I never really thought about the way I “read the world” or what lenses I bring to the classroom but after reading the article, I realize how the lenses of teachers can really affect student’s education. My schooling and upbringing have shaped how I read the classroom because I only have a small town, multi-grade classroom experience which is far different from what a Regina public classroom looks like. Throughout my schooling I only had classmates who were white Canadians, there was no different races or cultures in our school even all the teachers were white Canadians. Since I came from such a small-town school, I never had a male teacher until I was in high school which brought a different lens to the classroom.
The lenses that I bring to the classroom is an educator with white privilege, I have never experienced a racial prejudice. I would not be able to relate to students in a minority group because I have never had that prejudice which give me a white privilege lens. Unlearning these lenses starts with acknowledging each teacher brings in a different lens and each student bring in different lenses that can be shaped and changed by what we teach. Like Kumashiro discuses throughout chapter seven, changing the way you think about a novel or the way we perceive a story can change the way a student perceives something.
The “single story” present in my own schooling is the lenses of Euro-Canadian, I never had many experiences in my schooling of teachers who were not male or came from a different cultural background other than Euro-Canadian. Not only was I taught from a Euro-Canadian female lenses and my schooling was shaped from the knowledge from a textbook. I was usually in a mulit-grade split class so lots of the time the teacher would use a textbook to teach us so she could focus on controlling the class and making sure we hit the outcomes to move into the next grade.
