.

The one time I was really a viewer of this sort of thing was when my Tlingit friends and I entered a store in Sitka to ostensibly do some browsing, but it was actually a little demonstration they wanted to share with me about white on Tlingit racism in Sitka. Anyway, we all entered together, but the white shopkeeper pointedly only asked me if I needed any help, but then he started subtly following my Tlingit friends around the store while leaving me be – even though we all entered together. It was eye-opening.

I guess the only thing I can really do is reach out to my non-majority culture students by showing my interest in their cultures and at least trying to tie the curriculum into their worldview.

Our group today focused on how the Caucasian people need to find their identity before ultimately finding ways to teach without prejudice toward other races. In our group, we read about how 40 students took an undergraduate course focused on racism. There were 28 White students, 28 African-Americans, and 1 Latino. One interesting thing that I read was that they had a classroom exercise where students had to select an index card on which “McIntosh’s privileges” was written. Students were then asked to read the card aloud. White students were asked to read the card as it was written, while the other students were asked to say “not” before reading it. Any student was able to pass if they were uncomfortable. The purpose of this card game was to see how some might have more privileges than others. The purpose of this assignment, as the author noted, was to see the racism embedded which was previously invisible. It was certainly hard to read. But it gave me an idea of how people felt just a few decades ago.

After our group reflected on their thoughts on the book, we shifted toward our personal experiences with racism. I personally have not dealt with it, but I’ve heard and still hear stories from other people on how they were discriminated because of their race. I also hear about racism almost every day when I read news. It’s not an easy task to deal with racism. This book certainly inspires me to be careful on how I interact with people who might be less privileged than me. This book also offers different ideas on how we can teach students about racism in the future.