Everyone has prejudices. Some judgment or attitude, for or against, an idea, a person or a thing. Prejudice isn’t just about race, ethnicity or culture. Think conservative vs liberal. The student in your class who you give a high grade because she reminds you of your daughter. These attitudes develop over time. And are often based on folk beliefs, deeply held beliefs connected to customs and values. Prejudices can also be derived from personal experiences. It happened to me so I know. Prejudices are powerful. Everyone has them. Including me.
When I started teaching, I taught multicultural education, a course for in-service teachers seeking master’s degrees. This course was meant to prepare teachers to teach in diverse education settings in urban areas. Most teachers in the course expected to get a list of deeds and words they could deploy in the classroom to reduce prejudice and educational inequality. I remember one teacher said on the first day that he hoped the class would help him be less prejudice, less racist.
He was disappointed when I told him that what he wanted could not be taught. I couldn’t teach it anyway. I taught the class as a mix of history, ethics and cultural psychology, meant to foster self-awareness and attitudes that reduce prejudice. When I taught the course, there were four main goals: Reflective teaching; self- awareness; a research approach; and expanded knowledge of ethics and cultural psychology. I saw these goals as interrelated.
Reflective Teaching
The course began with an introduction to reflective teaching, the idea that teachers analyze their own teaching and deliberately think of ways to improve teaching and learning. Reflective teaching is a continuous process. It’s meta-teaching: the teacher thinking about himself teaching, talking and acting in the classroom. And deliberately seeking ways to improve what he does in the classroom.
“Reflective teaching is a key component in becoming more aware of one’s prejudices…”
Reflective teaching can be formal, like keeping a journal. Students in the class wrote a weekly reflection on the readings and how it may have influenced classroom practice. Reflection can also be informal, where teachers have discussions with other teachers or engage with new resources and make their own adjustments to ongoing acts and words in the classroom.
Reflective teaching is a key component in becoming more aware of one’s prejudices and changing one’s behaviors and talks. The will to change one’s view, reduce instances of prejudice or, be less racist, must come from inside. It’s something that you work on every day. You have to want to do it. Yes, a teacher or coach can guide your thinking by exposing you to ethics, pedagogy and instructional strategies, but you most of the work comes from you.
Self-awareness
Teachers need to become more aware of their own prejudices. And not feel ashamed for having them. I helped teachers to understand that prejudices are deeply embedded, not so easy to root out. Everyone has them. Yes, including peoples who traditionally face discrimination from dominant groups. Newsflash! Some dark skinned peoples find white skin abhorrent. The religious groups you consider to be pagan use the word ‘pagan’ to describe your religion. Prejudice goes both ways.
“Teach your own kind or teach the kind of students you want to teach. I mean it. You will be happier.”
It’s OK to be prejudice. You can be racist teacher. An elitist teacher. Anti-feminist. You can. I’m not kidding. Some students were aghast every time I said this. But it is the other side of the self-awareness coin that no one ever talks about. There is an underlying assumption that once you see your own prejudices, your hatreds, you’ll want to change them. But that’s a naïve notion. If you are perfectly fine with your prejudiced beliefs, keep them. If you are a teacher, there is a caveat. Teach your own kind or teach the kind of students you want to teach. I mean it. You will be happier. You will give of your best. You will be a better teacher for it. You like teaching all-male schools that follow Hindu doctrines. Please do. You like wealthy kids of Yoruba chiefs and government officials. Teach them.
I know this sounds crazy, but I will be a hypocrite if I said that all you need to do is have people read some ethics and review history and policy and Bam! …their prejudices will be cured. But that’s a lie. And anyone who tries to convince you otherwise probably has a cure-all potion that they sell in unmarked bottles from trunk of their car.
A research approach
It’s a cliché, but prejudice is often borne of ignorance. I encouraged teachers to research the socio-historical and economic history of the area where they taught. Find out about those new people who just moved into your neighborhood. Find out the history of the conservative party and what fuels their agenda. You don’t have to agree with them, but it might help you understand their point of view. The goal is to try to get at the facts behind beliefs that fuel prejudice. Find out how things came to be the way they are through policies and systematic changes over time.
“The goal is to try to get at the facts behind beliefs that fuel prejudice.”
For example, since I taught the course in New York, I had students read the history of education in New York and the U.S. as a whole (since teachers must understand the system they have inherited). We look at original documents in which the framers of the public education system set out the goals for mass schooling. We look at immigration. Language policies. The role of mass schooling in creating citizens. Eventually students begin to see that the debates about inequality and the rhetoric of prejudice has remained the same, only the nouns have changed. In the U.S., debates about the German language, Italian and Irish immigrants and Catholicism of the late 19th and 20th Centuries have become the Spanish language, Hispanic immigrants and Islam in the 20th and 21st Centuries.
We also look at how wage, tax and employment policies affect poverty and how poverty (or wealth) affects school. We look at the way economic trends affects school success and failure. And more. The idea is that I want students to get in the habit of finding out the root of things. Don’t just listen to the news or look at memes on Facebook to form an opinion about a country, a people or a belief system.
Ethics and Cultural Psychology
We read and discussed Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers by Kwame Anthony Appiah, essays that promote a flexible set of ethics for our growing interconnected world. Cosmopolitanism also argues that there are no quick fixes for our differences in seeing and understanding the world and that such differences cannot be easily crossed. Students often liked the approaches in this text, especially the idea that they didn’t need to discard their own beliefs.
Sometimes we read, Ryszard Kapuscinski’s The Other, a book of elegant essays on the place of non-Europeans in the contemporary world. We also read excerpts from Richard A. Shweder’s Why do Men Barbeque. Shweder explores cultural and ethnic differences in things like the way we express emotions, gender roles, and the way various cultures define right and wrong.
Teachers enjoyed Richard E. Nisbett’s The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently and Why. Nisbett argues that culture also affects behavior and the way we think. The reading list changed a bit each semester. I abandoned some reading and replaced them with texts from any contemporary event related to topics in class. For example, President Obama’s famous speech on race.
“These courses were also really difficult to teach. Emotions ran high. Passions would flare.”
Students either hated the course or loved it. Those who loved it wrote that it expanded their thinking and that it changed their approach to teaching. Those who hated it, wrote that they were teachers, not philosophers. They felt that the course should be confined to pedagogy and classroom instructional techniques that would help them to treat students equally. Some students said that since they taught the lower grades, they didn’t need to know about this stuff. Despite this, the discussions were lively and interesting. The reflection papers were also quite thoughtful.
These courses were also really difficult to teach. Emotions ran high. Passions would flare. As the teacher, I had to ‘hold everything and everyone together.’ Making sure everyone was ok. I did this mostly by listening and observing my students and having frank, open conversation. We had set up guidelines for creating a safe space and treating each other with respect on the first day. So disrespect and rudeness were not an issue. But it was still emotionally taxing to teach a course like this. But worth it in the end.
Happy Teaching. #heidiholder #redloheducation
