Tag Archives: culture at large

When Educational Research Battles Polictical Research

learner-centered classrooms, politics of education, ,

The New York Times Magazine last week had an interesting piece on new science indicating that physical exercise mitigates anger.  The science here is new only in the sense that this is a study that clearly indicates this link, but as others have written over the years, the link between physical activity (and sleep) and emotional/intellectual stability and strength is pretty clear. We know this.

So why, then, do we not change our schools to reflect what the facts tell us will improve the learning of our students? Because of political research. The Brookings Institution and others release studies about the effectiveness of individual schools that often ask political questions, not academic ones, which then affects funding for schools, which, in turn, affects how effective schools are. When we ask whether student test scores are rising, we are asking a political question, not an academic one, since the science is clear that testing does not actually measure or improve learning.

So what’s the answer? I don’t know, but getting our politicians to stand up to political pressure and look at what is actually best for students is a good start. That can be done on Capital Hill, but what about in your school? Can you talk to your teachers? The principal? The school board? “All politics is local” Tip O’Neill famously said, and the individual school I send my child to is a good place to start.

The ethics of TV ‘experiments’

advertising, language in the classroom, managing behavior, media literacy, school safety, teaching cultural competencies, Uncategorized, whites navigating racism, , ,

Macon, over at Stuff White People Do, picked up on the ABC show “What Would You Do?“, specifically an episode on racism in public settings and how people respond. It is in some ways reminiscent of some early ‘instigation research’ where researchers purposefully instigated some conflict to see how people would respond.

Macon tackles the issues of racism and white apathy, so I’ll largely leave that aspect to him, even though it is germane to this blog also.

Beyond that obvious issue, however, the concerns I immediately hit upon were those of human subjects in a research setting. All research that takes place which involves human subjects must be approved by an Institutional Review Board (IRB). IRBs function under the Office of Human Research Protection (OHRP), which basically is checking to be sure that researchers are not doing anything unethical, as in the classic Tuskegee Siphilis Case (which ran from 1932 to 1972 and, interestingly, the last widow to receive reparation payments after the Tuskegee case just died about two months ago). So if all research has to have oversight when human subjects are used, several questions arise about what the host of this TV program describes as an “experiment”:

  • Who approved this ‘study’? Does it have any IRB oversight?
  • Have they even thought about informed consent? Doubtful considering how upset several participants were.
  • What about debriefing? Every time I watched the film crew follow one set of people out on the street to do a post-interview, I wondered about all the other customers who were not interviewed and debriefed and who just slipped out the side and wandered off into their lives, unaware that what they’d been through was a con.
  • What about the effect on people of color? This ‘experiment’ is ostensibly to see how people would (or would not) respond, but people of color have no need to have this sort of store-front racism shoved in their faces since they are, in fact, living this reality every day.
  • Were participants compensated for their time, their discomfort, their trauma?

One of the questions IRBs consider when looking at a potential piece of research that involves human subjects is whether it stands to increase knowledge. Aside from the fact that most all people of color can testify that this is the reality in stores everywhere, upscale or down, there is also quite a lot of research that shows this as well. So what do we learn from ABC’s ‘experiment’ that we didn’t know before?

Another IRB question is whether a given piece of research does harm. Watching the responses by some participants (and only the ones that they chose to show, even thought the voiceover cites ‘more than a hundred’ people they filmed), I think it’s fair to say that, yes, it did harm: many people were really upset with what they witnessed. And what about the people who left the store but didn’t get caught by the film crew…. many of them may be left with the idea that this behavior is acceptable and appropriate, especially by someone with authority (the store security guard), because that’s what the silence of bystanders encourages.

And by silence of bystanders, I mean both the white people in the store who said and did nothing, but also those people accosted by the film crew who said and did nothing to stop this sham.

Unfortunately, the silence of bystanders is one of the strongest reinforcements for bullies, domestic and dating violence perpetrators, and people everywhere who would hold power over others.

This is the reason why all schools should be talking about talking: what do you say or do when you see or hear bullying? If we’re not talking about it in schools, youths grow up to be the callous adults who say nothing in episodes of “What Would You Do?”, as well as in the pre-production meetings of shows like “What Would You Do?”, as well as in their day-to-day lives.

