Advertisement
Supported by
Remote Learning Can Bring Bias Into the Home
Experts say unfair treatment and discrimination shouldn’t go unaddressed.
By
Andrea Hartsough’s 12-year-old son is the only Black child in his class in Nevada City, Calif. When he told her some things that were happening during remote learning, she was shocked. One of his classmates had used, as their own screen name, a shorthand for a racial slur that has long been used to torment Black people.
Scholars use the term “microaggressions” to describe offenses like this, which have been common in the classroom for years. In this context, “micro” doesn’t mean little or tiny, explained Derald Wing Sue, Ph.D., a professor of counseling psychology at Columbia University. It’s academic speak for “in the everyday.” As a result, unintentional slights fall under the term’s umbrella, but so too do blatant, purposeful insults. “There doesn’t have to be anything ‘micro’ about it,” Dr. Sue said, “and microaggressions can have ‘macro’ impact.”
Children experiencing this treatment inside their homes — with parents bearing witness — is a unique feature of distance learning. And it’s bringing up old feelings for some parents.
“There were so many overt things that happened to me in my own schooling,” Hartsough said, recalling statements like “Go back to Africa” and “Did you stick your finger in a light socket?” The racism she experienced “wasn’t really called out then,” she said. “This brings up so much for me.”
Now, researchers of race, psychology and child development say microaggressions might be heightened during this time of social unrest, and though they look a bit different virtually, steps must be taken to address them.
There’s an impact on targets and bystanders alike.
Cree Chancley of Charleston, S.C., watched weeks of virtual second-grade go by at her daughter’s new, predominantly white school, and she noticed something: The children of color in her 7-year-old daughter’s class received less attention than their white peers. “It’s been a month of school, and my kid and other P.O.C. kids are never in private sessions to make sure they are understanding,” said Chancley. “I also found the teacher very impatient when kids of color asked questions or needed assistance, and they receive less praise.”
Many people view such slights as “everyday rudeness,” but these biases are distinguished by both their nature and impact, said Dr. Sue, who wrote “Microaggressions in Everyday Life: Race, Gender, and Sexual Orientation.” Though some, such as slurs and anti-Semitic jokes, can be easy to identify, others contain a meaning of which the perpetrator has little or no conscious awareness, like praise that is based in a stereotype.
“All the time, people compliment me for speaking good English, and they don’t realize that the context of what is said is the perception that I’m a foreigner,” Dr. Sue said. In other words, the way the compliment is framed reveals an underlying assumption that makes it sting. The constant, cumulative nature of these comments, he said, makes them sting more.
“My daughter used to be motivated and happy, now she’s riddled with diagnosed anxiety and a general distaste toward school,” said Chancley, whose daughter has been in therapy for her anxiety since starting the new school. And witnessing the difference in treatment was also triggering for her. “It brought back my own experiences in the South Carolina school system, and how racism is still a very real thing,” she said.
Her daughter’s response aligns with research showing that discriminatory experiences can lead to sleep loss, impulsivity, anxiety, anger, depressive symptoms and other emotional issues, as well as stomachaches and headaches — all conditions that suppress engagement in school and affect cognitive functioning.
And it makes sense that Chancley has been affected as well. “Witnessing a microaggression that occurs to another individual in your own group also has a devastating impact upon the observer,” Dr. Sue said. Just being in the room, or hearing this behavior on Zoom, can negatively impact other children as well as a parent who overhears.
Stressful times may breed more hostile behavior.
Virginia Huynh, Ph.D., a researcher at California State University, Northridge, said the virtual classroom introduces new challenges. For example, delays and connection issues can make an accent more difficult to understand, and the digital-only interface can change student and teacher behavior. What’s known as the online disinhibition effect can cause students to say things they otherwise wouldn’t (a.k.a. “flame”) in unsupervised chats or comment sections.
Shawnita Sealy-Jefferson, Ph.D., a social epidemiologist and professor at Ohio State University, said the current racial reckoning in the U.S. is also a major factor. Sealy-Jefferson has noticed her own colleagues behaving differently toward her since the wave of protests and civil unrest this summer. “The status quo has persisted and now there’s a global uprising against anti-Black racism,” she said. “People are uncomfortable.”
The experiences she’s had weren’t “overly hostile,” Sealy-Jefferson said, but the negative attitudes toward her and other Black colleagues have been more apparent. “I’m a professor, so I can only imagine what the students are experiencing. These things are happening from elementary school all the way through Ph.D. training programs.”
