I have discussed the need for self-reflection and self-education
before any effective action can be taken to end inequalities in our schools and
really our world. Angela Valenzuela’s essay “Uncovering Internalized Oppression”
gives insight into how this self-work translates into practical skills within
our classrooms.
Inequalities left unaddressed in our schools and society
manifest themselves in many ways. Valenzuela focuses on one of these
manifestations in which a person of color leaves “soul wounds” on another
person of color by inflicting pain onto them through the use of negative
stereotypes created by the dominant (white, affluent, male) group. This is not simply when one child picks on
another, it goes much deeper than that simple viewing. It shows that the child
has already started to internalize the oppressions that they experience.
Unfortunately, most educators do no recognize this soul wounding as any more
than kids being kids not getting along. This obliviousness is precisely what
Valenzuela hopes to counter in her essay.
Valenzuela calls teachers “first to educate ourselves about
internalized racism” requiring us to know how racism exists in society now and
historically. It is only after this step that we can even recognize when this
playground banter is in reality soul wounding and in reality there is a child
unable to deal with the pain they unfairly have because of the oppression
imposed by society.
It is not only our job to help our students deal with their
soul wounds on an individual level because then we leave them living in a world
where the cycle of soul wounding continues. This is not the life I want for my
students. To avoid this cycle, we must actively pursue ways to change policies
that force our students to reject their culture because the dominant one is
superior. These policies are not hard to find once you have done the self-work
to recognize them and many can be addressed in ones own individual school.
Valenzuela gives an honest example of soul wounding where
she now wishes a teacher had stepped in to stop what was occurring. It was she
and a friend, Norma who inflicted pain onto another girl named Jovita. They
ridiculed Jovita’s clothing, makeup, and even her accent. Ridiculing that ultimately
led to a physical altercation. After Valenzuela’s own study of racism, sexism,
and classism, she was able to reflect on the experience in the following way:
“Jovita seemed to symbolize all that Norma wanted to expunge
from her own sense of self. While Mexican Americans like Norma and me also
spoke Spanish at home and English at school, we regularly distinguished between
ourselves, as Mexican Americans, and Mexican immigrants…we tended to view the
less Anglicized immigrants among us as inferior distant cousins or to ignore
their existence altogether.”
That is exactly the type of experience I desperately want my
students to avoid. I strive to give my students a different experience in my
classroom. However, you cannot passively wait for situations to arise to
intervene. While recognizing and
addressing an issue in the moment is important, we want to be more proactive
and stop the soul wounding before they even occur.
Last year I spent the first semester passively waiting for
situations that I knew would occur. I had equipped myself with all sorts of
ways to handle these inevitable situations. For example, I had a plan for when
I heard a student use the word “gay”. I had a plan for when I heard one female
criticize another. I had a plan for when I heard a child use the “n” word. I
had lots of plans. At the end of the semester I had rarely come
across instances to put my plans in action. I knew from talking to other
teachers and students that this soul wounding behavior was occurring. “If only
they would do it in front of me, then I can put my plan in action and address
the situation effectively,” I thought.
This was the wrong approach.
It was at this point of self-reflection over my teaching and
my classroom that often occurs that I decided that I needed a more active
approach if I hope to make any difference. I began probing students through
conversations filled with many questions of why to lead them to a place where
we could address the soul wounding and internalized oppression I knew existed. I
made sure those conversations happened. They were planned AND executed.
Hearing a TED talk and reading a book by Bettina Love, made
me realize that media negatively affected our students even more than I had
once thought. I also now realized the benefit of media when used effectively in
the classrooms. This time I did not take my new knowledge and stash it away
into some arsenal of ways to handle situations that might occur. I designed a
lesson over media literacy for my students where we analyzed what messages the
media was sending us from all types of music and pictures, both positive and
negative, and the forces behind these messages. We brainstormed ways to create
positive messages in our world and get rid of negative ones. During this one
lesson, I got to use my arsenal of planned attacks more than I did the entire
first semester.
This is not a testament to some intrinsic characteristic
that I possess that makes me able to do these things in my classroom. That lesson,
my conversations, and the other active approaches I took to addressing my
students’ internalized oppression were the product of self-work, education, and
reflection. Thankfully, things we are all capable of doing!
In my last post, I challenged you to self-reflect and self-educate
on the inequalities facing our students. While an extremely important first step,
this by itself is not enough. You must take your newfound knowledge and do
something ACTIVE with it. Do not fall into the trap of passivity that I did,
though, because the oppression that our students are experiencing is not
passive. Their pain is active and desperately needing to be addressed and that
is our charge as educators.
***I encourage you to share in the comment section below
your own experiences with soul wounding to give more insight into the issue.
Educators, please share ways that you have addressed racism, sexism, classism,
and any other discrimination in your own classroom.***
-Ariel
Feel free to leave a comment if you would like to know more
about other active approaches I took in my classroom and the ways I have
attempted to approach the discriminatory policies at my school.
Resources:
Angela Valenzuela- http://www.edb.utexas.edu/education/departments/eda/faculty-profile/?id_pk=68D680E8-C1BA-DA9F-63276258082AA3DF
Bettina Love- http://www.bettinalove.com/
Everyday Antiracism- http://www.amazon.com/Everyday-Antiracism-Getting-About-School/dp/1595580549
I would love to learn about the active approaches you took in your classroom.
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