Media Lit 16 final project

As an admissions officer at Rhode Island College I'm in charge of recruiting a diverse freshman class. The most important tool to recruit students is the admissions information session. As the person in charge of special tours, and information sessions i am responsible for a great majority of the presentations for students. Most of the students that I come in contact with are first generation college students. My job is a lot different than some of my other colleagues because the population has no foundation of knowledge for the way that the American higher education system works.





My presentation usually ends up covering a lot of things from personal stories to basic tenets about the college application process. If you are really Involved in multicultural recruiting you understand that it's not about convincing a student to come to your school it's about getting them to go to any school that will make them happy. It is about lessening the achievement gap through giving the students the information to attend a four year school and to also graduate. Words are my biggest tool.





Before I entered this class I would have seen myself as a techno-constructivist however in reality I was more of a techno-traditionalist who didn't really take advantage of technology within the aspects of my job. I would show up to presentations and use myself as the canvas I really hated using presentation software or even software that helps you organize your work life. This class has really made me think about the ways in which I could be using technology in a much more effective way and not just a way to distract myself from being productive at my job.





The first thing I really focused on was organizing my technology and really thinking of way to be organized in ways that did not involve paper. In my work, because of the amount of travel that I do in the fall and spring, my phone is my biggest resource. I downloaded a couple of apps that have really assisted me in accomplishing things that I am struggling (me being the unorganized person that I am) I downloaded an app Called Office Lens which is a digital phone scanner that really helps in taking pictures of documents, it fixes the image and puts it into pdf form. The second app I downloaded was google keep. Google Keep is apart of the google family of apps and it helps me make digital to do list for various different tasks. I have already begun to use them daily and have noticed a change in how many things I actually get accomplished.


I decided to try and learn the Prezi online software because just like the different templates within Prezi getting to college is a journey to a destination unlike the stagnant PowerPoint presentations. The prezi with all of its movements and customization really feels like a journey. Once you learn how to use the different shapes of the slides it becomes easier to understand. You can even do a slide within a slide which is a really cool feature that Prezi possesses.





My first goal with a presentation to first generation college students is to make them be able to read critically everything that admisisons officers say to them (including myself) and to understand all of higher education’s marketing. One way in which I do that, I take one of our marketing brochures and gives the students 30 seconds to look it over. Usually the brochures have pictures of students studying and posing, and then I ask them what is the purpose of this publication. I then ask them if they have ever taken a picture like the ones in that brochure.They usually respond with no and then I tell them that the brochure is a way of getting you to come to that particular school but that in reality no one ever poses like that. I affirm that school is about fit and imagination and that they should visit the campus and really see if they can see themselves going.


Before this class I would use a prezi designed by one of my other co-workers and to be honest the former prezi looks like it was designed for a non- first generation audience and that always bothered me. It felt to much like a sales presentation and although my job is to get the students to come to RIC, my why is not centered around a sales pitch it is centered around getting the students to find their own why's. We push these set of values on our students, we tell them that they have to go to college that it is something that needs to be done no questions asked. We don't help these students find their why and we make it seem as if college is not a place where discovery happen where self awareness and intellectual curiosity develop. In my presentation I try to make them wonder, and most importantly remember. I use a picture of my father now and the supermarket where he worked.










To try to give the student an image that I too have walked some similar shoes and that it is possible to attain an education and look like them and myself. I believe that students learn through stories, that we are story-telling beasts and I think that’s what we remember the most from people. I think that my story and the visuals will really help bring everything home.

The flight from conversation and the Anti Teaching

Today's reading post two very different ideas in the way that the modern world is going.

In Sherry Turkle's op ed in the New York Times she explores America's changing landscape both physically and emotional. In her research she believes that  our mobile devices not only "change what we do but they change what we are" and that we have become accustomed a new way of being alone together and that this shift has made us a more individualistic society and changed our focus to become a society of one. "Humans relationships are rich they are messy and demanding we have learned the habit of cleaning them up with technology." this article functions as a sort of audit on the challenges of navigating a technological world. It argues that we learn alot in conversation and that we try to compensate by saying that little bits of conversation of social media or email add up to the complexities of a physical conversation.

Michael Wesch has a much different approach to the new technological world. He believes that the problem is not technology but its the the tenets of education in this country. He believes that education is so outdated and that we need to break the basic mold of our classroom. He even describes his form of education as "Anti Education" and that as educators we put the blame on the student and not on the educational system as a whole. We say things like some "students are just not cut out for school, he says "if we replace the world school with learning, that the sentence becomes a sort of educators blasphemy. He talks about his video he created with data from 131 participants as a sort of audit of our educational system.

This I believe

I believe that education in at-risk communities should cultivate the imagination as without imagining nothing outside of your current situation is possible.

I believe that the way that we fund education creates cycles of poverty and violence in inner city neighborhoods.

I believe that if educational policy isn’t shaped by teacher’s and not just government officials then our educational system will eventually burst.

For my final project I plan on working on the Prezi presentation since it is a type of presentation style that I have never created for myself. We currently use a Prezi when we do presentation but it hasn’t been updated in a while and I never created one for myself I have been using a Prezi that was created by one of my coworkers.

