The topic I will be teaching out about is privilege. Throughout this course, I have seen that privilege is a topic we have gone back to time and time again and is usually what generates our best discussions. While I came into this course feeling proficient in my understanding of what my privilege is and how it has contributed to my life, through engaging in discussions and listening to other classmates I now have a much stronger ability to express to others what privilege is and why it is important that they understand their privilege.
I am looking to teach out privilege to my school community by giving an interactive presentation, creating a handout, and providing them with some readings. I believe that this teach out will be very eye opening to my team because privilege is not something we talk very much about or reflect on as a school community. We teach brown and black high school students in an urban district and the majority of us are white; increasing our understanding of privilege and how it affects both us and our students will ultimately allow us to better understand where our students are coming from, how they view us, and hopefully allow us to strengthen our relationships with them. Throughout the interactive presentation I also hope that team members are able to become closer to one another as they share personal information about their back stories. Even though we work together every day, we never spend enough time getting to know one another and where we came from.
I believe discussing privilege will be both a learning and coming together experience for my faculty and I am thoroughly looking forward to putting together this presentation, handout, and readings to best engage them.
The articles I have chosen to write summaries for are: The Problem We All Live With and Privilege, Power, and Difference. These articles shed light on how much privilege plays into acquiring a good education and what we as educators can do to ensure we give our minority students the best education possible.
I think this is a great place to start, Jackson, and I have some suggestions and supports for you as you move forward with this idea. First, this is a HUGE topic so you need to make sure that you are clearly focused on 2-3 concrete take aways that you hope to teach out here. To that end, WHY? Why do you believe that your colleague need to talk about this notion of privilege? How does it impact the teaching and learning that happens in your school? You have to find a way to explain WHY this matters before you explain WHAT it is. I do workshops like this a lot and would be happy to share some other ideas and strategies I have used as you work on planning. Let's talk!
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