Introduction
One of the categories we form early on is us. Most children naturally begin with mama, and from there they sort the world around them into categories: family, neighborhood, team, country, and so on. The familiar, the usses, draws a circle around those people and things we innately trust. Drawing a distinction between us and them is an “unavoidable fact of life” (Luhmann, 1988, p. 95). People instinctively trust the familiar and distrust what is new or unfamiliar. The positive bias that people feel toward the familiar is not a bad thing—until it is. Positive bias is the natural tendency to like certain things and people—often the familiar—and to distrust other, often lesser-known entities. It’s uncomfortable to admit that our bias may have grown into prejudice, racism, misogyny, and so on that disadvantages others, but it happens. In our classrooms, for instance, it’s common to come up with bias-based concepts about different types of students, even archetypes that go beyond race or gender identity: the “jock,” the “mean girl,” the “rapper,” the “drama queen,” the “nerd,” and so on. In thinking about your classes, you could no doubt ascribe some of these labels to some of your students. This book will give you the knowledge and skills to identify the places of bias that adversely affect your practice and give you strategies to move beyond those biases to build a more equitable, inclusive campus culture. This book won’t be difficult to read, but it may be hard to digest. Still, by thinking, feeling, reflecting, and learning your way through these pages, you will come to embrace yourself and your students in a way that will transform your school community into a more welcoming place for all.
Book Overview In the chapters of this book, you will learn to explore your classrooms and campuses through the eyes of an other, a person who society at large or an in-group views as an outlier, an outsider, one of them rather than one of us. The lessons I have learned as an other, both sitting in and standing in front of school desks, I share with you in the hope that you will use the humor, pain, incredulity, and even mundanity of those lessons to become a better-prepared, more inclusive educator. Those experiences, combined with extensive research, are woven together into an educational framework of eight guiding principles that will provide you with insight into the educational experience of students who do not belong to the mainstream, dominant culture. These principles will arm you with social-emotional and teaching strategies to help you better understand and educate students who might look, dress, or identify in a way that you may find difficult to decode. In chapter 1, you will examine your own bias and learn about the adverse impact it can have on student achievement. In chapter 2, you will analyze guilt as an impetus
3