My presentation is so completely different than the average admissions presentation because of the population that I recruit. I recruit mostly at-risk students from background very similar to mine. I usually tell a story about my dad and the word opportunity and I feel that with visual aid and pictures of my father and words on the screen I could make the story a bit more powerful.

Although I’m leaning towards the Prezi.

I am still considering Endnote. Endnote is a source gathering resource. It compiles sources and articles and cites them for you. I feel that I am lacking the modern capacity to compile and organize information. Manila folders and desk drawers don’t do it for me anymore. I usually end up with a folder of stuff that I can’t find when I actually need. I feel that end note could really help me compile data to potentially write a Doctoral thesis in a couple of years.

Girls Worms and Body Image

In tonight's assignment I focused on the article Girls Worms and Body Image by Kate Lyman. Lyman is a 3rd grade teacher in Wisconsin. It starts with her eaves dropping on two elementary school students fighting over a health video because they"needed it cause they were fat" the students then walked away. It seemed to Lyman that something had made the girls feels self conscious about their body image and she thought about her own upbringing. She started to plan lessons around gender and media in her classroom.

First lesson she separated her students by gender in her classroom and made them write 10 things of what they think about the opposite sex. The student all came back with different stereotypes about the opposite gender. Stereotypes like women were better at making, and men made more money that women. The student argued vehemently about these stereotypes and she realized that she had failed.

In another lesson she planned a discussion  around toys and the stereotypes about gender. She had the student plan a lesson around analyzing a barbie doll. She made them ask questions about the doll. What does the doll look like? Does it look like any of the women that you know? etc. She asked them why she though the toy manufacturers made her look that way, "the consensus was that girls want to look like her so that men would like them better" The students responded well, she guided them to come to the conclusion that the Barbie doll was teaching them what pretty was supposed to look like and that they didn't know anyone that looked like that. The teacher wanted the students to be able to critically analyze the hidden message in advertisements.

The last lessons she planned was an old fashioned day in which the students had homework to ask their parents how school was when they were in school. Students came back with many different responses. The old fashioned day was planned and female students were asked to come in with dresses (they could not were jeans) and that day the students were treated differently by their gender. They used similar disciplines of the old days: the dunce caps, the harsh repetition writing punishments. The teachers called on the boys more than they called the girls, to criticizing the girls for more sloppy handwriting. Lyman was interested to see if the girls and the boys notices the differences in gender. Not only did they notice but the boys seemed happy and the girls were very unhappy saying things "you paid more attention to the boys than you did the girls"

What I learned from the article as an outsider is that teaching lessons around media literacy on social issues is hard. Lyman shows examples of 4 lesson in her article but she does not stop trying. What she does well in her lessons is that she is giving these children real life examples of the issue that she is facing.

Brave

Since my youth I was one of the children that due to low resources, was babysat by the television and video-games. Popular children's culture shaped most of my beliefs, since most the first images of people other than me I saw on that magical box. In the late 80's and 1990's nothing was bigger than Disney and their movies and in my neighborhood if you were one of those families that could afford to have the Disney channel your house was the one we all tried to visit. I learned a lot about my beliefs from Disney culture and always put myself in the shoes of the princes. especially Aladdin. (the only prince that somewhat resembled what I looked like) I learned how grieve with the Lion King, (but I also learned that there are places that you shouldn't go and not to trust people with dark hairs), With Aladdin I learned that being poor was remedied by a magic lamp and three wishes and that the more successful I became that a princess would be waiting for me. They played a huge role in my life as I learned to interact and learned about beauty and how the princess involved in most films were "model" skinny and always seemed to be needed to be saved by the prince.

The film Brave challenges all of the things I learned from watching animated movies as a child. The protagonist Merida's mother is often trying to teach her daughter how to be a princess and how to do things in a way that princess should be doing them and her daughter Merida is always questioning that. If you were to replace the word princess with woman, or lady, or girl, the movie would become more direct at delivering its message. The protagonist in this film is not your stereotypical Disney princess. Merida is interested in challenging the status quo. She does not want to be waiting for her prince. In fact when her suitors comes she even beats them in an archery contest. The most symbolic scene comes when after beating the suitors in an archery contest, the dress that she has one, essentially becomes too tight for her and she says something to the tune of "it doesn't fit anymore" and the dress rips. What doesn't fit is her assigned gender roles. In the movie most of the time that her mother is trying to get her to conform she is making her cover up her hair and wear a dress that she can barely move in. This is the film maker's way of showing female containment and showing through metaphor how females are expected to be conformed in society.

Another thing that the movie did really well with the plot is the concept of perfection in the movie. Women are expected to be perfect and to be compassionate beings Merida isnt that.  I think with the plot of turning her mom into a bear and the fact that Merida was the one that made a mistake and she was the one that had to fix it was very important. This goes against the princess stereotype of having to be saved by a prince but it also goes against the stereotype of the perfection that we expect in women.

Are we really Digital Natives

Today’s readings made me really think about the way in which we receive information and the information age. I agree with a lot of the points made by Boyd and Wesch mainly about the way that we as educators need to help students process the way that they receive digital information.

