After reading through Chapter 7 Examples from English Literature by Kumashiro’s Against Common Sense, my upbringing/schooling shaping how I read the world and the biases and lenses that I bring to the classroom seem to be more apparent. I grew up in a small, extremely Christian based, white majority town and that definitely influenced parts of our education and student’s responses. I entered the world with a lot of biases towards people of colour, none that seemed to be a ‘problem’ in my own mind. Small stereotypes that seemed to be confirmed through my experiences after high-school, but as I grew and learned more, I realized how problematic some of these lenses are. One point that was definitely present in my classroom was the prevalence of Western literature in each classroom. As Kumashiro explains “When students read literature by only certain groups of people, they learn about only certain experiences and perspectives, especially those of groups that have traditionally been privileged in society.”. This was definitely the case in my classrooms which influenced how I looked at the world. Through a lot of educating myself, I was able to break through most of these single-sided biases that were created during my high-school experience. Also, a lot of the classes I have taken throughout my university experience have helped me challenge biases and lenses that I didn’t even know that I had. For example, I’m currently enrolled in ECS 303 and we had a reading about fat-phobia and how it affects students and their lives. I didn’t realize how biased our world is towards individuals who are ‘thin’. Keeping an open mind and working towards realizing how there are so many biases we can bring into the classroom is definitely one of the easiest ways to unlearn and work against these biases. If we continue to believe that what we currently know is always the right thing, we will never realize how biased these thoughts can actually be. It’s important to simply work on educating yourself everyday to learn what biases we may have and how we can unlearn them.
In Chimamanda Adichie’s talk, The Danger of a Single Story, she discusses how harmful the single story narrative can be. Single stories create stereotypes through incomplete stories which rob people of dignity while emphasizing how we are different rather than how we are similar. I think one of the most prevalent single stories were those surrounding Indigenous peoples. We often learned about their story through western literature which presents a completely different story than using literature from each perspective. The truth that mattered was the colonizer perspective because everyone in our classroom was part of settler families. Through our teachings of Indigenous peoples, it reinforced stereotypes and partial stories of them, placing the emphasis on how we are so different from ‘them’. Instead of using stories to empower and humanize the Indigenous population in Canada, they were used to emphasize and renew the stereotypes about this culture. I am definitely grateful that I have worked to unlearn these biases that were taught to me, but due to the complex and engrained nature of this single story in our country, I have so much more unlearning to do. I also have the responsibility to help students unlearn and relearn more than this single story narrative that is being told.
I really agree with you about how living in a small majority white town affects stereotypes. I myself also grew up in a town exactly the same, and I can also say that I as was entered the world with these single stories and stereotypes that did not affect me in anyway for me to understand it was wrong. Single stories are dangerous for our narrative of the world and I hope as future teachers we can help students unlearn these single stories.