- How has your upbringing/schooling shaped how you “read the world?” What biases and lenses do you bring to the classroom? How might we unlearn / work against these biases?
- Which “single stories” were present in your own schooling? Whose truth mattered?
I was raised at the centre of things but I was not raised ignorant. I was raised to respect people who were different and to resist and fight prejudice. But most of the books I read were about people like me – white. (Or at least that’s how I imagined the characters in the books I read.) The people I saw on television and in movies certainly looked like me, with a few exceptions.
I heard many “single” stories. Africa was poverty-stricken. Indigenous communities were poverty-stricken. Central America was undeveloped. And on and on. The underlying message was: if only these communities could enjoy the same privileges we enjoy, “they” would be just like us. The tone was liberal, hopeful and progressive… but uncritical.
Jeff Millar's Education Blog 
I think you touch on a very important aspect in your reflection, uncritical. Far to often we may be exposed to ideas or topics that only touch the surface of the issue, then that is all we see. it doesn’t go deeper than what the status quo has created. As future educators, I believe we all have this aspiration to not only think critically about what we are doing but to enable our students to examine things in a critical fashion to remove inherent biases that we all have.
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