"This Feels Weird"

I was drawn to Laura Vernikoff’s presentation at the PDS conference, "’This Feels Weird’ - Talking About Race and Other Differences in a High School English Classroom” for two reasons: because of the impact we know that school climate has on the quality of the learning environment, and for the implications I saw for the issue of “global competence”.  (How can students develop the ability to work "cross-culturally" on a global basis, if they haven't learned to interact with the people in their own high school?)

It also seemed particularly relevant in light of the current controversy over the comments regarding race by Reverend Wright and Senator Obama.

In one assignment, Laura asked her students to draw a “social map” of the high school – what groups of students tended to hang out together? As you would expect, the students identified the usual subgroups: the “jocks” and the artsy types, but also groups based on ethnicity: African-Americans, Koreans, etc.

What this exercise brought up in many of her students was the unspoken fear that by consciously acknowledging (writing down) what everyone saw, but wouldn’t say - that students tended to self-segregate along several criteria, including race - that this act of acknowledgement made them racist. Thus, a typical comment: "this feels weird". 

It’s the learning to talk about the weirdness that I think has the greatest potential value. It seems to me that part of the responsibility of public education in producing competent citizens is in giving them the skills to have these conversations.

She also talked about the popular misconception that "minority" students receive most of the benefit from “minority” studies - which, of course, missing the point completely. We do a disservice to all our students – particularly in this “global age” - if we fail to expand their horizons beyond their own cultural experience. As she said, “one of the purposes of a multicultural education is for students to use other ways of thinking, not just talk about them.”