Workshop on Hidden Bias and Microaggressions
Julie Barker
Teacher Center Director, Pittsford Central School District October 29th, 2020 : 6:00 - 9:00 pm
This workshop will explore the hidden biases we all carry due to a lifetime of exposure to cultural attitudes about age, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, social class, sexuality, disability status, and nationality. A large portion of the workshop will be based on the work of Mahzarin R. Banaji and Anthony Greenwald from their book, Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People.
Time will also be spent exploring the concept of microaggressions. This will include defining the term, reviewing examples of microaggressions, and exploring ways in which we can respond to them when we encounter them. After the presentation, participants will have an overview of hidden bias and microaggressions and an understanding of the training provided to teachers and staff at PCSD.
Speaker Bio
Julie Barker joined the District in 1995 as a social studies teacher at Pittsford Middle School. Barker attended the State University of New York at Cortland receiving her B.A. in History and Secondary Social Studies in 1990 and her M.A. in American history in 1995.
From 2000-2007, she served as the Standards Leader for Elementary and Secondary Social Studies and taught Economics at both Mendon and Sutherland High Schools. During that time she was the recipient of the Genesee Valley ASCD Emerging Curriculum Leader Award for outstanding contributions to education in the area of curriculum. In 2007, she became the Director of the Pittsford Teacher Center. While leading the Pittsford Teacher Center, she has served as co-chair of the Greater Rochester Teacher Center Network since 2015 and is a December 2016 graduate of the Learning Forward Academy.
The Pittsford Teacher Center has been in existence since 1978 and serves the needs of over 800 educators in the Pittsford Central School District, as well as St. Louis School and Allendale Columbia School. The PTC provides professional learning that is aligned with the District’s Professional Development Plan and Strategic Initiative. Programs are coordinated by the Teacher Center Director in collaboration with district and building administrators, district Standards Leaders, and PDTA leaders. The Teacher Center’s purpose is to provide high quality professional learning for educators that is designed to improve the quality of teaching and learning in the Pittsford Schools.
Workshop Review
This last Thursday evening was a very successful event with our own Julie Barker. She shared with us the training work completed over the summer for hidden bias and Microaggressions. For 3 hours, we covered topics from cognitive biases to developing more inclusive materials for the classroom, to how microaggressions negatively impact underrepresented individuals not just face to face, but through everyday social and traditional media.
Mrs. Barker started with a discussion on the topics of diversity, inclusivity and equity with the sharing of video from Dr. Derrick Gay.
Dr. Gay argued the point of view of Diversity not as identity, but as the “Space that Connects us” and that it is important to change diversity from the presence of a specific set of identities to excellence in equity.
“I would argue, quite simply that perhaps the goal of diversity is excellence in equity, that we strive to foster society that no matter who you are, and where you come from, no matter what you have, or what you don't have, no matter who you love or who you worship, or chose not to worship, you can totally flourish. I strongly believe that everyone should have the opportunity to participate in these initiatives and I am strongly committed to everyone.”
Attendees then broke off into smaller groups to discuss the definitions of diversity and inclusion that Dr. gay presented. After a short period, they reconvened to share their small group findings, Mrs. Barker then went on to talk about how we see these topics through a lens and this lens brings different viewpoints. For many of us, we grew up in communities that lacked cultural, ethnic and racial differences and this has shaped our lens that we view the world through.
Attendees voiced differing opinions on how diversity is perceived as a negative or a positive effect depending on how you were brought up and that in community where there is lower exposure to people of different cultural identities and backgrounds, this introduction of diversity can be seen as an attack on their identity, as a loss of what they perceive as “normal” while those that have been brought up in a more diverse community where differences are considered a large benefit see it as becoming more inclusive and fair.
Julie then covered additional areas regarding how the human mind creates bias’, how it can impact even the simplest of observations and how we develop stereotypes from an early age that impact our viewpoint on the world. This topic helped to validate the existence of bias’ in the audience through observation and quantification by the psychological research community.
After building a general understanding of hidden bias’ Mrs. Barker then went on to give examples of how this is approached in the classroom with teachers, including
“So, now we've got this information, what do we do as teachers, counselors, psychologists, and so on? And what steps can we take? Well, what we recognize is that some of the ways that cultural influences get defined is for school. And so what can we do, when we are trying to affect how our students are seeing the world, kids learn from images and storylines. So an example is, I'm a social studies teacher. When you are looking for images on Google, some of the first images to pop up may not be the best representation of my class. But it is very easy as a white female teacher to pick these images, and go with them. But if I'm making myself more aware of the images, and the storylines that I'm sending, I can be using more inclusive images that have more of the differences represented in society and then I would be including more of my students in the visuals that are being shared.”
She went on to say, “I'm going to tell you that our teachers are, we're hungry for this information. There was not one teacher that I've ever worked with and said, that's a bad idea.” “Teachers said, Wow, it didn't even occur to me. I'm so glad that we're having this conversation.”
She went on to finish the section by saying that “these are our students and we want to create an environment in which each one of them feel safe, the names that we use on test items, they need to be reflective of the students, not of our individual cultural experience.”
“The authors that we use the images in our rooms, the examples that we referenced. So that's work that we've done, as teachers in over 100 to 200 have participated in training such as this and that's the work that we are doing on behalf of our community, but specifically on behalf of your kids, right, we want all of our kids to feel safe in our environment.”
During the second part of the workshop, Mrs. Barker referenced the work of Dr. Derald Wing Sue, Ph.D., is Professor of Psychology and Education in the Department of Counseling and Clinical Psychology at Teachers College and the School of Social Work, Columbia University, who originally coined the term Microaggressions and that much of the current research available online references this text.
One of the stronger and more controversial examples she covered was probably one of the most well known incidents of a micro aggression. Was it or wasn't it? This is John McCain, in 2008, running for president and he is running against Barack Obama, in a town hall, where he stopped and shared the mic and a woman says to him, “I don't like Obama, he’s an arab”, after which McCain defends Obama as a “decent family man and citizen”...
When asking the workshop address to identify the microaggression, many of us got it wrong, identifying the woman as making a microaggression against Obama and the black community. After some redirection by Mrs. Barker, it became clear that the first statement was a racist and false “macroaggression” and that the real microaggression was done by McCain, in identifying that Obama was a “decent family man and citizen”, which inadvertently suggests that Arabic people are not decent family oriented citizens in America.
Julie then went on to cover a number of examples of microaggressions in conversation and media, some shared below:
Finally the workshop concluded with Mrs. Barker focusing on how to this work can be used to enable more active awareness of bias and microaggressions in the classroom. And she shared tools she uses to act as reminders and to build awareness.
One resource is Teaching Tolerances, “Speak Up against Bias” pocket guide, resources and printouts.
Overall the evening was a well developed overview of the introductory training topics covered by the Teacher Training Center. Julie emphasized that this is an introduction and that next steps from this work are already in process with training the district has actively pursued and executing on over the last year. Julie emphasized that “this is important work and I don't think we're done. But I think we're committed to this. I'm so glad to share that with you because you should know and we want you all to know what our teachers are working towards.” PCSD board members and superintendent were also in attendance and shared their commitment to continuing and developing this work.
Resources:
Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People: http://blindspot.fas.harvard.edu/Book