The term Digital Native was popularized by Marc Prensky. I really enjoyed Boyd’s critique of the term Digital Native Boyd believes that the term digital native obscures the uneven distribution of technological skills and media literacy across youth populations "presenting an inaccurate portrait of young people as uniformly prepared for the digital era and ignoring the assumed level of privilege required to be native. Boyd believes that educators purport the inequity in technological education in this country, because those who are privileged tend to learn technological skills outside of the classroom. We must not assume that all students have innate media literacy; in a world that required media literacy to get well-paying jobs, access to health care educators must do their part to cultivate media and technological literacy


In Boyd’s piece he states, “Censorship of inaccurate or problematic content does not provide youth the skills they will one day need to evaluate information independently” this past statement really articulates some of the philosophical problems in the way that digital immigrants are educating digital natives. What Boyd is referring to is the new crisis of the information age in which we are not teaching students how to see the biases in digital information and to not look to question said information. Instead we are eliminating and preventing them from having access to that information. What are we teaching our children when we are teaching them the sources in which to receive their information instead of having them learn which sources their information should be coming from on their own.

In Michael Wesch’s piece what struck me the most was the following statement,
“We have had our why’s, how’s, and what’s upside-down, focusing too much on what should be learned, then how, and often forgetting the why altogether. In a world of nearly infinite information, we must first address why, facilitate how, and let the what generate naturally from there”


I feel that this statement beautifully captures how the philosophy of education needs to change, especially the last fragment “let the what generate from there”. I feel that education should be in that order, and that we must teach students the importance of why they are learning things and what they learn is a produce of them learning how to be learners. I feel that we should be teaching our students to be the best learners that they can be because most of what they learn they are learning on their own in this age.

Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants

I consider myself to be both a digital immigrant and a digital native. On the one hand in high school we used floppy disks to save our work in class.

 When I arrived at college it was a digital world. Floppy disks were replaced by USB hard drives and most papers were written on the computer. I'm pretty hip to technology and social media and the way that it is used, however I don't interact with technology the same way that someone younger than me does. Hence why I feel slightly like a digital immigrant.

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Hello My name is Omar Reyes I work at RIC as an Admissions Officer before that I work at an Educational Opportunity Center it is a federally funded grant funded program designed to help low income first generation college students enroll in a higher education institution. Summer is going fantastic When I am not in class I enjoy reading and learning and watching the news. I also am a pretty big New York Knicks fan. I am looking forward to learning a lot this semester.

Teaching Multicultural Children

I wanted to start today's blog by posting a great clip on the English Language from I love Lucy

This week’s reading focused on teaching English as a second language. As a bilingual person and someone who had to learn English in Kindergarten, I was struck by both articles. I started by reading “Teaching Multicultural Children by Virginia Collier. I have often imagined how hard it would be to teach English as a second language to children. Collier states that “teachers must be creative and flexible, serve as a catalyst for discovery as students learn to operate effectively in their multiple worlds, be able to meditate and resolve intercultural conflicts, keep students on task and serve as a support base.

The article uses guidelines to teach students who are learning English as a second language.

1.      Be aware that children use first language acquisition strategies for learning English as a second language.  This guideline focuses on the belief that students use the same strategies in learning a language that they used when learning their first language. They strategically identify patterns in the language, they find ways of identifying the nuances in the language and “they take risks to try to use the analogies of the first language”

2.      Do not consider yourself as a remedial teacher expected to correct so—called deficiencies of your students.  (this guideline I really had a tough time understanding) it states that “the difficulty with teaching languages to native speakers is that teachers have been trained to teach them as foreign languages. I really need help understanding this and hope we discuss this guideline in class.

3.      Don’t teach a second language in any way that challenges or seeks to eliminate the first language. This rule really resonated with me as I feel that it is the most important rule. We must teach students to not forget about their first language or that their first language is wrong. We must recognize their bi-dialectism. “to affirm their home language means that they will not be told that they are wrong or that what they say is vulgar or wrong”. I wonder what Delpit would say about the past statement. I feel that she would give Ms Colier a high five and they would be best friends.

4.      Teach the standard form of English and students’ home language together with an appreciation of dialect differences to create an environment of language recognition in the classroom. And then Delpit would abruptly end their friendship after Ms Colier brings up this guideline. This guideline advocates that teachers who teach English should use the student’s dialect in their classes in order to enrichen the classroom and make the students feel that they are represented. “So when children come to their classrooms with their non-standard varieties of English and home language, teachers must look at the benefits of having multiple ways of talking in the classroom.” Delpit would disagree, I feel, because of she would want the students to explicitly learn the language of the culture of power.

5.      Do not forbid young students from code switching in the classroom. Understand the function that code switching serves. 

Safe Spaces

This weeks reading focused on creating a safe and conducive learning environment for LGBT youth. Safe Spaces: Making Schools and Communities Welcoming for LGBT youth brought up many things that I have not thought about when it comes to the challenges that  LGBT youth face in the classroom and in their environments. In order to understand the challenges I thought it was pertinent to find facts about LGBT youth in America. I have attached
them on the margins of this blog post.

