Teaching Bias in the Age of Charlottesville

                Like Oredola, Armstrong, and Wildman, the readings for this week were particularly beneficial in addressing how we, as educators, can enact change within our own classrooms, and how to do it responsibly. Many of the Dos and Don’ts and other guidelines seemed a bit like just common sense, but they were nevertheless useful. In the age of Charlottesville and Vegas, one can never take a bit of common sense for granted, especially when it comes to teaching these issues through the lenses of our biases. 

                One of the things I have been spending more time explicitly teaching is the idea of bias. I’ve worked on teaching students about all that goes into developing our individual biases and what makes us implicitly biased. I’ve reflected more this semester on how bias is unavoidable and closely connected to our culture, family, peers, education, and our powers & privileges (or lack thereof). I’ve met with greater success thus far in the classroom by working with bias early in the year to set the stage for meaningful discussion. Students have responded well, especially when examining the bias of others before being critical of their own (I use myself as the example first, modeling how to check your own bias without beating yourself up over it). Students have been working towards greater objectivity, trying to separate themselves from there bias, but I still want them to delve deeper. 

                What is more important than separating bias, at least in my opinion is merely recognizing it in ourselves and in others. As I teach, I remind my students to watch out for my bias. Even though I strive to be objective, I can’t help but allow some of my bias to seep into my instruction. I use myself as the example to help students practice the skill of recognizing bias. They are then encouraged to use that skill to check for bias when analyzing articles, non-fiction sources, our textbooks, and current events like Charlottesville and Vegas. We all need to separate ourselves from our biases when they lead us astray or when objectivity is necessary. Still, is it even possible (or necessary) to completely remove subjectivity from our real-world interactions? 

                I first found Barrett’s and Beard’s articles handy for creating checklists of dos and don’ts for addressing incendiary issues in class, but then began to realize that most good teachers in the 21^st century already do these things. Or do they? Based on the interactions I’ve had with colleagues and peers (and based on my own bias), it seems teachers already take the steps and precautions Barrett and Beard recommend. Don’t all teachers work to create safe spaces to promote meaningful discussion to help students work through controversial issues with the end goal of producing equity-minded critical thinkers?

Integrate!

                The big idea that Nikole Hannah-Jones tries to get across in the work she shares on “The Problem We All Live With” is that integration works, and it might just be the best school reform strategy to improve high poverty segregated districts. The major obstacles, outside of logistics and bureaucracy, stem from the prejudices and fears that fly when predominately white districts face the prospect of letting in non-white students. Perhaps the most unsettling part of the story came during the town hall meeting when the parents of the 80% white Francis Howell district spoke against the 96% black Normandy district’s students being “integrated” into their community. I felt that these students were being seen in the same light as many refugees are seen in the world today. 

                Each time refugees, like the Rohingya or Syrians, flee en masse to countries that provide sanctuary, it isn’t long before the citizens of those countries begin speaking out against letting people in. Similar sentiments are expressed each time black students get bussed into white schools: there’s an uproar with many of the white parents. If they can’t prevent the black kids from coming in, they’ll flee the district. When families try to escape the sinking ships of districts like Normandy, they are met with hostility and prejudice when they arrive on the shores of white districts. 

                The parents in the Francis Howell district had every right to be concerned with the influx of new students, as do citizens of countries with already brimming populations when tens of thousands of refugees arrive seeking aid, food, and shelter. Any school district would have reasonable concerns: What’s going to happen to class sizes? What’s this going to do to the budget? Do we need to hire more teachers? Unfortunately, the concerns expressed in FH, and often during refugee crises, are founded more on prejudice than logistics. In FH, the focus was on the “type” of students that were presumed to have extensive discliplinary records and caused the need for metal detectors and drug-sniffing dogs.

                The vitriolic responses of the FH parents were especially unsettling when cast against the enthusiasm of Normandy student Mah’Ria Pruitt-Martin. She and students like her were subjected to the generalizations and assumptions that Normandy students would bring only low scores, stabbings, drugs, and crime into the FH district’s schools. The privileges of the white districts of better scores, better teachers, and better funding make them desirable destinations to migrate to, but lead to some residents working to keep outsiders out so they can continue to enjoy those privileges for themselves. Some may say that it isn’t about race, that it’s not a racial issue, but the reality is that it is. The culture of power in FH and privilege allow people, like some of the speakers at the town hall meeting, to defensively take a step back and claim that it’s not a racial issue, it’s an education issue. If there’s one thing I’ve learned since the start of the semester, it’s that those two things always go hand-in-hand.

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.