Sometimes We Need it Explained Like We're Five.

To be perfectly honest, Armstrong and Wildman’s article, unlike much of what we have read so far this semester, was difficult for me to connect with. I’m thinking it was a mix of the highfalutin language and (admittedly) waiting until Monday evening for a perusal of a very complex text; but as I was reading through, I kept coming back to an old adage: “You don’t understand something unless you can explain it simply.” I found myself wanting, as a reader (and educator who wanted the golden nugget of information to incorporate into my classroom instruction), that simple explanation of how “colorblindness is the new racism” and how to use the “antidote” of “Color Insight” to solve our problems. I was left with this feeling until I read through Kevin Roose’s article on Black Lives Matter (more specifically, GreekAesthete’s ELI5 post).  

 

I don’t think that there is ever a simple explanation, so we need Armstrong and Wildman to bring out the big guns and expand our lexicons by sending us to the dictionary to understand how multiculturalism and diversity studies are vulnerable to “corporate usurpation” and “over-particularization” (68). Despite the inaccessibility of much of the language, there are several merits to the article. Unlike Johnson and Delpit, Armstrong and Wildman provide meaningful and practical exercises to apply to the classroom to help students move towards color insight. The “racial observation exercise”, for example, is an excellent opportunity for students to be mindful, reflective, and productive observers (69). I think it might be a challenge to modify the exercise for a high school class, especially for, say, my classroom with a highly-structured special education setting, but it’s refreshing to get practical ideas for instruction. 

As with everything we have covered in class, I am constantly working towards incorporating it into my classroom to make me a better educator and my students more critical and reflective learners. While Armstrong and Wildman’s “dynamic postmodern Koosh ball” metaphor might not meet the needs of my group of learners, the ideas behind Reddit’s Explain Like I'm 5 do. Much of Reddit is NSFW or school, but there are many valid, applicable ideas that can be incorporated into and modified for class. If you’re not familiar with Reddit and its various subreddits, there are endless topic boards you can subscribe to follow. Many are unseemly (like much of The Internet in general), but others promote intellectual and informative discourse, such as ELI5 and TIL. ELI5 calls upon Redditors who have a comprehensive-enough understanding of a topic to explain it as if their audience were five years old. Every educator who has set foot in front of a classroom of young adults has found him or herself having to explain a concept to a group IN THE SIMPLEST TERMS POSSIBLE because for whatever reason (e.g. it’s Monday morning, they don’t care right now, they think you’re speaking a foreign language, etc.) it’s just not clicking. Much of Armstrong and Wildman didn’t click for me. Maybe I’m unwillingly and unwittingly (or “untwittingly”... wait for it...) falling into the mindset that information isn’t important unless it’s condensable into 140 characters or less. There is no way to boil down or "Twitterize" racism, colorblindness, and privilege. Still, I think about the ways we can affect the most change, both with our students and our peers, and there’s definitely merit in both the exhaustive and condensed responses.