Heather's 3 Essentials (a work in progress!)

Thinking about ways to integrate anti-bias into the curriculum, it is hard to select just three essentials to stand behind! We came up with a great list of essentials as a class, and reading the blogs already written by the cohort, I see even more great ideas about how to acknowledge and fight bias. This reminds me of the Classroom Map activity. There are so many great ideas to incorporate into a great classroom, it’s hard to fit them all in! Creating a teaching philosophy is a process. Thank you Zalika for emphasizing that! That being said, here are my three essentials that I cannot live without when working towards social justice:

1. Knowledge comes from people who don’t look like us or talk like us.
This is so important because many of us have come from education institutions where the professors and authors of our books are from the dominant culture. Lindsey had a similar message in her blog, where she quoted the storyteller Will Hornyak from our art class today. He said in storytelling and folk tales, there is this often-forgotten message that everybody has wisdom, and be open to hearing that wisdom no matter the situation or source. Be open and ready for that wisdom, especially from people who are from different backgrounds than yourself.

2. Every person is an expert in his or her life.
This message came from last week's Delpit reading. It is so important to understand the context and circumstances of someone else’s life. Go into your relationships with the understanding that they know their own life. No college or master’s degree makes you more of an expert on what that person wants or needs. You can only understand where you come from. Elicia made a really good point in class last week that stuck with me. Ask your students, “Who are you?” not “Who are your people?” Each person is unique. This person might have parts of their group culture attached to them, but they also have their own personal culture, and can only speak for him or herself. This leads me to my last essential:

3. Realize that there’s more to people than you know.
You can ask a person about who they are and where they come from, but you may never truly know the whole person. You can learn new things about that person every day. It would be a mistake to think that you have a person all figured out. I remember telling somebody, I know a sliver of you, from this context, from this place, and I want to know more. Be open to the knowledge that every human is complex, and there is always more to learn. We are all interesting and different, and that's something wonderful.