I grew up the grandson of farmers. I loved the land, the animals, my friends and family. I learned to care about those less fortunate from my family and to treat everyone well and with care. The first time I experienced being “poor” and marginalized was in Catholic school which was mostly for the privileged. When I was 13 one…
So…all over the world, schooling is being moved onto online learning platforms of some kind. This provides significant challenges as well as opportunities. Starting with knowing who your students are and centring the most marginalized among them – then thinking about who you are in relation to them… what considerations/strategies/questions do you have for each of the 6 threads? Designing…
Thanks for a great conversation yesterday – or probably better if i say, thanks for listening to me lol…. so we spent a little over a week having some important conversations and learning about #InclusiveDesign and our work as it is tied to #Equity, #AntiOppression, #Decolonization & #AntiRacism. But far too often, people spent time “learning”, attending conferences and having…
As educators we have a professional and ethical duty to address the debt we owe to the generations of students who have existed in the achievement and well-being gaps. An Inclusive Design approach is imperative for systems to transform themselves and to truly serve ALL students. This work cannot be optional but must be deemed necessary, sustained, precise and well-resourced.…
As individuals doing this work, we spent this week engaging in collective learning, sharing and reflecting about how we personally engage, what are the implications of who we are, how we do it, conversations about privilege and how they hurt students, how our egos may/not get in the way, – so moving forward from this point – what does this…
This work is complex and interconnected. Some of us have a lot of privilege and some less. 1) There is the burden of the oppressed – they face oppression; they have to convince ppl it is occurring, worry about their (the oppressors) emotions, find the solutions – it is hard when you are dealing with trauma to have to think…
There was so much that resonated for me from yesterday’s conversations. There were definitely some good conversations and collectively people talked about the different things that assisted them in shifting their practices: Critical Friends – Mentors – Femtors (thanks Julius :)) Racialized friends and people we learn from (DrawntoIntellect, Amit, Sumir, Kevin, Stephen4Equity (your prof), Mrs. T, Jordan, Critical…
“The true focus of revolutionary change is never merely the oppressive situations we seek to escape, but that piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within us” – Audre Lorde Parker Palmer in The Courage to Teach, says, “We teach who we are”. It is a very profound statement, if we really think about it. For us to…
Q2. What are some practices or attitudes I hold/held that perpetuate/d the achievement/well-being gap? What do I need to learn or do differently to change this? In my TED_Ed talk, I make the connections between the micro (myself) and the macro (system), the attitudes I held (un/consciously) and how that harmed students. Watch the talk and answer these questions in…
The deepest and most profound learning I’ve had from doing anti-oppression work – was the work that I needed to heal and change myself. We often don’t understand the ways we are individually complicit in causing harm to students and in spite of understanding that the “system” doesn’t work for all students – we still uphold the structures that cause…