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 The info-graphics just represent what is very clear about american culture, America has a hetero-sexist problem. I believe that most of our education on acceptance of others comes from human interaction. As unfortunate as it is people tend to only care about something until it becomes personal. We can read about the marginalized communities, discuss their plights and even sympathize for their struggles but for a lot of people until they know someone in that marginalized community and have interacted with that person, broken bread with them learned with them that is when a deeper level of understanding occurs. Our education system is at a crossroads in educating students about LGBT issues, and although it seems as though things are getting better, The suicide rate and homelessness rates for LGBT youth are too high. This brings me back to
this week's reading. The authors argue that "children encounter cultural and ethnic norms different from those of their family. If our homes are incubators, keeping our children safe as they grow into patterns of family life, schools are outcubators places that introduce new ways of thinking and behaving". With this statement the author begin to introduce the biggest problem plaguing the LGBT youth in America. The place were students learn things different than the way

that they are brought up is failing to introduce the LGBT community and thus creating an othering of their community. The "word curriculum derives from a word in Latin that means "to run a race" the authors argue that in a race there are winners and losers and that "We contend that the winners are those who see themselves in textbooks, art, films, and other educational materials. Youth who see themselves as wise or powerful main characters or heroes

worthy of celebration and emulation will feel validated included and safe inside their classrooms."  If students that represent them are not represented in their curriculum than there is an alienation and a lack of ownership in their education. I have felt like that before with no authors of colors in my English classes in high school, however, ( and this is where my heterosexual privilege lies) if a teacher were to advocate for her class to read more students of color, there would be very little red tape to climb as opposed to reading about characters of different sexual orientation/ gender identity.

Literacy are today's youth digital natives?

Are today's youth Digital Natives by Boyd discusses how students are digital natives to an evolving technological world. In the beginning of the article one can already see what the main argument of the chapter is, "the children who attend school today are digital natives who think nothing of learning through the use of technology" The author argues that although teens are active participants and social media students do not have the knowledge to make the most out of their online experiences and that the rhetoric of digital natives is "often a distraction to understanding the challenges that youth face in a networked world.

Boyd believes that although students can share or create content online it does not mean that they have the knowledge to properly consume information, and that educators are lacking in teaching students the skills to engage with contemporary technology effectively and meaningfully.

The roots of the derives from a Marc Prensky article titled Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants  where Prensky he states today's students think and process information fundamentally different from their predecessors. He states that they should be called digital natives because they are native speakers of the digital language of contemporary technology, they have not lived in a world where the internet and computers do not exist. Digital immigrants are people who "were not born into the digital world but have, at some later point in our lives become fascinated by and adopted many facets of technology". Boyd believes that the term digital native obscures the uneven distribution of technological skills and media literacy across youth populations "presenting an inaccurate portrait of young people as uniformly prepared for the digital era and ignoring the assumed level of privilege required to be native. Boyd believes that educators purport the inequity in technological education in this country, because those who are privileged tend to learn technological skills outside of the classroom. We must not assume that all students have innate media literacy; in a world that required media literacy to get well-paying jobs, access to health care educators must do their part to cultivate media and technological literacy.

The article also discusses that educators do not really teach students how to validate online sources, and educators typically judge by the brand of the source. For example, a lot of educators tell students to not use Wikipedia for their sources, and instead have them use Google or Encyclopedia Britannica without letting them know what it is that makes one source greater than the other. The author also interestingly states that research has stated that encyclopedia Britannica is a less reliable source than Wikipedia. The way that teachers teach students to use google for their research also creates a problem when students automatically assume everything found on google is fact. Students are not learning to question their media, and it is because of the educators not catching up with the way that technology and media is consumed.

Below is the Ted Talk that this article focuses on in their critique of the term I figured it could be useful

School to Prison Pipeline

"The systems broken the schools closed the prisons open, I aint got nothing to lose mafucka we rolling."

With the first line in the first verse of his chart topping single "Power" Kanye west hides the harsh realities of the school to prison to pipeline, a phenomenon that affects low income students of color all over the country. With that one line Kanye draws a comparison against two opposite institutions, institutions that we as a society want to believe that have no correlation. We want to believe that the schools are open and that the prisons are closed but that simply is not the way that it is, hence why the system is broken. The schools are segregated and the prisons are open, this line is alluding to the segregation of both institutions. The school system is segregated because the culture of power has access to the best educational opportunities and they close it to students of color. In contrast the prisons are open to students of color as the population of the prison system is predominantly African American and Hispanic. This week I really wanted to learn more about the school to prison pipeline that Kanye West is alluding to in his song Power.

On rethinkingschools.org I chose to read Arresting Development. Zero Tolerance and The Criminalization of Children by Annette Fuentes, and a short article titled, School to Prison Pipeline in Mississippi. The Arresting Development article focuses on the school to prison pipeline and zero tolerance policies. The term Zero tolerance traces its roots to the Reagan presidency and the war on drugs in the 1980’s, “Congress enacted the Drug Free Schools and Communities act in 1986 bringing the war on drugs to school”. During the Clinton administration zero tolerance was taken further with the 1994 Safe and Gun-Free Schools Act, that made bringing a gun to school warrant a one-year expulsion for students and also provided federal funding for anti-violence programs directed at youth. These policies were viewed as a way to sway the prediction that was made by criminologists like James Q Wilson and John Dilulio that viewed African American and Latino males as “super predators” that would incite a new wave of violence in the late 90’s. The 1999 shooting at Columbine High School spearheaded the national move for police in our schools, and while Columbine was a predominantly white high school most schools that implemented having police in the schools were schools that had a high population of Blacks and Hispanics. The schools that were mostly segregated began to become a pipeline for youths of color to end up in prison.

