• How has your upbringing/schooling shaped how you “read the world?” What biases and lenses do you bring to the classroom? How might we unlearn / work against these biases?
• Which “single stories” (see Chimamanda Adichie’s talk, viewed in lecture) were present in your own schooling? Whose truth mattered?

My upbringing was not varied from the traditional norm. I grew up white, heterosexual, able-bodied, and lower-middle class, as did most of my peers. Learning to read the world outside of these lenses has been a challenge; understanding my own privilege and learning to look at everything I can do through the lens of another is not always easy. It is difficult to consider what I take for granted may present an extreme challenge to others, right down to considering my own way of thinning and interpreting new information. For example, in the classroom, I did very well with linear thinking, while a classmate might have benefited from abstract thought. Learning to work against these biases is a challenge that can only be addressed through repeated exposure to new perspectives, and considering how someone who holds those other perspectives may be challenged in everyday situations that I take for granted as easy. For example, Kumashiro discusses the power of using literature to introduce the reader to new experiences, but warns that this can only touch the surface of breaking one’s own patterns of thinking, and can even reinforce certain biases held by the reader. Learning to work against these biases is a lifelong challenge.

My own learning was riddled with single stories, especially concerning race and ability. Similar to Adichie’s single story narrative of what constitutes an African child to someone in North America, here we had ideas of what constituted anyone from a different race than someone who is white. My learning focused around what white settlers have deemed important. I was not exposed to perspectives of different races or cultures. In fact, a single-story present in my learning centered around these ideas: that most people in Canada immigrated from another country, and Canada is an ethnic patchwork quilt who celebrates all different ethnicities. But this ignores Indigenous stories; the single story presented there is that they assimilated willingly into “Canadian culture”, although a more true interpretation is that they were forced out of their culture by white Europeans. Growing up, I did not understand that Indigenous perspectives are ignored and undermined in our learning, even when we discuss multicultural views, because in Canadian schools, Indigenous culture is taught as something of the past, something they used to have before colonization. 

Even in this ECS 203 experience, I have found it challenging to address and include perspectives that are different from what I have learned. The biggest challenge for me as a teacher will be to stop and consider how my lessons might perpetuate stereotypes or silence different perspectives.  

Written in response to:

Kumashiro. (2009) Chapter 7, Against Common Sense, pg. 71-79.

Adichie, Chimamanda. Ted Talk.