1. Provide a brief summary of your social location essay- why do you think it is important to establish yourself in this work as we begin a comparison of countries, cultures, and experiences?
Rather than summarize my social location essay, I’m including an excerpt of it below. I think this particular excerpt speaks to why I find it so critical that we examine our social location with frequency. For many of us—in fact, for most of us—that social location shifts with us throughout the day, the month, the year. I believe that cognizance of our various social locations in life helps us put in broader, more intersectional terms the social locations of those we encounter during our travels. An excerpt: This exploration of self and location makes me think of the concept of privilege, especially in the ways privilege helps dictate our social location in life. A number of years back, I read one of Roxane Gay’s books, Bad Feminist. She wrote something in that book that hasn’t left me since. I’m paraphrasing here, but it was essentially this: We don’t have to go to war over our various privileges and disadvantages in life. It doesn’t have to be a contest that one person wins. We can be privileged in some respects and disadvantaged in others. We can be privileged in our education, for example, but not in our skin color, privileged in the manner and comfort of our upbringing, but not in our gender or sexuality.We can understand privilege broadly without having experienced each form specifically. For clarity, Gay is not suggesting that some forms of privilege don’t carry with them heavier responsibilities; without question, some do. Instead, she is commenting on the fact that privilege is not an all or nothing game: we can and often do live in the in-between. Gay’s framing speaks to my own experience and location in society. I am, for example, strikingly privileged in many respects. I am able-bodied. I grew up in relative comfort and without ever facing real hunger. Though I am part Panamanian, my fair skin presents otherwise, a status that lends me an almost unending amount of ease in the societies that I navigate daily. I am a PhD student and teach in a university. I am literate and articulate and speak three almost achingly privileged languages fluently (French, German, and English). And while I am not wealthy in the classic (American) sense, I can afford simple vacations and new clothes when the inclination arises and a Starbucks whenever I like. I live in a house. In California, for god’s sake. But I am in some ways not amongst our most privileged, and this matters, too. I am, for example, a woman living inside the confines of a patriarchy—a crumbling one, perhaps—but one with a death grip so strong as suffocate some of us at mere view. I am queer, and more specifically, bisexual, a fact which means that I am neither straight nor gay, and rarely accepted by either group in full. I grew up in a household virtually absent books and to parents absent post-secondary education. And I was raised in part by men who were prone to objectifying and degrading the women around them, including me. Especially me. My social location, then, reflects the very malleability of my identity experiences and my subsequent need to flit about amongst them. I picture myself something like an abacus, one line moving higher in perceived numerical value, another lower—a calculation that, in the hands of the accountant, is unending and merciless. I am fair-skinned, up. I am female, down. I am highly educated, up. I sleep with women, down. I live in a house brimming with books, up. I grew up in a house without them, down. And on and on and on. Up, down. Back, forth. Step, fall. 2. What similarities and differences did you learn about inclusive education in SA and USA this week (in presentations and readings) I think what struck me most about the idea of inclusive education in South Africa versus inclusive education in the U.S. is that inclusive education in South Africa was historically defined as education that supports students with physical disabilities. In the U.S. inclusive education is largely understood to be broader. For example, inclusive education in the U.S. might be defined as understanding, accepting, and appropriately challenging students of various cognitive, emotional, social, linguistic, and physical backgrounds and proficiencies. Certainly, this chasm between South Africa’s definition of inclusive education and ours has some roots in our historical differences, but even that doesn’t fully explain it in my opinion. What I am thinking after this week’s readings is that regardless of the breadth and depth of understanding that we may have come to regarding the definition of inclusive education in the U.S., we have not made all of the strides in practice that our expanded rhetoric suggests. 3. What did you learn about in your group textbook chapters? Why is understanding the learner so important? What information is important to learn? I have worked with Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CLD) students for many years. As an English as a Second Language (ESL) instructor, this is my day to day. As a result, there wasn’t as much entirely new material in the book for me as there might have been for others. What I appreciated about it, however, was the connection between culturally responsive teaching and cognitive science—areas I don’t see intertwined as often as I’d like outside of research into second language acquisition and associated pedagogies. Understanding the learner is as critical to teaching as knowing ourselves as teachers. It allows us to connect with our students, to see where additional scaffolding is required in our pedagogical practice, and to consider where we might draw from our students’ knowledge and life experiences to positively impact learning outcomes. There is, simply put, almost nothing more important. 4. What do you hope to get out of the Changemaking experience? As with any assignment in this course, I hope to continue my own growth in the area of education and educational leadership. This includes, but is never limited to, expanding my knowledge of how to work with those who are different from me.
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AuthorI'm Kelly. I teach English as a Second Language, business English, and writing. I eat poems for dinner. Archives
January 2019
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