Return-Path: <nifl-povracelit@literacy.nifl.gov> Received: from literacy (localhost [127.0.0.1]) by literacy.nifl.gov (8.10.2/8.10.2) with SMTP id e9LImx907944; Sat, 21 Oct 2000 14:48:59 -0400 (EDT) Date: Sat, 21 Oct 2000 14:48:59 -0400 (EDT) Message-Id: <LAW2-F281CLjme2E8Hq00009018@hotmail.com> Errors-To: listowner@literacy.nifl.gov Reply-To: nifl-povracelit@literacy.nifl.gov Originator: nifl-povracelit@literacy.nifl.gov Sender: nifl-povracelit@literacy.nifl.gov Precedence: bulk From: "Eileen Eckert" <eileeneckert@hotmail.com> To: Multiple recipients of list <nifl-povracelit@literacy.nifl.gov> Subject: [NIFL-POVRACELIT:211] re: discussing racism X-Listprocessor-Version: 6.0c -- ListProcessor by Anastasios Kotsikonas Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed Status: O Content-Length: 9320 Lines: 139 Catherine, Thanks for your thought-provoking response. I appreciate being challenged to think through and either defend or revise my statements. For now, I have an initial response (one I'm sure will change over time) to the nine insights you enumerated in your response, keeping in mind your earlier post about the place of outcomes in adult and higher education. 1. Your statement: the instructor is already a part of the ethnic, socio-economic context within which and out of which the dialogue will take place. Unlike other course work, we cannot "bracket" ourselves. To try to is false. My response: What we can do is participate with our students in the process of naming our place in the ethnic, socio-economic context of the discussion. This requires that we be very aware of the power of our position, that we discuss the imbalance of power with our students, and that we deliberately share as much of that power as possible to become what Freire calls teacher-students along with our students, who become our students-teachers. The process is co-intentional; the teacher gives up the right to hold a grade over someone's head, and gives up the responsibility for "making" students learn. 2. Your statement: racism and all kinds of group biases have deeply set historical and psychological roots. It's not a matter of learning a skill. My response: I'm not sure what skill you are referring to. Gathering information, examining and reflecting on it, developing or learning the criteria upon which to base a judgment of its worth and validity, using those criteria to make a judgment, and to some extent, recognizing personal bias and reconciling that intellectual judgment with personal bias—these are skills that can be learned. I believe that they are usually taught implicitly, through immersion or indoctrination into a culture or discipline, and therefore they are rarely recognized or questioned, but I also believe that they can be made explicit and that to do so is necessary to education that is liberating rather than oppressive. 3. Your statement: teachers and students enter a dialogue with "flying assumptions" and tense questions about each other, depending on their own experience and ethnic background, and on how they perceive other's experience and background through that prism. My response: yes, I agree. The power of dialogue is to uncover those assumptions and challenge them. 4. Your statement: teachers and students enter a dialogue with fears and desires about "how I might sound," and about whether what I say may either "flag" me as the racist I'm not sure I'm not, or others may misinterpret me as a racist when I am not. My response: Again, I agree. In the beginning, the primary responsibility rests with the teacher to create an environment where it is safe to speak. This may mean starting with "safe" subjects or with speaking about things that are not too close to the bone. Jeff Burkhart referred to "Don't Be Afraid, Gringo." I have also used this book, which is written at about a 4th or 5th grade reading level but is definitely for adults, to introduce controversial and, for many, scary topics in a relatively safe way (for example, domestic violence, or the role(s) of religion in both liberation and oppression). As the teacher gives up sole power and responsibility and the students come to share power and responsibility, everyone becomes responsible for making the learning environment a place where it is possible to speak and to be challenged or challenge others in a way that does not destroy their ability or desire to keep participating in the dialogue. 5. Your statement: I may be entering a dialogue where others may be racist (sexist, etc.) against me, including the teacher who, regardless of her-his academic credentials, experience, references, or publications, if they are from the "dominant" culture, they probably don't know my and my group's experience. My grade may depend on that distinction. My response: If the teacher is unwilling or unable to share power with the students, to participate fully in the dialogue as a learner him- or herself, to listen and to accept/respect each student, and to **not** use a grade or other tool of power as a control mechanism, then the learning experience will not be productive. 6. Your statement: whether we are student or teacher, we cannot get a certificate, or be graded, on whether we are or are not racist, sexist, anti-religious--nor should we be able to. All we can say is that we have participated in a dialogue and perhaps written essays or journals about it. There goes funding. My response: Dialogue around race and oppression can be a theme or context within which other skills are learned. In the outcomes I posted, what is being assessed is not the particular position the student takes, but the abilities and skills s/he uses to get to that position and with which s/he defends it. You have referred in several postings to the listserv to students arriving at positions different from yours, but having demonstrated the skills and abilities you were teaching to get to their positions. I'm talking about the same thing. No, we do not evaluate someone else's level of bias or freedom from bias. We can evaluate the skills they have demonstrated in arriving at whatever position they take. 7 and 8. Your statement: the dialogue is extremely important because of its potential to provide positive results. These positive results, I would generally say, are the occurrence of insights or clusters of insights in a student (and the teacher) that (1) help him-her understand deeper and more about his-her own situation and historical context, and that of others; (2) help him-her become more self-reflective about such internal change as a matter of developed habit, (3) provide a new internal pivot of understanding from which new actions will now spontaneously flow--different and better from prior unreflective and uncritically inherited positions. these insights and clusters of insights may or may not happen depending on the amount of reflection and internal unraveling that needs to be done, and according to the attitude of the person towards openness to change--there is no guarantee that the questions raised in the dialogue will result in someone having life-changing insights. "Achievement" is person-specific and has more to do with their history and development than it does with learning a task. My response: The draft curriculum I propose is one step in a process, a small number of points along a continuum. Students will achieve different insights, and different kinds of insights, depending on their starting places, how they learn, how open they are, etc. 9. Your statement: often the results (of having life-changing insights where one's biases are challenged and begin to be dispelled) occur after a long time and in unison with some other historical intrusion in the person's settled assumptive life. The teacher (or the "outcomes" person) may not be able to collect data to show the dialogue has had profound results, even though those later profound results may not have occurred without the prior dialogue. If coursework and funding are tied to outcomes understood as they seem to be today, we may set ourselves up for missing deeply life-changing development. My response: if we think that the outcomes we list on a course syllabus are the only possible outcomes of learning, then we do set ourselves up to miss "deeply life-changing development." I am relatively new to outcomes-based education, but as I see it, when we define outcomes, we simply make explicit to students what we expect of them. No instructor walks into a classroom without expectations. Whether we say it or not, we know what constitutes an "A" or a "C," what is acceptable and what is not, what we consider success. By documenting outcomes and assessments, we let students know exactly what we expect. That does not mean that the stated outcomes are the only outcomes, or even the most important ones. More on this later. I am thinking this through as I write, and as I said, I appreciate the challenge to do so. One short comment on method: your statement about the power of reading rings true for me, but many of my students have never learned how to learn from books. Even if they can comprehend on a literal level, they often don't connect what they read with their experience. So while I feel this is a skill that they can develop as they explore issues of racism and oppression, and reading should definitiely be part of the learning process, I don't know that reading has the same revelatory power (YET) with ABE students that it does with college students who have had some introduction to and success with the culture of academia. Kathleen's ideas about art can be adapted to use with ESL students as well, as can creating collages from magazine and newspaper articles and photos, cartoons, etc. More on this later, too. Eileen _________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com. Share information about yourself, create your own public profile at http://profiles.msn.com.
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