So how are we talking to youth about their moral and ethical responsibilities to each other in our culture?

Youth Sexuality

media literacy, teaching cultural competencies, ,

According to data collected by Hunter College with the Human Rights Campaign, men are 12 when they first think they might be gay or bisexual. Women are 16 when they first think they might be lesbian or bisexual. By the time LGB people hit college age, they have, on average, had sex with someone of the same sex and have decided for sure that they are LGB. So it is no surprise that so many people come out before or shortly after graduating from high school and explore these aspects of themselves during those years.Regardless of an individual’s sexuality, these are the sexual development years and so many youth are exploring sexuality during this time, with whomever they are drawn to be with.

So how are our cultural views on sexuality during youth changing? Last weekend, Ryan Allen, under the stage name Reann Ballslee, was named Homecoming Queen at George Mason University, a school with some 30,000 students. While there are some who are nay-saying his being named to this position, this is a title given to the person with the most votes after they performed at a qualifying pageant in early February, so clearly an awful lot of GMU students were comfortable with a drag queen being named Homecoming Queen and cast their votes for Reann Ballslee.

On the other hand, high schools across the country are grappling with staging a newly-released toned-down version of the musical Rent. It seems that many communities are not yet comfortable with the idea of high school students talking about sex, STDs, and drugs. Oh, and there are two gay couples in the show. Perhaps the parents and administrators ought to attend the Homecoming this weekend at GMU?

Meanwhile teens across the country are now being booked on pornography charges for texting pictures of themselves nude to friends and partners. Some of this is certainly warranted, as when a boy takes pictures of his girlfriend and texts them to his friends, but much of it is the same fear of human sexuality, especially among youth as probably drives the people fighting Rent productions. I’d be interested certainly to see gender breakdowns; I’d assume that these photos are more often of and by young women trying to live up to cultural expectations of being sexualized. Where is the line here between allowing youth to be sexual as human beings and protecting youth from being victimized by our culture?

So how are we talking with youth in Sex Ed class about sexuality? What sort of language do we permit in schools? Is language that puts women down or sexualises them laughed off by teachers? Does homophobic language merit merely a “hey, cut it out!” or more conversation about what homophobia looks like and means? What messages are we sending youth through both what we talk to them about as well as what we do not talk to them about?

Terror Toys

Toys and Play, , ,

So what do our children see and play with in today’s world? On TV, there is a Homeland Security reality program on ABC (yep, Disney owns that one too). Propaganda? The executive producer says it pretty clearly:

“I love investigative journalism, but that’s not what we’re doing,” he told The Reporter. “This show is heartening. It makes you feel good about these people who are doing their best to protect us.”

Well, if you were worried about all the guns kids play with, as they imitate superheros, Power Rangers, and other fictional characters, perhaps those, as fantasy, aren’t the worst things to worry about in playland. There are more realistic toys they could be playing with:

  • Lego has a Police Command Center, for which the description states “the police are keeping a watch from their mobile command center!”
  • Playmobil has both a Security Checkpoint with walk-through metal-detector, guard with a wand-metal-detector, and an x-ray machine for bags and luggage, as well as a Police Checkpoint, in which officers are “also equipped with a map, stop sign, and pistols.”

One interesting note here is that the Police Command Center has comments about how much their kids loved the toy and played with it for extended times. No irony there. But both of the other toys are full of ironic reviews that include comments the following. So where is the line between what is acceptable violence and what is not? Different for each of us I imagine….

  • This playset is one of the best purchases I have made for my three-year-old. In the past, when we have been stopped at roadblocks, or when during one of Daddy’s arrests, he would start crying uncontrollably. Now, after playing with this for the past several months, he is perfectly docile.
  • What better way to condition your kids to accept the police state and patriot act? Last thing one needs is your kids growing up to question authority!
  • Unfortunately, this product falls short …. There’s no brown figure for little Josh to profile, taser, and detain? Where are all the frightened plastic Heartlanders pointing at the brown figure as they whisper “terrorist?” Where are the hippy couple figures being denied boarding passes?

And if you really want to give the full effect to your kids, there are also SWAT teams and Police Stations with Jail Cells. One poster even suggested using their electric fencing in the Cow Pasture to elicit the full Guantanamo feel.

