Month: March 2020

• 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?

This is kind of a hard question since most of a person’s “biases” are unknown to themselves. I’m sure I have many “biases” that I live my life with every day and am completely unaware of.
My time in elementary and high school was very multicultural and was surprisingly inclusive to other sexual orientations. I feel because of my experiences in school I became more accepting and understanding of other people’s culture and sexuality.

other than that I often see the world around me as a very white-dominated environment where company greed will often squash and oppress people around them. I personally see corporations as “the bad guy” this is likely due to the views I have gained from school when reading about poverty, sexual assault white supremacy, and cover-up stories related to companies and businessmen. I know that my thoughts on this are very extreme and have recently been trying to be more understanding and openminded when dealing with large corporations but still have this view on them.

Like many people, I don’t like reading information about things I do not agree with. So for me as an educator, I’m sure I will read many papers from students and teach topics that I will not agree with politically. I will have to learn to contain my personal opinion so the students are able to develop their own.

• What examples of citizenship education do you remember from your K-12 schooling? What types of citizenship (e.g. which of the three types mentioned in the article) were the focus? Explore what this approach to the curriculum made (im)possible in regards to citizenship.

I remember doing lots of different activities during my time in school that would be considered citizenship education. Throughout elementary school, we did different types of charities as well as community activities to spread awareness. We took part in terry fox day where we were taught about cancer, what it is and how it affects people’s lives, so we as a school went for an hour-long walk to raises awareness and also raise money to donate for cancer treatment. I would consider this to be the Personally responsible citizen, the students didn’t do any of the planning but did donate some money and also help raise awareness, the teachers, on the other hand, was Participatory Citizen. they were teaching us (the students) about the issue and did all the setup for the event to happen.

We also took part in Earthday, during this time I remember my teacher telling us all about the environment and the key role it plays for humans and animals to live, and what we can do to keep it a clean and healthy place again this is the same type of citizenship happening here.

I don’t recall there being any examples of The Justice Oriented Citizen being present during my school experience. the only thing that I could argue is that through the education that they gave us some students may have felt inspired to tackle main issues head-on. but we were never explicitly instructed or encouraged to find these issues. Maybe it’s too large of an issue for a standard lesson plan to be built around? for example its a bit challenging for a teacher to build a lesson about tackling how we as a society use so much unnecessary waste, packaging and plastic that it’s damaging ecosystems around the world, and its giant manufacturing companies that are ignoring the facts of there actions to maintain profits.