  Although Zero Tolerance in schools began, the National Center for Education Statistics reported that incidents of gun violence have been dropping steadily since 1993. Zero tolerance one focused on guns, alcohol and guns now targets an ever expanding range of behaviors. It is estimated that from 1997-2007 police officer presence in high schools increased by a third. Zero tolerance combined with the increasing police presence in our nation’s high schools are taking away the disciplining of students from a school to issue to a law enforcement issue.  According to Judith Browne Dianis, co-director of the Advancement Project a civil rights and advocacy group, “Things a police officer might not arrest someone in a bar fight for, your seeing them make arrests in schools for.   There are a lot of children arrested for disorderly conduct, which has a very subjective definition. Whoever is standing there gets to define it.” Schools with officers are 5 times more likely for a student to be arrested for disorderly conduct. Disorderly conduct is an offense that is most often left to the interpretation of the school system and that in my opinion should not be a reason to arrest a student instead it should be a time for the school to discipline a student and not to criminalize a student.

Zero tolerance by the numbers.

In 2009-2010 school year California recorded 757,000 suspensions it was only second to Texas that had 1.67 million suspensions and the population of texas schools is only 4.7 million students.

According to the ACLU there are more African Americans in the US justice system than there were slaves in the 1850’s.

40 percent of students expelled in the US are Black

70 percent of students arrested in school are Black and Latino

Currently African Americans and Hispanics youth make up 3/5ths of the juvenile delinquent prison population.

Regan’s war on drugs was primarily waged in communities of color. Although people of color are no more likely to sell drugs as their white counterparts, Blacks and Hispanics historically have higher rates of arrests.

African Americans comprise 14 percent of regular drug users but are 37 percent of those arrested for drug offenses.

From 1980-2007 about one in three of 25.4 million adults arrested for drugs was Black

Zero tolerance often targets students in populations of color. Schools that are segregated are more likely to have a police presence at their high schools. According to Russel Skiba, a professor of educational psychology at Indiana University, Skiba suggests that when teachers are inexperienced and come from different racial and class backgrounds they teach “cultural discontinuities” and they create adversarial dynamics in the class room. An alienating curriculum poor classroom management skills and negative stereotypes of black youth can lead to authoritarian disciplining and overreliance on suspensions.  Hence what we talk about in the Finn article and the segregation of schools. Below you can find a great video explaining the school to prison pipeline. 

This brings me to the short article on Meridian Mississippi, a town who was sued by the Department of Justice in 2012. Meridian is a perfect example of how the prison to pipeline works in some of our school systems. The lawsuit alleged that the city’s juvenile justice system has operated a school to prison pipeline that shoves students out of school and into the criminal justice system violating young people’s due process rights along the way”.

In Meridian when schools wanted to discipline students they called the police instead arresting students as young as 10 years old, in most times the officers didn’t even know if the offense was worthy of an arrest. The complaint read that the students were incarcerated without for days without a hearing or even knowing why they were arrested.  The department of justice lawsuit came after years of research by organization like the Southern Poverty Law Center, (SPLC) that determined that 67 percent of youth in detention centers in Mississippi arrived from the Meridian school system. In between school and detention-schools, students were denied access to lawyers and due process, “the administrators were the judge and executioner”. The managing attorney of the SPLC states, that although Meridian is a city comprised of 61 percent African American over a five-year period, “there was never once a white kid that was expelled or suspended for the same offense that kids of color were suspended for”.

                                                       NOT ONE!

One middle school student was suspended over 30 times for offense including wearing the wrong colored socks and being late to class. The Department of justice in its lawsuit said “that the city police department served as a “de-facto taxi service” shuttling students away from school and into youth jails.

Lastly I will leave this hip-hop-centric blog post with a very brief analysis of another Kanye West song, titled new slaves. The song is a song dedicated on talking about the Prison Industrial complex and the privatizations of our prisons. Prisons owend by private corporation and not by the judicial system. The biggest private prison system corporation is the CCA. The way that they work is that they receive tax payer dollars for ever inmate in their prisons. In Kanye West song New Slaves, he states

I know that we the new slaves...
Meanwhile the DEA, teamed up with the CCA
They tryina lock n---s up, they tryna make new slaves
See that's the privately owned prison, get your piece today
They prolly all in the Hamptons, braggin 'bout what they made

With this verse Kanye is referring to the war on drugs. The DEA being the Drug Enforcement Agency and the CCA being the largest private prison corporation in the world, and the profits that exist with having a private prison be filled with prisoners. This song expresses a sentiment about the distrust of minorities and the judicial system, and the Reagan era war on drugs that sent majority African Americans and Hispanics to prison at alarming rates. He compares the prison system to slavery because it seems that it is mostly the people with slave ancestry who are getting arrested and who are being profited from in the prison industrial complex.  This is why I feel that the, 
                                                The system is broken,

The schools are closed

The prisons open

Literacy with an attitude (corniest title of a book ever)

This week’s reading really affected me and made me really want to either get into the class room or find a way of changing educational policies in this country. It made me think very deeply about social class and how the language and the approaches to education are really meant to keep the status quo in check. The author relied heavily on the influences of Brazilian scholar and educator Paulo Freire. Paulo Freire in the 1960 started an adult literacy program for Brazil’s illiterate poor. Freire believed that the way that literacy was being taught to this group of people needed to be approached differently.

