Robert Anaya
1-20-12
Gorski's article reminds me quickly that what i believe and what is reality are many times different. As a future teacher i must constantly reflect about what i am to teach and more importantly how i teach and convey the information. Understanding that there is bias and some form of prejudice in all people that is a product of their upbringing. I find myself wanting to explain the term prejudice because the standard or common use of the word is in the text of racial prejudice. This is in itself a product of what has been defined in a culture or environment. Prejudice has no boundaries and rather is probably better defined as the limits each of us have based on our exposures. This article made me think and recognize, once again, as i have many times in my life, the more i know, the less i really know. (paraphrase from Socrates, I think, or was it?) The more i question what is presented as fact and encourage and help guide students to this end the closer we will get to critical thought and learning. From conflict and crossroads we can find new knowledge or a new understanding of a previous known truth.
The Perkins/Gomez article ties into the realty that as teachers we must first analyze ourselves. This analysis has to be critical and truthful so that we can do justice to diverse and multicultural populations. Simply put if we don't understand ourselves or we try and impose our reality on our students we will struggle. The ego and single minded thinking of our own background needs to be checked at the door. Easier said then done. In my professional career i have worked in New Mexico with people across the country. Early on i struggled because i couldn't see past my own reality but with time and through some trial and error, embracing and understanding differences is a lot better then beating your head on a wall or forcing a square peg in a round hole.
This course and going back to school in general is reminding me how diverse we all are. I feel the optimism in the class's, but i also hear the frustration of the experienced teacher. This frustration is not individual to education its everywhere in every field. I feel myself being idealistic and very optimistic but i also have the recognition that disappointment will be present as well and how i deal with that will be directly reflected to the students. The articles, the theory and the course discussion thus far, are reminders that as a teacher i need to adapt, be open, be flexible to deflect the reality of disappointment in the interests of the young adults.
Use the tools available to me, learn from the experienced, question realities, persist, understand the foundations and build upon them.
Isn't it ironic how the more we learn the less we can see we know? I took a class called Education Across Cultures in the Southwest at UNM about a year ago. We read many articles like the Perkins/Gomez article. We even read part of "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" by Paolo Friere. Throughout the entire semester, I experienced "cognitive dissonance." I had never heard many of those ideas and they were unsettling to me. I became defensive and even a little hurt, but now I see just how important those ideas are to effective teaching. I like how you pointed out how we will be disappointed during our teaching career. I think we might be disappointed in ourselves and others when we fail to put aside our own prejudices because of our world views. It will happen, but at least we will be able to recognize it and try to overcome it.
ReplyDeleteI could not agree with Esther more about experiencing cognitive dissonance in a situation when it appeared that I was being given multiple models and rationales for human behavior. I am fairly (possibly in a naive way) confident that the experience of dysphoria in a setting is a sign of growth and rethinking my stance, and one that I can master. It may be that I will have to seek peer contact and mentoring- but I see that as a positive and colleague to colleague event. One thing I learned early in college was that theory A and theory B may be both right in certain circumstances. I have a couple schools of thought about behavior that I absolutely have no respect for or interest in applying. Despite this viewpoint, when I look at the way these scholars came to their conclusions, and think in their thought process, I learn something of my own rigidity and bias. Freud was a genius, but for the most part wrong. His methods and his insights were compromised by his lack of ability to be only the observer in his theories. He was a variable. His ideas of libido, oral, anal, genital, phallic and so on were a part of his own psyche and his time (Victorian). His ideas of super-ego, ego and id are not so far from perceivable. But then he was of the first to attempt to explain development and neurosis. I look at the dysphoria of a situation and ask what is my part and what do I do about change. I expect to not accomplish the ideal, I expect to push toward the ideal, I expect of myself to have days of energy and days of wondering why I am here... I will not please everyone, and at times that everyone will include me. What I desire is to accomplish the art of teaching with humility and energy. Most likely interjecting quantities of caffeine, my security blanket.
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