Technology Teacher 06/06/2016

• Textbook

  - racial groups include many ethnic groups and ethnic groups may contain more than one racial group - until 1952, immigrants had to be white until they were able to be naturalized citizens - miscegenation laws stopped whites from marrying another race - " a crucial fact in understanding racism is that many whites see themselves as better than people and groups of color, and as a result, exercise their power to prevent people of color from securing the prestige, power and privilege held by them" - "they argue that they have never discriminated and they take no responsibility for society's racism." - the problem is that color blindness helps maintain white privilege because it does not recognize the existence of racial inequality in schools" - students can be treated differently as long as the treatment is fair and appropriate, to accomplish the goal of student learning. - A first step in confronting racism in schools is to realize that racism exists and that, if teachers are white, they have benefited from it. - Why would a teacher not believe a report of racism? it is their job to report all incidents that could be harmful to any student. - they should intervene when other students call students racist names. - a multi-ethnic curriculum permeates all subject areas at all levels of education, with accurate and positive references to ethnic diversities. Afrocentric curriculum - tell the truth about black history. - Create a ethnic studies elective and have students during that week do presentations and other projects to the rest of the school.

• Mining the Jewel of Black History Month | Teaching Tolerance - Diversity, Equity and Justice

  • Many of those lessons were learned during February, and much of what I now know about the relationship of race and culture to curriculum and pedagogy stemmed from my fear of doing Black History month the “wrong way.” 
  • Fatimah Hutchings and Dionte Brown, former students of mine, taught me two ways Black History Month should not be handled
  • The first was limiting the study and celebration of black history to a few special events or projects in February
  • The second was, in my well-intended effort to steer clear of the “heroes and holidays” approach, missing February’s special opportunity to dwell with my students in the richness of black culture and history.
  • Dr. King and Maya Angelou surrounded by a kente cloth border, entered students into a local essay contest about the meaning of black history, and taught a week-long unit on black inventors,
  • Fatimah zinged me. “What’s all this black stuff? You’re only teaching us this because it’s February and you don’t want anyone to think you’re racist,” she said.  
  • I integrated black history into my world history curriculum, introducing the Red Summer of 1919 into our unit on WWI
  • the women of Gees Bend (Ala.) into our lessons about the Great Depression
  • Then in February, we began to study the Rise of European Fascism. That’s when I learned the Dionte lesson. “Why are we learning about Stalin and Hitler and all these dead white guys during Black History Month?” he wanted to know.
  • I explained the risks of reducing or marginalizing black history to the span of one month and the scope of one class.
  • And finally, I pointed to various learning artifacts around the room, “Look how much we’ve learned about black people and black history this year,” I said. “We didn’t have to wait for February!”
  • I realized that Fatimah and Dionte were both right. Filing black history away for February was clearly inauthentic and insulting, but minimizing the month was arrogant.
  • n my fourth year, I assembled a black history month committee of students and staff (all staff, not just teachers). We moved black history month out of the social studies classroom and into the school community.
  • Students watched movies and attended workshops on topics related to black history and culture. Teachers, parents and support staff led film discussions and hosted workshops on a range of topics including African Americans in sports and the Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) experience.
  • We held a student panel discussion about the effects of gentrification on our city. The art department hosted a black art poster contest. Kids formed performance teams to reenact their chosen moment in black history. And, yes, it all culminated with a grand assembly where the choir sang the Black National Anthem and James Brown’s “Say it Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud” pumped through the speakers. Everyone learned something new. It was beautiful. 
  • I also continued to reflect on how I could best teach my students about the history and experiences of African Americans across the curriculum and all year long.
  • My February social studies lessons focused on the history of Black History Month. We studied the “father of Black History,” Carter G. Woodson, and his connection to our city, Washington, D.C.
  • We struggled through close readings of Woodson’s 1933 The Miseducation of the Negro which, among other things, provides a defense of why he started Negro History Week in 1926.
  • He wrote, “The thought of the inferiority of the Negro is drilled into him in almost every class he enters and in almost every book he studies.”  
  • Black History Month is part of an educational lineage and tradition that has evolved into the work of anti-bias, anti-racist, multicultural, culturally responsive and social justice educators.

• Do's and Don'ts of Teaching Black History | Teaching Tolerance - Diversity, Equity and Justice

  • Do's and Don'ts of Teaching Black History

  • DO...