“Before he started teaching reading and writing he asked his students to reflect on the concepts of justice… He asked his students what he might do to secure justice and suggested that literacy would make them far better able to engage in the struggle they would certainly face if they tried to get a better deal.”

Freire’s intentions were to teach literacy with the intention of education a social class to be able to fight for their rights in an unbalanced Brazil. His teaching eventually led him to be exiled from Brazil, as those formerly illiterate students began to get registered to vote. Freire “understood that for the poor in the slums of Recife literacy as part of the identity of the “other”—a hated other in a society where the gap between the rich and the poor is ever so much more obvious than it is in the United States” Paulo Freire made me think about the Martha Demienteff quote in the Lisa Delpit reading.

We listen to the way people talk not to judge them, but to tell what part of the river they come from. These other people are not like that. They think everybody needs to talk like them. Unlike us they have hard time hearing what people say if they don’t talk exactly like them. Their way of talking and writing is called formal English.

In a way, Demienteff is teaching a Freirean idea, with that quote she is underlying a dislike for those who speak formal English, but she is also hinting that in order to succeed they need to be able to become literate in that world. You can almost feel her expressing and understanding the disdain for the Alaskan native people of the culture of power, but she is teaching them so that one day they can affect change in their communities.

 The literacy that Freire is talking about is also teaching historical and cultural context which is important in any classroom for economically oppressed students.

My favorite passage and the most emotional passage for me in this week’s reading comes from the author describing one of Freire’s thoughts on the poor, “They are so submerged in their daily lives that they have little or no awareness of the possibility for change, much less what they might do to bring about change. They view their conditions as natural, the will of God, or determined by fate” this passage speaks to me on so many levels, and I feel it speaks greatly of our socio-economic system in the US. Our working poor in this country work so hard and are economically running in circles and if they were to stop and think they would notice that it isn’t something natural, or the will of god it is a cause of a system in place by those who want to keep power in their hands. It made me think about my father a lot and the story that I tell to students in the inner city when talking about the word opportunity.

Rhode Island college is nicknamed the college of opportunity and I ask the students to give me a synonym for the word opportunity. usually a student  responds with the word “chance” It is then that I ask the students the question 

Why college? 

Students usually respond with various answers, “to have a better future” or “to make money” or “to have a job that I like”

I then ask them, If I were to ask you parents 

Why do they want you, their children, to go to college what would they say?

I let them respond until I get one of the students to answer “so that I could have a better life than they had.”

I then proceed to tell them about my father and the story goes like this.

"My father was the smartest man I had ever met. When I lived in Dominican Republic he used to read my history text books from front to back within the day and then recited most of the important parts in history to me and help me with my homework. My father had a high school diploma but never had the opportunity to go to college.

After we immigrated to the US, my father took a job at a local supermarket. I never knew what he did for work just that he worked at C-town supermarket. One day my father’s car broke down and I had to pick him up at work. It was winter and the temperature was in single digits.  I arrived to pick him up that day 20 minutes early and when I looked around the parking lot I realized what my father did for a living. My father was the person at the supermarket who retrieved the carriages and I remember looking at him and seeing how the bitter weather conditions had made his skin dry and ashy. Not that there is anything wrong with pushing carriages as it is honest work, but I am talking about the smartest person that I had ever met.  I remember looking at him and understanding something that I was too young to be able to verbalize.

I then proceed to ask the students why do you think the smartest person that I had ever met was pushing carriages for a living?. There is always the one student who says something to the extent of “because he didn’t get an education” My goal is to get those students to think of their own experiences and to think about their working class parents. From experience from working in the community I can tell you that most working class families I come in contact with know that education is the way out of their struggle as working class families, but now we just need to make that education a much more transformational one. 

The Problem that We All Live With

This American Life’s episode 562 discusses the topic of failing schools in largely Black and Hispanic communities. The journalist in this interview, Nikole Hanna Jones has been trying to find solutions to the lack of improvement in schools with large under-represented, minority populations. She states 

“And I would go to schools. And they would just always be trying these new things that actually sounded like they might work. They would do things like “well put a great magnet program here. Or we are going to focus on literacy…. They are always talking, really, about the same things. I mean you could take the conversations and go from district to district to district, and you will always hear the same things”

 The producer of the show Ira Glass then comments “what she noticed was that it never worked. I mean, like never” They begin to set for discussing why schools in underrepresented neighborhoods seem to always fail, and that the achievement gap between white students and black students was so disproportionate. According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) the achievement gap occurs when one group of students (such as, students grouped by race/ethnicity, gender) outperforms another group and the difference in average scores for the two groups is statistically significant (that is, larger than the margin of error).  As of 2011 the NAEP which is a government funded testing organization that tests students in the nation to measure academic achievement in schools determined that in many ways the achievement gap was still existent. In their report "School Composition and the Black-White Achievement gap they determine white 8^th graders tested on average 31 points higher than Black 8^th graders in the US.This analysis gave reasons as to why it could be that Black students are testing lower than their white counterparts. All of the issues in this government funded study has reiterated the issues that Nikole Hanna Jones argued in her reporting. The theories on why the achievement gap exists can be found in the image below.

