“#equality but I still don’t know what ba” (CC BY 2.0) by leighblackall
I am leaving in exactly two hours to drive to the airport and board a plane for Hawaii. I’m giving my first official presentation on my research. The conference is called the 8th Conference on Social Justice in Education. I write about my research work extensively in this blog, if you’re interested. In the meantime, I’d like to describe my experience with Weeks 3-4: Empathy and Bias of the Equity Unbound class.
I watched a video by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s called The Danger of a Single Story and posted a comment on twitter about my thoughts.
One of the first tasks was to watch and reflect on this video by Dr. Kandola called Diffusing Bias and follow that up with the Implicit Association Test. This is obviously a tool to test the biases we’re less aware of. I chose the female and male names related to career and family test. I scored a “strong automatic association for Male with Career and Female with Family.” This is my take on it though. I have a strong bias against associating men with family. I don’t have a lot of experience with men being particularly nurturing and emotionally supportive. I think this was less about negative thoughts about women and career than the other way around. Who knows though.
Hypothesis.is looks like a great tool that allows anyone to annotate a webpage. However, I really wasn’t able to get too involved in the article War in Translation: Giving Voice to the Women of Syria that was the focus of this activity. This was probably the worst day for me to read this article. I’m stressed about getting an increasing amount of school work and today is the testimony of Dr. Ford in front of congress. I’ve been avoiding social media to practice self-care. I struggle with reading stories like this one. I understand the importance of allowing people to share their stories, but I just find that it’s traumatizing to read.
Doing the Spent activity was challenging as well. I’m a grad student, and money is not flowing freely at the moment. I went broke in Spent because I paid a $400 vet bill, which is something that just happened to me – twice! I also have experienced most of the obstacles that happened in Spent. I’ve waited tables for $2.13 an hour, gone without health care, etc. Living without adequate income is an excruciating way to live. It’s constant underlying stress punctuated by episodes of total panic. Nobody should have to live under these circumstances in the U.S.
Ed Tech for the Funky Ones 