Читать книгу Leading Equity - Sheldon L. Eakins - Страница 27

The journey to fostering an equitable learning environment requires you to examine your own assumptions, biases, and positioning. Start with looking into understanding your own cultural identity. Self-reflection helps establish a method of internal investigation into why you became an educator and what the values are that you have for your students. After a deep reflection on your own perceived identity and assumptions, consider taking the Implicit Association Test (IAT) at https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/education.html. The IAT measures attitudes and beliefs that people may be unwilling or unable to report. It may be difficult, but we must be able to see what experiences contributed to our current view of the world.

Always remember that everyone's experiences are different.

Here are some questions to ask yourself:

 Who am I as an educator and as a cultural being?

 What are my assumptions, and what are my beliefs?

 How do those beliefs and assumptions impact the way I view people who are different than me or the same as me? How do those beliefs and assumptions influence the way I interact with students, families, and their communities?

If you want to create a safe and productive environment, use these reflection questions to consider how effectively your current beliefs impact equity in your school. Keep in mind that self-reflection is an ongoing learning process of self-awareness and self-identity. Identify at least one accountability partner to help you with recognizing some areas in which you can focus on your teaching methods. The knowledge that you have about yourself informs what you believe and what you do. Furthermore, your behaviors and the things you do in the classroom inform what students believe about themselves and each other.

We all have biases, and we make judgments about others. Some of the biases are racially based on stereotypes and result from a lack of understanding of groups and cultures. It's okay to have biases because they are a natural part of who we are. The key is to recognize those biases and reflect on how to overcome them to establish a learning environment in which you have high expectations for all students regardless of your perceived knowledge of their abilities and backgrounds.

Keep in mind that the information you receive about groups of people because of how they are represented or not represented in the news, media, and books influences all of us. From a teacher's perspective, that is part of the society that is inundated with generic messages about groups of people; those messages tend to be most harmful to students of color.

Again, develop self-awareness of your biases toward your students and work to overcome them. Do not view a student's abilities from a deficit lens or associate students with labels (stereotypes, socioeconomic status, gender, or race). Those terms are labels that society uses to tell you a student is incapable of meeting high standards. Instead, view your students' backgrounds, culture, and abilities as assets to help them thrive in their learning.