Segregation in schools

YES Schools are still segregated

In the report by Nikole Hanna-Jones the term “segregation of schools” is used very deliberately. It is mainstream knowledge that Brown vs Board of education made it unlawful for schools to be segregated. Schools by law can no longer be segregated. However what this report introduces is the new type of segregation that occurs in not so blatant ways as the days before Brown VS Board of education. Policies in American government, gentrification and “The Great White Flight” have all contributed to the re-segregation of schools in America. In a report done by PBS titled the return of school segregation in eight charts, the article gives some shocking statistics on the re-segregation of schools. It goes on to state that Since 1988 the rate of Black students at predominantly white schools in the south  was 43.7%   has gone down to  23.1% in 2012.

 http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/the-return-of-school-segregation-in-eight-charts/

Why is integration Important?

Studies have shown that when schools are diverse and integrated students of color tend to do better in their classes. Students in predominantly white schools have access to better resources, more funding and more effective teachers. Compared to schools who have a high concentration of Black and Latino students, those schools typically have lower graduation rates, less funding, and employ less experienced teachers.  According to the report in the Saint Louis area, nearly 1 in 2 Black children attend schools in districts that performed so poorly, the state has stripped them of full accreditation. Only 1 in 25 white children are in a district like that. That statistic really emphasized everything mentioned in the report.

This report really saddened me and made me really think about the injustices in education in this country. The fact that schools are still funded by property tax, the graduation rates in neighboring districts. In my current job I get to see these gaps immensely. I will go to a high school that has brand new buildings, a 99 percent four year college acceptance rate. I will then travel to a neighboring district where the 4 year college acceptance rate is only 33 percent, the building look decrepit and the students don’t enjoy the luxury of even having up to date technology. I once visited a high school in New York in which the school stopped funding AP classes and couldn’t afford to hire any teachers to teach Geometry or Algebra II so the students had to take it a community college. Those two courses are required for admission at almost every 4 year college or university. I think a lot about the disadvantages of these students. It makes me think of opportunity and how precious it can be for those students, and how those students have little room for failure in a society that is not educating our children equally and fairly. It is even sadder to think that the basic right of a good education, is not a right that is given to everyone.

color blindness

Deconstructing Privilege.

Colorblindness is the new racism.

This week’s article speaks a great deal on the term colorblindness that is being used a lot in mainstream media. The term colorblindness refers to someone that does not see race. The authors describe colorblindness as problematic as well as scientifically unlikely. In order to understand colorblindness, one must first understand that white privilege gives those who are not of a color the option to feel that colorblindness is a thing as opposed to those who are of color who live in color-seeing word daily. In reference to a study done by Fiske and Neuberg that determines that humans quickly place people into categories or schema (category based processes) and that category based classification serves as the default mode for perception. Category based perception can occur automatically and outside of conscious awareness, the study supports a conclusion that the brain makes colorblindness unlikely. The study proves that whether we want to or not or brain uses physical attributes to categorize and relate people to what our perception of race is.  I have attached the video below of a race study that CNN did a couple of years ago that demonstrates the racial bias in children. The study demonstrates that even small children have already begun to put students in categories based on their race, and a good percentage have already begun to have negative connotation towards a darker skin color.

How can colorblindness be hurtful to society?

Colorblindness can be hurtful to society because it invalidates the existence of issues of people of color. Colorblindness is good intent masking “I don’t have to care”. If you are of an oppressed racial makeup you have can’t choose to be colorblind and there are racialized systems in place that work against you and your race. In the classroom to avoid the discussion and to avoid that component of the racial makeup of your student’s is to deny those students their struggles and the challenges that they face in comparison to their white counterparts. I have included a hyperlink that describes race statistics in America to better highlight some of the issues that colorblindness can deny:

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-30214825

This is not to say that there should be pity involved, or that one should guide discussions based solely on their hardships, but it is to raise a general awareness and to be conscious of a student’s race and the plight that comes with it. To be “colorblind is to ignore the racial biases that are inherent in American society.

The authors of this week’s reading believe that we must us a strategy called color insight in order to properly discuss race and defeat the myth of colorblindness and a post racial society, we must acknowledge that people have privileges or disadvantages based on their race. Color insight refers to a process of thinking about one's own color to discuss race.  There are four steps in engaging in color insight, 

1.     Considering context for any discussions about race

2.     Examining systems of privilege

3.     Unmasking perspectiveness and white normalness.

4.     Combating stereotyping and looking for the "me" in each individual.

The last step in the color insight process really spoke to me. "Looking for the me in the individual" is looking for a commonality between you and someone of another race. I found that looking for the me is a natural process. You tend to care more about an issue when it has to deal with people that look like you. This advocates that one must accept people's differences and to stop assuming that your normal is their normal and that just because their normal is not your normal it does not mean that that their normal is invalid. (WHOA what a run-on sentence, my undergraduate English professors will be disappointed!) thus color insight reminds us to acknowledge our differences and fight for a more equal society.