Here in Maine, where there are lots of guns, some parents vet the homes of their kids’ friends before allowing play-dates: “Are there guns in the house? Are they locked up? Loaded? Are kids taught gun safety?” Do we also ask about what sort of toys the kids play with? “Does your child play with guns?” A friend of mine has pointed out that differences in child-rearing come between friends much more than anything else in our lives. If your oldest, dearest friend allows his or her children to play with toys like these, do you allow your child to go play with them? Does your kids’ daycare facility or school prohibit toy guns? What about play guns, like using fingers?

As Lucinda Marshall says over on Feminist Peace Network in a blog post on these toys:

As difficult as it sometimes seemed to raise sons during the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Power Ranger years, clearly teaching children the difference between right and wrong has  become far more challenging as the toys and games pitched at them become blatant police state propaganda.

h/t to Alternet, which carried Lucinda’s post.

Dehumanizing People of Color

language in the classroom, media literacy, teaching cultural competencies, Uncategorized, ,

Well Maricopa County, Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio is at it again. He’s been criticized before, by the Mayor of Phoenix among others, for violating civil rights and for ignoring some 40,000 felony arrest warrants so he can focus on rounding up people with brown skin. “Immigrants” and “Criminals”, Sheriff Joe calls them, but he doesn’t seem to care what their legal status. To quote the Mayor:

American citizens and U.S. veterans who fought for our rights are seeing their own rights violated. Immigrants, who are here legally, with paperwork in hand, are being treated like criminals. Vendors, with valid visas and properly licensed equipment, are being detained.

Last week, Arpaio paraded 220 “immigrants”, all reportedly Mexican, from the Durango Jail to the Tent City, and sent out a Press Release to announce this, and be sure media were present. They were dressed in prison stripes, chained, and marched down the street (traffic was rerouted for them), with an enormous force of armed guards around and above them.

This from a Sheriff who has some 2,700 civil rights violations filed against him from 2004-2007 and who has apparently cost the County some $43 million in legal settlements over the jails during his tenure.

Unfortunately, too many in this country see this sort of public humiliation to be permissible for people of color. It’s really unfortunate that we are teaching youth that it’s okay to treat POC not only differently from white people, but it’s okay to humiliate POC publicly.

Two years ago, Tarleton State University, the second-largest school in the Texas A&M system, discovered that an annual MLK Jr-day party at one of their fraternities was predicated on white students dressing up like racist stereotypes of black people.

Last fall, there was the case of the white teacher who tied up two black girls and made them get under a desk to demonstrate how slave traders treated slaves as they were bringing them to this country.

Last week, in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, a predominantly black elementary school called off their “Cotton Picking Day” where students were encouraged to come to school dressed as slaves for the day as part of Black History Month.

Of course these events are offensive and of course they are racist, and there are lots of other events like them. And, you’ll note, they are happening in schools. Not Sheriff Arpaio’s event, of course, but all the local kids heard about that and/or saw it on the tv. So are we talking about these events in schools? Are we, as adults, merely ascribing them to ‘extremists’ and assuming that ‘that sort of thing wouldn’t happen here’, or are we looking, with our students, at the cultural forces that make the people who do these things think it’s a good idea?

What do you do when a student in your class uses a term like “that’s so gangster” or “that’s so ghetto”? Do you punish, or do you start a conversation with the class about what those terms actually mean?

One of the difficult aspects of being a teacher is the constant pressure to be a role model. Not just the I-say-please-and-thank-you variety, but the how-do-I-respond-to-hate variety, regardless of how ‘minor’ the infraction. It’s African-American Month, February is, so will we spend it with platitudes about how post-racial, post-civil-rights, post-slavery we are, casting furtive glances at the black student in the corner to see how he responds, or will we engage our students with actual conversation about real events that still take place and how we must respond to all forms of hate and prejudice, even when someone argues they’re ‘just joking’? Every time a teacher does not challenge these comments (or behaviors, like pulling eyes back to mimic Asians), that teacher has just taught the entire class that it’s not that big a deal to put down or humiliate people of color.

