AED 812: Diversity

Although I read the articles after looking through the teaching resources, I noticed that there weren’t any teaching resources that specifically focused on racial diversity. They all dealt with gender and sexuality. It really is becoming more and more normalized to talk about people with different gender and sexual affiliations, even in schools. For example, my district made it policy that students may use the gendered bathroom of which they associate with. However, I think we totally avoid the topic of race, not just because of how uncomfortable it can be but because it’s easier to just not talk about it. We avoid the kinds of conversations that could actually begin to override the existing conceptions of race and and how we use this information to characterizing the people around us accordingly.

In “Through a Glass Darkly” by Landson-Billings (2012), she reviews, “The Chicago School scholars receive credit for breaking from the notion of racial biologism to assert strongly that race was socially constructed.” Ideas on race are perpetuated and passed down through generations from the past. In schools, we talk about slavery and social injustice as if it were simply in the past. This socially constructed thing infiltrates every aspect of our lives. Landson-Billings also references the exhibit “Race: Are we so Different?” as a renowned experience on race and racism through the scope of science and history. I think schools should be teaching and “debunking prevailing thinking about race” in ways that are not currently being addressed. As a part of the Pittsburgh Public School system, I know there are assumptions about the students and the neighborhood where I teach, but these assumptions come from the same ugly place a lot of the research Landson-Billings looked at in her dissertation. She said, “Our entire field was resting on a deficit paradigm that makes it difficult to uncouple the work we want to do from the centuries of work handed down from ideological positions that emerged from constitutive disciplines that insist on the inferiority of entire groups of people.” I want to see more curricula designed and made available to teachers who want to begin to explore and break down race in their classrooms using best practices. I want my “minority” students to feel empowered the same way the feminist curriculum has been designed for women and girls.

Examining my own practice, my administrators are pleased to see that I bring in culturally relevant artists and practices to engage my students. However, I do want to take it to the next level where Landson-Billings discusses sociopolitical consciousness as “the ability to take learning beyond the confines of the classroom using school knowledge and skills to identify, analyze, and solve real-world problems (2014).” With a population of students who need to talk about their real world issues (gun violence, educational inequity, gentrification, etc.), I am doing them a disservice by not opening the discussion up to the real topics on a more consistent basis. For the sake of time and focus, I only occasionally make this bridge and would like to push myself to start to make these connections more for the enrichment of myself and my students. Paris (2012) pushes us further by saying that we must preserve the multitudes of diversity among our students by acknowledging and teaching their experiences; he states, “This research and the pedagogical, curricular, and teacher learning innovations it forwards is interested not in relevance or responsiveness, but in sustaining and extending the richness of our pluralist society.”

Of the all of the resources I examined, my favorite ones were the “Killing us Softly” and “Deconstructing a Video Advertisement.” Advertising is so normalized to our kids; they see and watch them constantly even in between Youtube videos or on the side bar pop-ups; even as adults, we often view things with no critical lense. The curricula not only provides you with thoughtful questioning, it is really teaching students good analytical processes for taking in information and conversing in a state of active listening and non-judgement. I also was thrilled to come across the Feminist Art Project; I signed up and investigates “Women on the Rise!” to find some of my favorite female artists. I am excited to incorporate more women into my teaching as the art world is male dominant; their conceptual messages in their artwork would make viable segues to more exciting discussions on the real world issues associated with them.

References

Ladson-Billings, Gloria (2014). Culturally Relevant Pedagogy 2.0: a.k.a. the Remix. Harvard Educational Review, 84(1), 74-84.

Ladson-Billings, Gloria (2012). Through a glass darkly: The persistence of race in education research and scholarship. Educational Researcher, 42(4), 115–20.

Paris, D. (2012). Culturally sustaining pedagogy: A needed change in stance, terminology, and practice. Educational Researcher, 41(3), 93–97.