     

    Incorporate black history year-round, not just in February. Use the month of February to dig deeper into history and make connections with the past

  • Continue Learning.
  • Textbooks are notorious for omitting information about the struggles of communities, and what they include is limited, so use the textbook as one of many resources.
  • Reinforce to students that "black" history is American history.
  • black history relevant to all students.
  • Relate lessons to other parts of your curriculum
  • the context of the struggle for civil rights and social justice should be familiar to students if you have already addressed such issues across the curriculum.
  • Connect issues in the past to current issues 
  • ask students to gather information with a focus on what social disparities exist today and how a particular leader has worked to change society
  • Include the political and social context 
  • You see her bravery not as just a personal act but as coming out of community determination
  • DO NOT...
  • Stop your "regular" curriculum
  • This trivializes and marginalizes anything you are teaching, making these leaders a token of their culture and ethnicity.
  • Students will get the message that the diversion it is not as important as the "regular" curriculum.
  • Decontextualize heroes or holidays,
  • separating them from the larger social movement or historical place
  • For example, if you teach about James Farmer, you must also address the work of the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE) and the Freedom Rides
  • Focus on superficial cultural traits based on stereotypes.
  • It's ok to celebrate black music, but teachers should also explore the political and social contexts that give rise to musical forms like hip hop.
  • his fails to help students examine how racism manifests itself today.
  • alk about black history in solely "feel-good" language
  •  Be sure to allow students an opportunity for discussion and reflection
  • Limit the presentation to lectures and reading
  • Teach with little or inaccurate information.
  • Review resources to make sure they don't promote a Eurocentric perspective, which may misrepresent historic figures and social movements.
  • Shy away from controversial, ambiguous, or unresolved issues. 
  • Share the real-life experiences about racial realities in developmentally appropriate ways.

• 'Acting White' Myth, The - The New York Times

  • "boys attacking other boys because the boys are studying and they say, 'You're acting white."'
  • it has since become almost a truism: when smart black kids try hard and do well, they are picked on by their less successful peers for "acting white.
  • What they found was that black students basically have the same attitudes about achievement as their white counterparts do: they want to succeed, understand that doing well in school has important consequences in later life and feel better about themselves the better they do.
  • there's an "oppositional peer culture" in every high school -- the stoners and the jocks making fun of the nerds and the student-government types.
  • When white burnouts give wedgies to white A students, the authors argue, it is seen as inevitable, but when the same dynamic is observed among black students, it is pathologized as a racial neurosis.
  • And significantly, at this particular school, the notion of the burden of "acting white" was most pervasive not among the black students interviewed by the researchers, but among their teachers and administrators, who told researchers that blacks are "averse to success" and "don't place a high value on education."

• Acting White Part 2

  - current science suggests that one race is not smarter then another - the social idea could be affecting African american students in standardized testing because they are not trying as hard so they are not seen as acting white - statistics can be miss leading as well. Tell a black student that they are more likely to score lower than whites and you might have a self fulfilling prophecy. - the fear of being ostracized from a group could affect students from trying harder. - if students do not try in school then society is tasked with supporting the unprepared students - success comes from being able to exist in a variety of worlds. - slang, its the language for friends. It is a way to hide something from someone you don't want to know what your saying. - kicking your old friends to the side for new friends, that is just wrong - student defending why they called someone acting white.

• Part 1 Acting White

  -Acting white is achieving or succeeding or being involved in extracurricular activites. - use standard English language - black students sabotage each others - underachievers will accuse them of acting white or try to bring them down. - students try not to achieve as much to avoid being seen as acting white. - stunted by racial disloyalty - family influence can perpetuate the negative stereotypes - why putdown other students - if they leave them behind, they will call them acting black - labels like hang with white be acting white or trying to be like a group - is there something wrong with being smart. - whites are demonized in african american mythology

• Counting Mixed-Race America Grows Ever More Complex - NYTimes.com

  • And if she is now confronted with a blank space for her race, she might challenge the form with a question of her own: “What does this tell you?”

• Counting Mixed-Race America Grows Ever More Complex - NYTimes.com

  • Harvard Civil Rights Project in 2006 showed that the new method of race reporting would result in a significant reduction in the black student population nationally, producing data that it called “questionable and often meaningless.”
  • And a federal task force had concluded that creating a multiracial category would “add to racial tensions and further fragmentation” of the population.
  • multiracial catchall, concerned that such an option would diminish minority numbers, particularly blacks, in government counts.
  • But Project RACE, for Reclassify All Children Equally, one of the largest and most vocal multiracial advocacy groups, and its president, Susan Graham, a white mother of biracial children, were among those who had pushed equally hard for a multiracial classification.
  • Some people of mixed race were fickle about their racial identifications in early tests of the new, more expansive methods, changing their answers from interview to interview.
  • Moreover, because the census in 2000 began allowing respondents to mark as many races as they wanted, today’s numbers are not directly comparable with those before 2000.
  • 38 states and the District of Columbia report race data in the new and more expansive manner that allows for the recording of more than one race.
  • For example, a birth to a parent who marked white, Asian and Native American would be declared just one of those races, depending on a number of variables in a probability model, like sex, age of the mother and place of birth.