So, who are you?

politics of education, teaching cultural competencies, whites navigating racism, , , , , ,

We all develop a sense of who we are, and this process is a juggle of one’s sense of self and our culture’s sense of us. Even  as adults, we are constantly refining this sense of self and even working on several different versions of it. Much like having several different resumes that highlight our skills in different ways, we all have several different hats we wear, whether at work, with our children, or while pursuing a sport or hobby or other avocation. Right now I am a blogger, but I’m also a Dad, I’m straight, I’m white, I’m a researcher, I’m an employee, I’m a partner. And many things beyond that. As I approach 40, I am still struggling with what it means to be any number of these things, but for school aged youth, this struggle is often what their lives are consumed by.

Majka Burhardt has been blogging about a sense of understanding who she is, especially relating to what I understand is a very U.S.-centric question: “what do you do?” How do we articulate who we are in a one-sentence soundbite? And what if ‘what you do’ is not really fully how you understand yourself? Like Majka, I have climbed for all of my adult life, and this is a major way that I understand myself, even if I barely get out these days because of other responsibilities. So “what I do” is not necessarily who I am. This is also going to be true for many people of color, for women, for anyone who struggles against the culture. I’ve always struggled with the common dinner-party question Majka talks about: “what do you do?” and I’ve never come up with a really good alternative, but I’m certainly open to options. I usually ask something like “what do you do with your days” as a way to allow someone to answer outside of their job, but it still implies “what is your job?” to many people.

If we take this sense of self one step back to a more basic sense of human identity, I am male. But that simple fact does not encompass who I am anymore than the fact that I am a climber. I am male, but I have struggled against culturally-force-fed stereotypes of gender my whole life, especially in classrooms. I like to take students’ comments about being one gender or another and start a bigger conversation about what gender means in our culture: “Wow, so do you really think you’ve got to be ‘tough’ like that to be a man? Can’t women be tough too?”, or, perhaps more commonly, “do you really think women are less valuable than men? Why do you say ‘don’t be a girl’ like it’s a bad thing? What are you actually trying to say then?” 7th graders ‘get it’ when they are encouraged to talk about it, because so much of these gender stereotypes are ‘received knowledge’ that they’ve heard but never questioned. Dollface is talking about these gender stereotypes on her blog and asking what we’re doing to reinforce or break these gender stereotypes. For me, I always enjoyed talking about how I like to sew and quilt and cook and parent and yet still climb and get dirty and use tools and fix things: I can be my own definition of man.

One issue with these cultural stereotypes is the idea of homophily, which the Guardian had a piece on last week. Homophily is “The faintly depressing human tendency to seek out and spend time with those most similar to us.” One of the reasons I always tried, as a teacher, to talk about my own experiences and life (to a reasonable degree) is that I was different than many of my students. I felt that if I talked about this, they would see that the stereotypes (of whatever, gender, race, religion, sexual orientation, class, rural/urban, etc. etc. etc.) are just false social constructions. If teachers allow themselves to be vulnerable in this way, students often respond to that with authentic thinking. Other students, especially (in my experience), the LQBTQI students, seem to feel a sense of relief in an adult being open to these conversations and in an adult who is willing to talk about these issues.

So do we surround ourselves with only people like us? Is that a good or bad thing? Don’t we want to have interactions with other viewpoints? To what degree is this line of questions white- or male- or hetero- or able-centric? Can members of any non-dominant group truly surround themselves with only like points of view in a culture so fiercely dominated by straight-white-male-able-culture?

I guess the bottom line to me is that we ought to be having these conversations with youth early on.

When “the Market” runs the school

advertising, media literacy, politics of education, ,

Over the years, there have been lots of examples of corporate interests making their way into classrooms. Teachers are well familiar with the posters oh so kindly donated by companies which plug their products in one way or another, or even go so far as to steer the politics of teaching.

Is this just the way schools get materials today, since we can’t seem to find the resources to fund our schools fully? Should we see this as schools getting the job done by whatever means necessary, or is it more nefarious than that? Even though, in states like Maine, soda and candy are being banned along with the advertising for them, there are more than enough loopholes to drive a delivery truck through. At the school where I taught, when the ban went through, they changed the sign at the athletic fields from a Pepsi logo to a different Pepsi brand. Inside, the soda machines were stocked with other Pepsi brands, from water to juices, but it is still a Pepsi brand on the side of the machine. Why does the school keep them at all? Because the distributor pays the school a portion of the profits from the machines.

