[MUSIC] "Celebrating difference". I'm going to start with the hidden curriculum, and to talk about when we teach our formal curriculum how every learner in our class is different in some way. And I'm going to talk about the various social identities all these learners come in with. The various experiences and the various expectations that they come into the class with. But as a teacher, you come in with a number of social identities yourself. You may carry a particular racial identity; a particular sexual orientation; you might be able-bodied or differently abled; you might come from a pro-working-class background; you may come from a wealthy class; you may identify as heterosexual, gay, lesbian, or bisexual; you may be Christian, a Hindu, Muslim. So, you come with multiple identities - with multiple assumptions, with multiple stereotypes and misinformation that you've learned about groups, about yourself - and all of this comes into the classroom, and plays as part of your hidden curriculum, in terms of, the assumptions you may make about the learners in your class based on the social identities you may hold or the learnings you have. So, for this session we're going to be talking about prejudice and discrimination. And I spoke a little bit about social identity, because that is crucial or critical to how we understand prejudice, and discrimination. I want to take you back a few years ago, or maybe in some cases, many, many years ago. Can you think about an early experience in your life, an experience when you were not older than six, when you realized you were different. And the difference could have been; you could have been racially different; or you felt you were different on the basis of gender; or body shape; or that you were poor in a very wealthy community; or you might have been of a different religion. Can you think about that experience - what was it like? Who is it that made you feel different? How did you feel? Did you tell anybody about it? Now, think about that experience - what messages did you learn about difference? Now, I don't want to make assumptions about your experience. But in my experience, when I teach this lesson to my undergraduate students, they often talk about how hurt they were during that experience and how emotional, and how painful it was. From my student's experience and my experience with teaching that I can conclude that our first experience of difference is that we see difference as something to be ridiculed; to be devalued as not important; sometimes to be ashamed of. Now, we can understand how we carry that experience much later in our lives. When everyone is telling us we need to celebrate difference and we need to value difference, and yet, the very early experiences, and many of the experience throughout our lives has been something of the way difference is to be ridiculed and to be laughed at. So, I'll talk a little bit about race today. And while I'm talking about race and gender, it's also about impressions about everything; around people who are differently abled; or heterosexism; people who are gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender; or classism, where people are discriminated on the basis of being poor or working-class. But with race and racism, and very briefly, I want to talk about how race and racism, or how racial identities have privilege in your classroom. Let's just take an example about, what are some of the race privileges in your school or in your classroom? Do you privilege white children more than children of color? In terms of prescribing textbooks, or books that deal with literature, who are the writers? Are they Indian? Are they writers from Africa? Or are they largely from Europe, and America, who are white? I do this example with my students every time I teach about race: I ask my undergraduate students to close their eyes and to think about what a professor would look like. They all get very excited, and they start to tell me range of lists. "Oh yes, he'd be wearing a checkered coat." or, "He would be wearing a bow tie. He'd be wearing glasses." Then, of course, when they start to go into the social identity they will talk and say he would be white, he would have grey or he would have piercing, blue eyes, or sometimes he would look like the KFC man. The lists generated largely points to the fact hat the professor would be - "he", "he", "he", - a man. In most cases, he is able bodied, but in almost all the cases he's also white. That's not just misinformation of the students, they would have picked this up from movies. Think about the movies you have watched: always the professor is depicted as a white, bearded, gray-piercing-eyes, bow-tie-wearing professor. Of course, I have to remind my students: That in front of them There is standing a professor, who looks nothing like the KFC man, who is not wearing a bow tie but is also a professor. So, the messages we listen to can also be racist. What are the messages you've learned about race? And how do you carry those into the class or the misinformations? In the same way, look at the report from UNESCO in 2008 where it talks about how the increase of access for young women to higher education. And that's wonderful to see that happen, but at the same time, one also has to be pay attention to the large number of woman teachers in schools, but the even larger number of male principals. So, how does one reconcile that? And here we can get a good example of how male privilege operates in our society. Think about your school. What are the number of woman teachers? Who is the principal? Who are the leaders of education in your country, in your region or in your institution? Now, your own identity, let's pay a little of our attention to that. And if you remember Professor Jansen in my previous session where I spoke about starting with the self. What language do you speak? Think about what languages are spoken in your school. What language do you privilege in your classroom? What is your gender? Are you a man, a woman? When you teach do you speak and teach more to boys in your class? It may happen unconsciously, and you may not know that. Do you want to think about that? What are your hobbies? Where did you grow up? Did you grow up outside the country you're teaching in at the moment? What is your religion? What are the religions of the learners in your class, or of your peers? What job do you do? Let's think about your identify a little bit more critically. What are the most important things from your identity? Think about what labels apply to you. Do you define yourself, maybe, in terms of your social identity, as a Christian? As a man? As somebody who is African? Or is able-bodied? What are the identity labels you'd use to describe yourself? You may also describe yourself as a teacher, as somebody who goes to church, as somebody who loves soccer. So, the identity label is how you describe yourself. Now, identity. And most of my work in identity, my own understanding of identity, on many ways, it's storied. You can tell multiple stories and narratives of what it means to be a black woman, for instance. Another part of our identity's also about emotions. I recall, when I teach about gender, how young girls are taught very early that they need to be contained within the house, that they need to play with dolls, that they need to play with tea sets. But most of the time they're sad with those stories because they want to be outside, playing and running around with the boys. So, in some ways our identities are emotional but also they're relational. Girls in relation to being boys; black in terms of relational to being white. So, our identities are also caught up in relation to the other. And of course, our identities are all contextual. Our identities don't remain the same: they change, they shift. At some times, at some spaces and some places, we're are very aware of our gender identity. In some spaces we're very aware of our racial identities. I want you to think about the times when you are most aware of the certain identities that you carry. But also, how identities in different contexts and situations differ, how they shift, and how they change. Think about age: when we were very young, we had an identity around our age, which was that we were very young. But as we grow older, we have a middle age identity, and an old age identity - and each one of those identity stages come with different privileges and access points. Of course, most important for us, is to have a self awareness of our identities. Who am I? What are the identities I carry? And how do I communicate those and understand who the learners are in my class and the identities that they carry? How would I describe my one identity as a teacher? As a man or woman? As a family member? And here you could be a mother or a father, or you could be a son or daughter. As a community member? But also, how do you reconcile these identities and make sense of your identity as a teacher in a school? As a teacher when you go home? Or as a teacher when you're walking in the town, or sitting in a church, or another place of worship? There's a change in different contexts. What about the relationships? How do the people relate to you as a teacher within the school? Or, as it relates to you as a teacher within the town? Now, good questions to ask yourself is: how might I help my students to think about their identity? Their identity as learners? The influences on their feeling of self? And here you can talk about their social identities, their personal identities. And the different identities they assume with their teachers, with their family, with their peers, and the people they know in their contexts, such as the town, their churches or their places of worship. [MUSIC]