This week’s reading for some reason, made me think about a young man named Kalief Browder. Kalief Browder was a 16-year-old black male who was accused of stealing a backpack. He was sent to prison without being charged and stayed in prison for 3 years with no charges   and no court date.

No charges and no court date!

While in prison he spent a great deal of time in solitary confinement and he tried to take his own life several times. There was video coverage of him getting assaulted by other prison inmates and correctional officers. He was threatened daily by the correctional officers who were there to guard his man-made cage. When he was finally released Kalief began to have hallucinations he once threw his television out of his window claiming that the television was watching him and lived in constant paranoia that he would be thrown back in jail.  After his release he was quoted saying:

People tell me because I have this case against the city I'm all right," he told the magazine. "But I'm not all right. I'm messed up. I know that I might see some money from this case, but that's not going to help me mentally. I'm mentally scarred right now. That's how I feel. Because there are certain things that changed about me and they might not go back."

The New York times published an article on him and an anonymous donor offered to pay all of his college expenses. He began taking classes at a community college in the Bronx. He even was able to meet Jay-Z and Rosie O’Donnell. The paranoia started again and one day his mother had found that he had committed suicide in his room, a victim of injustice and the prison system.  He was only 22 years old.

In my life I have never had a news story affect me as much as this one. I try not to make everyday things about race but how could I not? I often wonder would this have happened if Kalief was Kyle? Arrested maybe, but three years with no court date, no trial and no charges. Highly unlikely. To be colorblind is to not to be able to have an honest conversation on what people of color determine are the issues that are plaguing their communities. To pretend that this could have happened to anyone, is to pretend that the judicial system is color-blind. To pretend that the judicial system is colorblind is to pretend that African American males don’t account for 60 percent of the us prison population. To pretend that our society is colorblind is to be blind.

Culture Codes

The Silenced Dialogue.  (The Code)

Lisa Delpit's article, The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People's Children, argues that "the different perspectives on the debate over "skills" versus "process: approaches can lead to an understanding of the silence dialogue. The silence dialogue is a term that Delpit uses to describe how some non-white educators feel as though they have been silenced from the dialogue on how to educate children of color. It took me  a second read to really understand where the author was coming from.  Some of her ideas, at first glance, seemed strange and to be quite frank a little divisive. It was when I read the text the second time and tried to look at it through an educator's lens that I really understood what the author is invoking.

Delpitt coins a term that I knew existed but did not know had a name, the "culture code". The culture code she speaks of relate "to linguistic forms of communicative strategies, and presentation of self that is, ways of talking, ways of writing, ways of dressing and interacting". An example of the dominant culture code can be how African American students who use hip hop language in daily interactions with each other, can be looked at as unintelligent if the same type of cultural language is used in a professional setting. An African American student has to learn how to speak the language code of the pervasive white culture, and a white student will never have to learn how to speak the language that African Americans use in order to navigate the world. The culture code is yet another barrier that children of color have to navigate in order to even the playing field. 

When it relates to the linguistic culture code, Lisa Delpit argues that a barrier of communication exists between the way that students of color are being taught that is inherently different from the way that they are being communicated with at home. She argues that in education the way that the "liberal educators" try to educate children of color can be flawed and does a disservice. Delpit  argues that middle class white families want their children to be an "autonomous student" or a student that can think for themselves without outside influences. These middle class students have already internalized the inherent culture codes of the culture of power.  While parents of color want more they want their students to be also be able to navigate the "white man's world" as the mother in the article is quoted.  Why would two different cultures want different things when it comes to educating their children? The answer lies in the culture code. The mother of the student, perhaps understand that there is a different cultural approach that her child must speak fluently. There are many different dialects inside of one language.

In the words of Martha Demientieff, 

We listen to the way people talk not to judge them, but to tell what part of the river they come from. These other people are not like that. They think everybody needs to talk like them. Unlike us they have a hard time hearing what people say if they don't talk exactly like them. Their way of talking and writing is called formal English

At first glance, quotes and statements like the one above  were a little difficult to conceptualize. I felt icky agreeing with some of the explicitly race labeled quotes in the article. It almost felt as if the author was blaming white middle class educators for not catering to the needs of students of color in the classroom. It could be, that maybe I just am not quite ready to talk about race, using the terms to differentiate a group of people. Once I read the second time the words really started to sink in, and I thought about the Johnson reading from the week before. His words echoed (and I'm paraphrasing) without giving things names how can we talk about it. The truth is, quotes like the one by Martha Demientieff, explicitly describe what it is like to educate students of a different linguistic code of English. The culture of power decides what dialect to use and makes it formal English. Student whose families do not speak the language code of formal English at home are at a disadvantage. I though a great deal about Brown vs Board of Education and the first years of desegregation in schools. Little Ruby Bridge's all over the country now found themselves in classrooms that did not use techniques that fit towards their linguistic code, and it feels that we have gotten a lot better at creating a much more inclusive classroom, but have we done enough?

PS. Below is a really cool cartoon I found on privilege. Completely unrelated to my blog post and this weeks reading but I felt it was cool and I wanted to put it in my blog for later use.