There are also lots of other examples of corporate interests trying to create ‘brand loyalty’ at a young age and pushing their products. There are even companies set up to market to kids in schools. What, then, is needed, is media literacy and getting kids thinking about ways to understand what they see around them and the motives behind that, especially as online marketing to kids gets more and more sophisticated.

But what if the corporate interests in the classroom are not so obvious as that Proctor and Gamble poster trumpeting the glories of their products? In the world of pharmaceuticals, many drug companies are paying universities for research on their drugs. This, in and of itself, is fine, but what happens when they pay the university to create a course based on their products? Several years ago, the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Medicine and Public Health started coursework around the benefits of hormone therapy, even though a clinical trial had actually been halted five years early because of the dangers of this therapy. For six years, doctors took this online course that was sponsored by, you guessed it, Wyeth Pharmaceuticals, the makers of the hormone drugs! Now that someone asked questions about it, they’ve halted the course, but how many students (in this case doctors who will then go treat patients based on this information) were given information that is not only wrong, but potentially deadly to women who undergo this therapy?

There are plenty of subtexts here about how our culture values women (this sort of thing never seems to happen in clinical trials of men, or white people, does it….), but we need to find more effective ways to be sure that education is a completely free-standing institution that presents lessons based on the best information available, no matter if it’s 2nd grade or medical school.

“Class warfare” in education

politics of education

“There’s class warfare, all right,” Mr. Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” This he said to a New York Times reporter in 2006 while discussing how little the rich pay in taxes relative to their incomes. He had noticed that he paid a lower tax rate than anyone else in his office, mostly, but not all, secretaries and clerks.

These class discrepancies are not limited to what people pay in taxes, however. Our school system reinforces these income hierarchies by providing good educations to those who can afford it, and withholding it from others, meaning that these socioeconomic disparities remain in place. (And it should perhaps go without saying that I am not talking about individual schools or individual teachers or individual students here, but rather the big picture: schools in poor neighborhoods and town are not as good, are not stocked as well, do not provide as many opportunities as schools in wealthy neighborhoods.)

But how do we talk about changing this since those in power, both politically and educationally are only representing the wealthy? The University of California system just hired a new President. They pilfered him from the University of Texas and lured him in by paying him — are you sitting down? — $828,084 per year. Yes, that’s almost $4 from every single student in the entire system. This was, apparently, approved “by Governor Schwarzenegger and legislative leaders,” but they, too, are largely of the owning class themselves.

I’m not sure what to suggest here, but it’s clear that equalizing our educational system is a pretty big and entrenched issue.

Is empathy eroding?

teaching cultural competencies, ,

Jean Twenge was recently interviewed on Fair Game with Faith Salie. Twenge is a professor at San Diego State University where she studies differences in generations. She has also written a book called Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled — and More Miserable Than Ever Before, which title is fairly self-explanatory, as far as these things go.

One of the things she was talking about was the rise in narcissism in the generation born since about 1980. In many ways this is how older generations talk about younger generations: they’re all out for themselves, they don’t care, they are lazy, etc. etc. etc. I was born in 1970, the heart of Generation X, and they certainly said all of those things about us in the 80s and 90s, and I wonder if we hear less about Generation X now mostly because there’s a new generation (often called the Millennials) to complain about.

Or is there something to this narcissism? She points out that the corollary to a rise in narcissism is a drop in empathy and that has been coming up recently for me in the world of liberation activism and theology.

One of the problems with people and groups who oppress others, either directly (say, hitting someone) or indirectly (say, not speaking up when a racist joke is said), is that they seem to lack a certain level of empathy. They may not even realize that they are missing it, as when students in my class make comments that they don’t even understand are hurtful because they’ve never really parsed the language.

So how do we teach empathy? How do we better get students to analyze their language and be better aware of how certain words affect others? I feel like this needs to get done in every class all the time, on top of what we’re already teaching, but certainly lots of teachers already feel like they have too much to do and don’t want to take on yet another thing….

[Also, I’m not sure my use of ‘directly’ and ‘indirectly’ oppressing others is a good distinction, but it seems useful in that usage.]