Sealy-Jefferson, who pulled her own son out of public school in eighth grade due to racist experiences, said that anti-Black racism in particular is “woven into the fabric of our society, and as long as people of color exist in majority white spaces, biases will occur.”
Now, with virtual classrooms bringing hostile comments into the home, the place where a child normally feels most safe and valued, Dr. Sue said the adverse impact could be even more severe.
Students and teachers need tools to respond to bias.
“One of the most damaging things that happens to children is to feel paralyzed, to not know what to do,” Dr. Sue said. “You begin to think you are a coward … and it lowers your sense of self-efficacy and self-esteem.”
Yet there are ways to feel brave and dignified in the face of microaggressions. When his excellent English receives accolades, Dr. Sue now replies: “Thank you. I would hope so. I was born here.” By highlighting the communication tucked inside the statement — here, a lack of belonging — he’s “making the invisible visible.” A second anti-bias strategy involves “disarming the microaggression,” and it can be as simple as deflecting it with a response like “Ouch” or “Whoa.” For the third, “educating the perpetrator,” one of Dr. Sue’s scripts reads, “I know you meant that to be funny but that really hurt.”
When none of these options feels safe, children can use a final one: asking an adult for help.
This makes sense to Jeff Mead, an English teacher at Hillview Middle School in Menlo Park, Calif. “My goal as a teacher is to have a smooth, efficient, safe classroom, and if that is not working for you, I want to know why. If it’s a microaggression, if it’s something I said, I don’t want to be an idiot in front of a group of kids.” Mead said that as a gay child, he didn’t have the language to explain why he was upset when he heard the words “gay” and “fag” used as insults toward other kids. He likes the idea of parents preparing their children to take direct action in the face of such treatment, but arming students with these “microintervention” strategies isn’t enough in Mead’s book.
“You absolutely can’t leave the burden on the kids,” he said. Research on bullying reveals that children can interpret a teacher’s failure to call out and counteract behavior as tacit approval of it.
Other teachers can also step in to educate one another. Brianna Wright, an elementary teacher in Albany, Ga., at a school with a majority Black student population, said she’s often had to point out biases to her white colleagues. Recently, during group lesson planning, she had to explain to a white teacher why she would not show a video with the Confederate flag to her Black students. She’s also had to explain why it’s inappropriate to refer to Black students as “boy” instead of their name.
“With everything that’s going on now and considering the history of the use of ‘boy’ to degrade Black males, that’s just something you don’t say,” said Wright. Being a Black teacher puts her in a position to empathize with her students of all marginalized backgrounds, she said, but ultimately it comes down to teacher training. “I try to always be aware of my own biases,” she said, noting her degree in social work prepared her to “see both sides and sympathize” with her students better.
Tony Thurmond, the State Superintendent of Public Instruction in California, agrees that “every adult responsible for educating a child needs to have the knowledge, and the tools, to create a learning environment free from bias.” He said that’s why his office announced the “Education to End Hate” initiative on Sept. 21, that will award $200,000 in mini-grants to school districts to support educator training in the area of bias.
If parents and teachers give children words to “name the pain,” it can help insulate them against self-doubt when others try to dismiss their hurt as oversensitivity, said Daniel Solórzano, a professor of social science and comparative education at the University of California, Los Angeles, who recently co-authored “Racial Microaggressions: Using Critical Race Theory to Respond to Everyday Racism.”
This opportunity may be the upside of parents being able to hear how teachers and students are relating to their child in virtual school. A caregiver who hears their Latino child’s name being repeatedly mispronounced despite corrections, for example, can make a point of correcting the error, validating their child’s distress that their background doesn’t seem to be valued.
After a lifetime of second-guessing her own discriminatory experiences, Chancley is thankful that virtual learning has allowed her to call out her daughter’s experiences. Now, she’s focused on helping her learn to recognize these microaggressions for herself. “When you’re gaslit all your own life, it’s a very long and tiring battle,” she said. “That’s not what I want for my child.”
Advertisement
"bring" - Google News
December 04, 2020 at 05:30PM
https://ift.tt/2Ie2bAg
Remote Learning Can Bring Bias Into the Home - The New York Times
"bring" - Google News
https://ift.tt/38Bquje
Shoes Man Tutorial
Pos News Update
Meme Update
Korean Entertainment News
Japan News Update
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Remote Learning Can Bring Bias Into the Home - The New York Times"
Post a Comment