"B" Blog Bell

 "B" Blog Teaching on the Intersections by Bell and 5 Tips for Being A Good Ally

I never thought of intersectionality as a lens for an educator but I really appreciated the break down. Recently I have learned about intersectional identity and I feel we brought some of this to our training/project for my summer camp staff. We played a game where staff had to make assumptions about different aspects of our identities, some you can judge pretty clearly from the outside but others you had to guess based on what little information they had from earlier activities during the day. April and I then talk about ourselves so staff could know what they did, and didn't guess right about us. The biggest take away for me was hearing one of my staff mention that what you can see on the outside doesn't sum up who we are as individuals. I hope my team takes this in mind when thinking about their students' identities.

"An identity-based discussion that directly focuses on layers of oppression might seem too difficult to navigate in class. But for Torres, raising these issues is a way of privileging her students’ identities, experiences and stories. She hears students talking about race, gender and other identity layers outside of class, giving her the green light to bring up these topics in class." I appreciate this quote because it brings to light, relevancy again, topics in class should represent the relevancy in students' lives but I wonder what tools and resources do you give educators, especially white, privilege educators to equip them for these discussions?

The following paragraphs were extremally powerful to me, especially, "Every day kids enter our class, there’s an opportunity for them to be empowered or oppressed." I believe this is, not only another example of how power plays in a classroom but an important factor in education to remember, as educators, as adults in students lives, WE have the power to keep safe, or harm our youth. I also found the Ally video to be powerful. The introduction alone, really paints a picture through the metaphor of why its important to listen to marginalized groups when you want to help, because you do not know how to help them having never been a part of their identity/ies . 

1. Understand your privilege - I really appreciate the breakdown in the simplest of terms, that privilege is the reference to never having to think about certain self identities the way marginalized people do

2. Listen - I always lift up listen with empathy, when I was beginning this work, some people would get mad at me for having nothing to say (specially the white people) but often I was listening and process what people were saying and did not feel I had either the space to speak or the understanding to do so and that's okay because I was listening to learn from others.

3. Speak up, not over - I think this is my favorite of the 5, I have had many conversations about when it's appropriate to speak on behalf of others and people are always perplexed by this idea, and creating weird scenarios like how do we give people space "at the table" instead of speaking for them. Dont get me wrong, creating safe space for communities to speak up for themselves and be heard is important but often times these spaces are not safe for marginalized people and we, as white people need to understand that and when it is necessary to speak up v. when to create space and listen.

4. It okay to make mistakes, but apologize regardless of intent v. impact - This was also something we spoke about in our training and used different scenarios and words to talk about how something may sound like a compliment for you, but is actually harmful. This was hard for my staff and while they didn't question April's story, they did question mine and had to be reminded that the intent doesn't matter, the impact hurt me deeply.

5. Ally is a verb, do the work - I'm going to give people this video after REI trainings. I find people want to be an ally but those trainings don't really lay it out for you or where to start and there is no one size fits all but I enjoyed this video with concrete steps that I think would help others in thinking about what their next steps would be.