Racial Microaggressions in Everyday Life: Is Racial Bias Harmless? Derek Wing Sue

Faulk, M
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Racial Microaggressions in Everyday Life: Is Racial Bias Harmless? Derek Wing Sue
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/microaggressions-in-everyday-life/201010/racial-microaggressions-in-everyday-life (Links to an external site.)

Summary:Space does not allow me to elaborate the harmful impact of racial microaggressions, but I summarize what the research literature reveals. Although they may appear like insignificant slights, or banal and trivial in nature, studies reveal that racial microaggressions have powerful detrimental consequences to people of color. They have been found to: (a) assail the mental health of recipients, (b) create a hostile and invalidating work or campus climate, (c) perpetuate stereotype threat, (d) create physical health problems, (e) saturate the broader society with cues that signal devaluation of social group identities, (f) lower work productivity and problem solving abilities, and (g) be partially responsible for creating inequities in education, employment and health care.

Evaluation: An eye-opening article about the "little" things (slights) that may happen each day in the classroom, possibly, to any student. The perspective is from an Asian American's viewpoint who speaks to what he sees going on around him and incidents that draw attention to this very real problem.

Teacher spends two days as a student and is shocked at what she learns 

Gloria Maciejewski

ET - Educational Theory  

Strauss, V.  (2014, Oct. 24) Teacher spends two days as a student and is shocked at what she learns. The Washington Post. retrieved from: 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2014/10/24/teacher-spends-two-days-as-a-student-and-is-shocked-at-what-she-learned/?tid=pm_pop

This is an article I think every teacher should read, no matter where they are in the career.

 It appeared first on a blog by Grant Wiggins, author of Understanding by Design. It turns out that it was written by his daughter, Alexis,  who had transition out the role of teacher after 15 years and was now an instructional coach at an American High School overseas. As part of an introduction into her new role, her administrator asked she shadow a 10th grader and a 12th grader.  She uses her experiences to form three reflective  Key Take-Aways.
1.  Students sit all day long and it is exhausting (no surprise there)
2.  High school students are asked to passively absorb for (a shocking) 90% of the time.
3.  Students wind up feeling like a nuisance all day long.

She then goes on to frame what she would have done differently given the chance to do it all again.

New teachers and old could benefit from this article. I wish there was an elementary version. Wake up teachers and get your kids moving and active.

ET- Arenas of Practice

Benson, Jessica

ET

Schoenfeld, A. (1999). Looking toward the 21^st Century: Challenges of Educational Theory and Practice. Educational Researcher, 28 (7), 4-14. Retrieved from http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0013-189X%28199910%2982%3A7%3C4%3ALTT2CC%3E2.0.CO%3B2-0

Summary

In this paper Schoenfeld sets out to identify a series of arenas for investigation in which theoretical and practical progress can be made in the field of education. He argues that “pure” and “applied” work in research need not be in conflict, but that that contributions to knowledge and practice should complement and reinforce each other. Educational research can and should be conducted in contexts that are of practical import. He identifies the theoretical and practical issues in which progress needs to be made, and outlines his conceptual framework for joining theory and practice. Schoenfeld's question of the difficulties in unifying the cognitive and the social aspects of learning continues the discussion of how we think and act in the world, as well as offering ideas about the how the mind works in context. His quest for a truly integrated theoretical perspective on issues of self, identity, and social interactions has very practical applications: “The better you understand how someathing is done, the better you can help people do it” (p.6).

Evaluation

This article was one of the first that I encountered while creating my reading plan, and while it does not offer many solutions for the problems in educational theory, it does pose many interesting questions (which is arguably more important). He poses questions about the future of creating detailed models of teaching based on theoretical understanding, and I am focusing my reading on work that has come out of this question in the decade since this article was published. What I found interesting about this article was Schoenfeld's focus on creating not only a theory of learning but a theory of mechanism-- the processes by which learning take place. The discussion of how we make sense of the ways in which people use knowledge in differing circumstances (transfer) is an important factor in considering educational theory.