How has your upbringing/schooling shaped how you “read the world?” What biases and lenses do you bring to the classroom? How might we unlearn / work against these biases?

Which “single stories” (see Chimamanda Adichie’s talk, viewed in lecture) were present in your own schooling? Whose truth mattered?

My upbringing and schooling shaped how I read the world in a negative way. The main reason for this is because my hometown is a predominantly white settle town. This means that the school was full of mainly white students and also white teachers. I think my teacher must have fallen into the “well I don’t have any students of colour so I don’t need to include resources that ‘tell a range of different stories’ (76).” I say this because when I think back to everything I learned, it was all taught from the same colonizer lens, there was never any other perspectives included. My senior year English class was the first time a “new story” was included when we read The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie. An example of a single story that I recall from my schooling was in grade seven health in our HIV and AIDS unit which also happened to be the only time the topic on homosexuality. This only tells a single story that is very problematic because it attaches a negative stigmatism to homosexuality. Since I began university I have been uncovering my biases and lenses so that I can acknowledge and begin to work against them. An example of a bias I had to work to against was about gender identity, mainly because I didn’t really understand it. Growing up in a small town, everyone always just conformed to the gender norms so that it was seemed “normal” to me. However, I had the chance to attend the  professional development session Gender is ordinary: How to welcome gender diversity every day in your classroom last year with Dr. Lee Airton about their book Gender: Your Guide and it honestly changed my whole mindset because I finally learned from a perspective different than the one I had been surrounded by my whole life.