As a white, middle-class, Californian male, it would be obscene to say that privilege has had no part in shaping my identity. Both of my parents attended university, and while I was was growing up they worked well-paying jobs. In a world of growing divorce rates, I’ve been lucky enough to see my parents not only love and support me, but also do so to each other for the past twenty-one years of their marriage. I also consider myself lucky that they’ve kept me educated. From pushing me to do well in school and attend university, to playing National Public Radio in the car every morning (even when I begged them to change it!), my mom and dad set learning as an essential, lifelong practice.

The older I grew, the more prevalent it became to me that I was privileged. In the graphic memoir Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi, the protagonist Marji goes through a similar experience when she makes the realization, “I finally understood why I felt ashamed to sit in my father’s cadillac,” (Satrapi, 33). Marji begins to understand class inequality the same way that I understood my born socio-economic advantage. After this realization, people like Marji and I can’t help but wonder how they can understand or help people with problems that they themselves haven’t personally gone through.

The title of my post comes from a lyric from the popular song “Same Love” by the musical group Macklemore & Ryan Lewis. The song discusses the writer’s passion in progressing towards equality in the social world with an emphasis on eliminating the prejudice that LGBT individuals experience. Although the writer himself hasn’t gone through the harassment and struggles that members of the LGBT community have, he strongly emphasizes the ability and more so the responsibility of social progressives not in this community to support this social justice movement. If this “I’m not the same, but that’s not important” principle is valid across all platforms, then it is quite possible privilege is an irrelevant factor in a person’s ability to help those in need. For Marji and I both then, we should not feel bad about our advantages in life, but more so understand our responsibility to use those advantages to better the lives of those with less.

Sources:

Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis. New York, NY: Pantheon, 2003. Pritn.

Growing up in the most populous U.S. state, by grade seven I was used to 30+ student classrooms as the norm. Throughout middle and high school, you would hear concerned parents discuss over-filled classrooms and the negative effects they were having on our youth. “Where are our tax dollars going?”, “Why aren’t my kids getting the time they need?” were among the common concerns about the struggling public school system in California. However plentiful the concerns for this fact of matter were, not much attention was being given to the growing diversity of backgrounds in any given public school’s classroom. Out of the thirty-five kids in my grade nine Spanish class, probably 10 were white, 12 were latino, 8 were asian, 3 were black, and 2 were middle-eastern. Each one of us had a different history with the Spanish language, and with learning in general.

Not just in California, but all over the world, classrooms are becoming more diverse. In a 21st century classroom, how can teachers create and apply a curriculum that understands and works around a diverse group of individual students? Is it enough to vary instruction through visual, auditory, and kinesthetic models, or does the teacher have an obligation to learn individual narratives and shape learning around them?

The Ontario College of Teachers claims as one of their standards of practice, “[Teachers] treat students equitably and with respect and are sensitive to factors that influence individual student learning.” Although the standards of practice do not specifically detail the teacher’s full obligation to the individual student, this statement covers the principle that teachers must understand their students as individuals, all coming from different interpretive communities, with different ideas of learning and the role of education in one’s life.

In her paper discussing the role of interpretative communities in remembering and learning, Farhat Shahzad suggests it is important to build up networks between teachers, parents, and peers to “bridge the gap” between the classroom and the individual’s interpretive community. We can then see that the responsibility expands beyond just the teacher. A well-rounded education system requires not only a committed educator, but also the cooperation of parents and peers in creating a learning community. The idea of learning involves many different inputs, and a fluid education system must recognize the need to relate school to an individual’s own home community and vice versa.

Sources:

“Ontario College of Teachers: Standards of Practice” http://www.oct.ca/public/professional-standards/standards-of-practice

“The Role of Interpretive Communities in Remembering and Learning” by Farhat Shazhad, Canadian Journal of Education 34,3 (2011): 301-316