Class Presentations
People who speak in metaphors should shampoo my crotch.
- Jack Nicholson in as good as it gets
As an end of year assignment for my school and society class (which i loved- the most challenging class in my program by far) my prof asked that we each make a “brick” towards “building” an equitable classroom. The brick should be decorated/designed to reflect our teaching philosophies and how we plan to make our classroom inclusive. a little hokey, i know, but whatever, i cut and pasted my teaching vision onto a box.
Then we presented them in class and after 4 months of careful in-depth examination of inequity in the classroom, i was blown away at the ridiculous amount of bullshitting and trite reflections which at best were weak platitudes and at worst- misguided and harmful views. A sample:
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- i glued all these buttons on my box. They’re different shapes, sizes and colours, just like the diversity of abilities and identities of my students in the classroom.
- my brick is a garden. i have seeds, that represent students and the different flowers that grow are like the diversity of abilities and identities of my students in the classroom. Some of them need more water, but some of them need more sunlight.. just like some are more visual learners and others might need more one-on-one attention. I also added a lady bug. the lady bug represents equity. because lady bugs eat aphids, which eat plants. and aphids represent exclusion. so with equity, we’ll have no exclusion and the flowers, i mean students, won’t die.
- my brick is also a garden. i have seeds, but they represent knowledge and how we can help that knowledge grow. and these are tools, which represent equity and inclusion.
- my brick is also a garden. i have seeds and tools too.
- my brick is actually a banner with the word welcome written in different languages. The different languages show the diversity of the classroom.
- my brick is a ring of lightbulbs. the different shapes and sizes of the lightbulbs show the diversity of the class. and if one of them doesn’t light up, then none of them do.. which represents my idea of inclusion.
- my brick is a meal. i have steak for north america, sushi for asia, caprese salad for europe, morrocan olives for africa and brazilian tea for south america. this represents the diversity of the classroom. insert cooking metaphors here (students are ingredients, teacher is chef..some people like their steak medium, some like it well done, students might take different amounts of time to learn).
- my brick is a scale made out of rulers, paper clips and textbooks. I used rulers because there are certain “measures” we have to take to ensure equity. paper clips because they hold things together and inclusion keeps everyone together.
- i tried to include all types of identity here on my brick: age, religion, ethnicity, ability, gender. all of them are represented so everyone’s included.
you’d think after 4 months of class we would have moved beyond, “there’s diversity in our classrooms.” and a person’s identity isn’t solely determined by those identifiers which we so often use to marginalize and discriminate individuals: class, age, religion, ethnicity, ability and gender. That’s going back to identifying P as “The Nigerian” while the rest of us are given the privilege of being perceived as complete individuals. i dunno. maybe i’m not being fair. but i thought it was mostly a bunch of hooey.