Book Overview

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

for change, but eschew it as a paralyzing force or grounds for giving your students less rigorous learning experiences. In chapter 3, you will learn how language choices can subtly reinforce racism, sexism, ableism, and other forms of discrimination, as well as how these choices can impact your students’ sense of self, their academic progress, and even their economic future. After learning to choose your words more empathetically, you will move on to making curriculum changes to include diverse perspectives and stories in chapter 4, exploring the impact of intentionality in making curriculum and library choices that reflect a more varied cultural community. In chapter 5, you will investigate the subtleties of cultural acceptance and rejection, and you will also learn that language style and intelligence are not intrinsically linked. In chapter 6, you will explore gender, sexuality, and identity while developing strategies for supporting students and families from the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer or questioning (LGBTQ+) community. In chapter 7, you’ll identify ways to celebrate diversity daily, and in chapter 8, you’ll be able to dissect and recognize microaggressions that can prevent educators from building the relationships they hope to foster. In chapter 8, you’ll also learn to (hopefully) avoid some common faux pas when interacting with students from cultural groups that may be less familiar to you.

In this book, you will explore all the tools you need to move from checking a celebrate diversity box during heritage months to fostering a deep sense of inclusivity and belonging for students who, because of race, gender, religion, sexuality, or perhaps more individual reasons, feel that they are them and not us. At the end of each chapter, you will find a section, Reflection to Action, that’s designed to help you use what you’ve learned in the chapter to reflect on what you still need to work on, your personal growth, and how you can put what you are learning into action. Then, when you are ready, try the activities in the tables throughout the book with the group or groups you work with. Doing so will not only help you stay accountable but also give those around you the chance to reflect on their beliefs and blind spots as well.

Finding Your Blind Spots is not just another book about culturally responsive teaching. It’s an experiential learning handbook written by an educator for educators, based on academic research and lived experience as both a student and teacher from a nondominant culture. It’s a book you can use a chapter at a time or in its entirety as a book study or campus guide. It’s a book you can refer to time and again because the strategies can be referenced in cycles. As culture norms shift in your learning community and as your perception and acceptance of those shifts evolve, you can circle back to chapters in the book to rediscover and implement bits of knowledge you may not have been able to use at first reading.

Spoiler alert: this book will not stop you from gathering information about the people around you and recognizing archetypes. The guy in the letter jacket with the outgoing personality may indeed be the quarterback. The girl with the black army boots, heavy black eyeliner, and blue hair may indeed love her SoundCloud emo playlist. Those kinds of cues might provide you with relationship and conversation starters. As much as we want to see people as blank slates, it’s not possible or even necessary. Colorblindness does not exist, and celebrating cultural and group identity is a good thing. But identity within a group is only one part of who your students are, so it’s important to see archetypes without allowing yourself to stereotype or pigeonhole your students. Seeing them as one-dimensional cultural caricatures prevents educators from examining “the operation of implicit bias, racial anxiety, and stereotype threat” that so often hinders the success of students who aren’t born into the dominant culture (Godsil, Tropp, Goff, & Powell, 2014, p. 4). Wanting your classroom and campus to be truly inclusive requires that you are intentional in building and supporting relationships. It doesn’t require compromising your values, but it may require a shift in thinking that allows you to teach more and judge less.

I would recommend using a journal and taking notes while reading the chapters of this book. Many of the questions and ideas will require more than passing thought, and as you continue to learn, at some point you will want to look back and see how far you’ve come. Let’s begin.