[MUSIC] For this session, we're going to continue with celebrating difference, but with a focus on race and racism. Now, for many people, the understanding is that genes and biology play a huge determine to understanding race thinking. Over the past many years anthropologists and socialogists have said there really is very little biological or genetic drive is to understanding race. In fact, most sociologists conclude that race is a social construct. That simply means: that people give meaning to race. There's very little biological or genetic drives that contribute to the information about race and ways of thinking that we see around us. I'd like to refer you to a story of a young woman called Sandra Laing, in South Africa, in the 1960's, who is born to white parents, who looked brown, and had very curly hair, and was nothing like her parents. And when she went to school, during apartheid, she was not allowed to go to a school for whites. So, she had to be excluded from the school. When her parents went for a blood test, it proved that Sandra Laing was the daughter of her white parents, and so she was readmitted to the school. Now, from that very example, you could see that people decided what Sandra Laing would need to be in different contexts. There's no biological fact that could prove that she was either black or she was white, but people made the decision. Of course, if people make the decisions about race, they also make the decisions about how they will treat people. So again, on the basis of race thinking, people make decisions about which groups are more superior, or better, or need to be given more privileges. And that some groups need to be given less priviliges. And again, those decisions are made by us - all of us. And those are based on our own socializations, our own beliefs. The messages, the misinformation, the stereotypes that we all gather from the time we are born. Now, this is an important slide. Because, in some ways, it talks about how racism is operational in our society. Let's look at individual racism, and individual racism starts at an interpersonal level. It's about you, or one of your colleagues and where there's a relationship and it's the beliefs and views that you have about race and racism. Of course some of the views you may have might be racist. You may think for a particular group of people that's deserving certain punishments or believing that certain groups of people should be treated differently. That would a level of the individual, or the individual racism, Individuals make up institutions, so if you think about your school as an institution, they consist of many individuals, and all of those individuals will come with different views on race and racism. If the view is predominantly that groups should be treated racially different. then the institution may adopt a very racist stance on how people should be treated. Think about your school in this way. What are the kind of messages that you, and your school, give out about how people who are different racially are treated? Are there certain groups that have more privileges? Are given more opportunity? That you expect more from? Are there some groups that are treated poorly and their opinions disregarded? Think about how your institution responds to the learners who are racially different. The third pod is cultural racism. Of course institutional racism, and individual racism, feed into how the media represents race. It feeds in by messages of beauty, of the messages of what racial groups are beautiful, who are on the covers of many magazines of fashion and beauty. When we look at television and we look at advertisements, who are the people driving the large cars in our society? Who are the people that are seen as experts? I used the example of what would a professor look like in my previous presentation. You think of those representations of people in the media and on television, that emit through cultural messages what groups of people should be privileged, are seen as important, are seen as superior. Now, you would understand that those cultural messages also feed into how individuals and institutions would understand race and racism. So you can see a kind of cycle here between institution, individual, and cultural racism. Of course, historical racism grounds all of this, it feeds into all of this in terms of how historically people have been treated. You can't just erase the messages about how people should be treated for instance. Much of that is historical and that gets continually reproduced today in our schools and in our societies. Now, a lot of those systems, the individual, the institutional, and the cultural racism, feed into our embedded knowledge - in the knowledge that we carry, that we teach, and that we learn through. And as you can see, those messages that we pick up get relocated into our classrooms and we reproduce those messages about race and racism. Let's look at the slide with this young boy, and it could be any young boy - whether the boy is white, or whether the boy is black, or a girl who is black or white - who would be asking the question about their own identity development. Where am I in all of this in my school? When I look at the pictures in my classroom, do I see images that look like me? Do I see parents that look like mine? When I see images of beauty, do they tell me that I'm beautiful? That is an important one. When I read storybooks, are all the heroes white with blond hair and blue eyes? Or is there a diversity of heroes that look like me? Think about history. All the people in history that we study, are they white and are they largely male? Or are they black women, that have also contributed to struggle history? That have also contributed to change and revolutions of the world, are they depicted? I am proud of my background, do the images around me and what I'm taught reinforce that? A certain pride of celebrating my difference rather than making me feel that I am invisible in all of this. Now, think about how you take account of the cultural diversity in your classrooms. In your class are you paying attention to who is in your class and the content that you're presenting to the learners? Does it reinforce their own thinking of their own racial identities and their cultural identities? How do you provide activities to encourage children to see different points of views? That we have different socializations; we have different narratives; we have different emotions that come with our own histories; and our own positioning of how my parents, my grandparents and the struggles they have endured on issues of race. How do we a create a climate and an environment in the class where we can talk about these issues and dialogue and also learn that historically how race can be used for privilege but also to subordinate the very learners that we're trying to teach? How do you provide positive role models in literature and history from different cultural backgrounds? So, when you talk about experts you say experts have said this or certain things on a particular issue, how are those experts balanced? There can be white experts, but also experts of color. So, that you constantly have learners see themselves potentially as being experts one day as well. Think about teaching songs or dances which draw on a variety of traditions and cultures; selecting stories which reflect ideas from different cultures and illustrate how children and teachers deal with racist language. When this happens in your class, how do you deal with it? When somebody makes a racist comment, what is your response? Do you shout at the learner? Do you shut the learner up? Do you punish the learner? Perhaps one of the things we need to be asking is that oppression and prejudices like racism are learnt behaviors. So, perhaps one of the first questions to be asking the learner would be "I wonder where you first learned that language." And so, allow the learner to tell us where they actually got that racist comment from. And perhaps you can then help the learner to show, and show the learner and say, "This is based on misinformation. This is stereotypical." And perhaps you can use that opportunity to show the learner, like you learnt that language, you can also unlearn that language. Anti-racist education. There is a lot of literature written on anti-racist teaching and we've included a couple of covers of books that could be useful to you. One of them is Guidance for Initial Teacher Trainers, particularly on issues of diversity. Another interesting book that is not there, is a book by Beverly Tatum called, Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting in the Cafeteria? Another useful book to look at race, racism and identity development. So, I want to conclude with anti-racist education of how do we raise awareness of self awareness and demonstrate that we all have sub conscious prejudices. That we all gather these through our lifetime. We learn these messages. Discuss the language you use when discussing race, and establish the correct terminology. That certain labels are offensive to certain groups of people. Ensure pupils are able to recognize racism and prejudice, and to encourage children to talk openly about racist views and prejudices. The only way we can bring about liberation about racism is not by shutting learners down, when they're being offensive, but opening up a conversation and dialogue of how we can learn, and grow, and move beyond those racist assumptions. So my classroom at my school. Is there explicit expression of racist attitudes in my classroom? And how are you going to respond to it? Are there implicit and hidden expressions of racism in my classroom? How aware am I and how do I respond to them? How do I help my students to recognize and deal with with explicit and implicit racism? What is my influence on anti-racism beyond my classroom at school and community levels? So, not only within the classroom, but outside the classroom with your colleagues. When racist comments are made about learners who are not white, How do you challenge that? And what are some of the things you could do to create new learning, not only in your classroom but in your environment? [MUSIC]
