In considering this Blog 3 task, Race, this blog 3There are many things that I can talk about through my various experiences on racism. To be honest, throughout this Unit 2, it was a painful process to remember various traumatic experiences in the past. But I think it was great opportunity for me that I was able to reconsider through the study of Unit 2 what kind of discrimination has happened to me so far, how do I digest it?, and how to transform this experience into education for the future.
As I wrote in Positionality, the racism I’ve received so far can be broadly divided into two categories.
The first is discrimination from people who don’t know me very well, mainly at school and in the community of acquaintances. The other is the discrimination I received from people I didn’t know on the street.
Conversely, I have never been discriminated against by anyone who knew me personally or who knew who I was.
Through these various experiences of discrimination, I thought that categorization is one of the starting points of racism.
Here, I would like to give an example of discrimination and power harassment that I received from a tutor when I participated in an exhibition event (a joint exhibition event in which several universities participated) when I was a student. The discrimination was due to first-time tutors who weren’t in my course. Her discrimination started from the beginning because she assumed that I couldn’t speak English because I was Asian.
During the presentation at the first briefing session, I met her for the first time, but as soon as I started speaking, she started asking questions in a blaming tone in front of everyone (other participants was never interrupted by her), and I was not allowed to give a proper presentation. I wasn’t on her course, so I met her for the first time at that time and hadn’t spoken to her before, so I didn’t understand until the end of the event why I was the only one to be blamed among all participant students.
And similar power harassment continued only against me until the end of the event. According to what I heard later, the tutor was originally a racist and always targeted Asians for power harassment. On the day of the event, he was severely warned by a teacher from another school who couldn’t stand it.
In summary, this tutor categorizes me as Asian and can’t speak English well, and furthermore (this is a guess I heard from someone), categorizes Asians as a submissive and non-verbal culture, and categorizes me as such a race. It seems that it has led to discrimination and power harassment.
In this way, all the racism I’ve received has come from being categorized. Therefore, I have tried to avoid categorizing and judging people as much as possible.
This time, reading “A Pedagogy of Social Justice Education” gave me an opportunity to reflect on the above experiences and the racism I have received, and think about many things. Among them, the following content was very helpful in thinking about the relationship between teachers and students.
– An ideal educational experience exists between a teacher and students rather than emanating from a teacher to students. A teacher needs to create experiences with, and not for, students, integrating their experiences and voices into the educational experience itself (Freire 2006).
In addition, Freire makes the following suggestions regarding the relationship between teachers and students.
– one way to move students toward freedom is to create an educational structure whereby both teachers and students engage in habitual, critical reflection, a model that takes into account their identities. (Freire 2006, 77)
Based on the above, Tapper describes the educational policy of an organization that adopts an educational theory based on Freire’s thought, investigated in this text, as follows.
– Teachers and facilitators are understood to be guiding, rather than leading, students through this process, assisting in steering the experience while not actually piloting it in a top-down, dictatorial manner, always using and reinforcing academic methods of critical thinking along the way. (Tapper 2013)
Through Tapper’s text above, I thought again that education should not be conducted top-down, but should be conducted in the context of equal communication between individuals. It is to say that the exchange of opinions from an equal position will become important.
Further reading of A Pedagogy of Social Justice Education also mentions treating students from the perspective of intersectionality, which was also covered in PGCert classes.
– Intersectionality is not reductionist but sophisticated and multiperspectival.
– each student is also understood to be a unique individual human being with a mixture of social identities, as well as all of the personality traits that she embodies. She has group identities of several kinds, as well as an individual identity. (Tapper 2013)
-This organization’s approach allows participants to include whichever identities they themselves choose, simultaneously allowing students to reclaim and redefine what they consider to be the meaning of the groups with which they identify (Patterson, Bigler, and Swann 2010) (Tapper 2013)
Through Tapper’s analysis, I think I was able to reconsider the relationship between teachers and students, and what teachers need to be careful about when playing a role in education. In other words, instead of categorizing individual identities as one, we assume that individuals are made up of various intersectional identities such as race, gender, nationality, class, etc., and pay respect to them and treat them equally. I felt the need to keep in mind communication.
<Bibliography>
T. Aaron. 2013. A Pedagogy of Social Justice Education: Social Identity Theory, Intersectionality, and Empowerment. Conflict Resolution Quarterly