• Counting Mixed-Race America Grows Ever More Complex - NYTimes.com

  • The chameleon-like quality of Ms. López-Mullins’s racial and ethnic identification might seem trivial except that statistics on ethnicity and race are used for many important purposes.
  • But when it comes to keeping racial statistics, the nation is in transition, moving, often without uniformity, from the old “mark one box” limit to allowing citizens to check as many boxes as their backgrounds demand.
  • he number of mixed-race Americans, for example, is rising rapidly, largely because of increases in immigration and intermarriage in the past two decades.
  • (One in seven new marriages is now interracial or interethnic.)
  • any student like Ms. López-Mullins who acknowledges even partial Hispanic ethnicity will, regardless of race, be reported to federal officials only as Hispanic.
  • “They’re all lumped together — blacks, Asians and Latinos — and they all look the same from the data perspective,
  • “But the reality is much different. There are different kinds of discrimination experienced by these subgroups.”
  • The standards were also devised to save schools time and money. If schools were to report on every possible racial and ethnic combination to the federal authorities, there would be dozens of possibilities. It is simply easier to call students “two or more races.”

• When and How Does Ethnicity Matter? A Cross-National Study of Social Work Responses to Ethnicity in Child Protection Cases

  • At a cross-national level, no robust evidence  exists to illustrate similarities or differences in social work response to ethnicity.
  • It demonstrates, perhaps surprisingly given national  variations in legislation and professional practice, that overall, country by country, the child’s ethnic affiliation evokes  little significant response by social workers, confirming a largely universalist approach

• Poverty: How does ethnicity matter? – Understanding Society

  • Key findings include:

     
     
    • Over 40% of Bangladeshi and Pakistani children are growing up in poverty, compared with 31% of Chinese, 22% of Black Caribbean and 15% of children in the white majority population.
     
    • Over a third of Pakistani men and over half of Bangladeshi men are paid below the living wage.
     
    • Nearly a quarter of all graduates are now over-qualified for their jobs, but for Black African graduates this figure rises to 40%.

• Standards for the Classification of Federal Data on Race and Ethnicity | The White House

  • These standards are used governmentwide for recordkeeping, collection, and presentation of data on race and ethnicity in Federal statistical activities and program administrative reporting.
  • citizens who report information about themselves and users of the information collected by Federal agencies have indicated that the categories set forth in Directive No. 15 are becoming less useful in reflecting the diversity of our Nation's population.
  • While the Ad Hoc Committee recognized that there is frequently a relationship between language and ethnicity, it made no attempt to develop a means of identifying persons on the basis of their primary language.
  • The Ad Hoc Committee wanted to ensure that whatever categories the various agencies used could be aggregated, disaggregated, or otherwise combined so that the data developed by one agency could be used in conjunction with the data developed by another agency.
  • These revised categories and definitions became effective in September 1976 for all compliance recordkeeping and reporting required by the Federal agencies represented on the Ad Hoc Committee.
  • Based upon this interagency agreement, OMB drafted for agency comment a proposed revision of the race and ethnic categories contained in its circular on standards and guidelines for Federal statistics.
  • This meant that for the first time, standard categories and definitions would be used at the Federal level in reporting and presentation of data on racial and ethnic groups.
  • While OMB requires the agencies to use these racial and ethnic categories, it should be emphasized that the
  • Directive permits collection of additional detail if the more detailed categories can be aggregated into the basic racial and ethnic classifications set forth in the Directive.
  • Among the proposed changes was a revision of Directive No. 15 that would have added an "Other" racial category and required classification by self-identification.
  • it drew strong opposition from Federal agencies such as the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, the Department of Health and Human Services, the EEOC, and the Office of Personnel Management, and from large corporations.
  • Respondents who opposed the change asserted that the present system provided adequate data, that any changes would disrupt historical continuity, and that the proposed change would be expensive and potentially divisive.
  • Some members of minority communities interpreted the proposal as an attempt to provoke internal dissension within their communities and to reduce the official counts of minority populations. Because it was evident from all of these comments that this proposal would not be widely accepted, no changes were made at the time to Directive No. 15.
  • -- adding a "multi-racial" category to the list of racial designations so that respondents would not be forced to deny part of their heritage by having to choose a single category; 

