- Challenging forms of oppression through the ideology of anti-oppression
In 2018, I was given a few articles to read, few of them written by Kevin Kumashiro, during my first Professional Development Day at Mount Royal Collegiate in Saskatoon. The theme of these articles was based on creating an anti-oppressive environment. A few things that I have learned in that one day was that diversity will always be an ongoing learning process, so having to gain knowledge on how to touch on subject in regards to multiculturalism needs to be a learned task, considering your own background and how it effected yourself in the past, present, and in the future. Then, using those skills to attend to teaching students. Also, the importance of the effectiveness of teachers, how teachers can help navigate a student to understand multiculturalism in the classrooms, in order to understand society. One common misconception of challenging oppression is the consequences of unpacking anti-oppressive education, as it will include a deep commitment to changing how educators conceptualize and engage in:
1. curriculum: breaking down the syllabus and having a visual present for the classroom creates consistency, an articulate timeline of classroom management for learners and teachers. Using anti-oppressive strategies in the curriculum opens doors to diversity, which can help create multiple learning and teaching strategies. Consider personal issues that peers face, in which some cases, are not planned. Understanding that how we respond to the world is how we see the world. Enlightenment between students and teachers should be mutual.
2. pedagogy: multiple methods can be used to “teach” multicultural education, such as evaluation/participation among classroom/faculty staff in the school(s). This can be unpacked by having a vision of what it actually means to you as an individual first, and how levels of understanding multiculturalism steers our emotions towards education and open-minds.
3. classroom management: understanding that undergoing (a few) process(es) of personal transformation, in regards to the ideologies of inferiority, realizing that having appropriate and sympathetic communication with students is another analogical step used to create self-awareness
4. school culture: researching tools to help you understand, then, to teach these areas. Bringing value, and believing in the values you bring, to everyday situations and how they create oppression, and how to help make it better within the school’s environment. Then, in the classroom, having students break down the topic of multicultural education by using different exercises, such as group discussions, to form a critical analysis of the topic. Having diverse perspectives can lead to many open and interesting conversations, if instructed correctly.
Unpacking anti-oppression can become controversial, as it can mean making a huge amount of changes in the environment, political beliefs, structure, policies, and having the idea that commonsense is present in everyone. Oppression can often lead to biases, ignorance within the environment, which can withhold the ideology of diversity, inquiry, and open-mindedness. Constantly learning about oppression (race, gender, sexism, class-ism) can help individuals understand that having to undergo a process of personal transformation in order to recognize and reject racial ideologies of superiority is a step toward an anti-oppressed education.