    -- adding an "other" category for individuals of multi- racial backgrounds and those who want the option of specifically stating a unique identification;

  • -- providing an open-ended question to solicit information on race and ethnicity, or combining concepts of race, ethnicity, and ancestry;
  • -- changing the name of the "Black" category to "African American";
  • -- changing the name of the "American Indian or Alaskan Native" category to "Native American";
  • -- including Native Hawaiians as a separate category or as part of a "Native American" category (which would also include American Indians, Aleuts, and Eskimos), rather than as part of the "Asian or Pacific Islander" category;
  • -- including Hispanic as a racial designation, rather than as a separate ethnic category; and
  • -- adding a "Middle Easterner" category to the list of ethnic designations.
  • -- The categories and their definitions have been criticized for failing to be comprehensive and scientific.
  • The identification of an individual's racial and ethnic "category" often is a subjective determination, rather than one that is objective and factual, no matter what the process for arriving at the categories. Consequently, it has been suggested that it may no longer be appropriate to consider the categories as a "statistical standard."
  • The perceived importance of historical comparability of racial and ethnic data has been questioned by some. Since the names of the categories have changed in the decennial censuses, and agencies use different methods even internally to collect the data, there is less continuity in racial and ethnic data than many believed.
  • Some important examples of the Federal Government's uses of racial and ethnic data are: 
     
    • enforcing the requirements of the Voting Rights Act;
     
    • reviewing State redistricting plans;
     
    • collecting and presenting population and population characteristics data, labor force data, education data, and vital and health statistics;
     
    • establishing and evaluating Federal affirmative action plans and evaluating affirmative action and discrimination in employment in the private sector;
     
    • monitoring the access of minorities to home mortgage loans under the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act;
     
    • enforcing the Equal Credit Opportunity Act;
     
    • monitoring and enforcing desegregation plans in the public schools;
     
    • assisting minority businesses under the minority business development programs; and
     
    • monitoring and enforcing the Fair Housing Act.
  • These examples of statutory requirements are mentioned to foster public awareness and understanding of the Federal Government's many different needs for racial and ethnic data.
  • The racial and ethnic categories set forth in the standard should not be interpreted as being scientific or anthropological in nature.

  • 1. Definitions

     

    The basic racial and ethnic categories for Federal statistics and program administrative reporting are defined as follows:

     
     
    1. American Indian or Alaskan Native. A person having origins in any of the original peoples of North America, and who maintains cultural identification through tribal affiliations or community recognition.
          
     
    2. Asian or Pacific Islander. A person having origins in any of the original peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, or the Pacific Islands. This area includes, for example, China, India, Japan, Korea, the Philippine Islands, and Samoa.
          
     
    3. Black. A person having origins in any of the black racial groups of Africa.
          
     
    4. Hispanic. A person of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Central or South American or other Spanish culture or origin, regardless of race.
          
     
    5. White. A person having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, North Africa, or the Middle East.
     
     

    2. Utilization for Recordkeeping and Reporting

     

    To provide flexibility, it is preferable to collect data on race and ethnicity separately. If separate race and ethnic categories are used, the minimum designations are:

     
    a. Race:
      - American Indian or Alaskan Native
      - Asian or Pacific Islander
      - Black
      - White
     

    
      b. Ethnicity:
      - Hispanic origin
      - Not of Hispanic origin

  • If a combined format is used to collect racial and ethnic data, the minimum acceptable categories are:

     

    American Indian or Alaskan Native
      Asian or Pacific Islander
      Black, not of Hispanic origin
      Hispanic
      White, not of Hispanic origin.

  • The minimum standard collection categories shall be utilized for reporting as follows:

     
     
    1. Civil rights compliance reporting.
  • General program administrative and grant reporting
  • Statistical reporting.

  • In cases where the above designations are considered inappropriate for presentation of statistical data on particular programs or for particular regional areas, the sponsoring agency may use:

     

    (1) The designations "Black and Other Races" or "All Other Races," as collective descriptions of minority races when the most summary distinction between the majority and minority races is appropriate;

     

    (2) The designations "White," "Black,"and "All Other Races" when the distinction among the majority race, the principal minority race and other races is appropriate; or

     

    (3) The designation of a particular minority race or races, and the inclusion of "Whites" with "All Other Races," if such a collective description is appropriate.

  • When the primary focus of a statistical report is on two or more specific identifiable groups in the population, one or more of which is racial or ethnic, it is acceptable to display data for each of the particular groups separately and to describe data relating to the remainder of the population by an appropriate collective description.

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