Critical Personal Reflection

Cultivating a learning environment that caters to diversity, social

justice, and equity.

I believe myself to be an open-minded individual who is strongly in favour of social justice, who
believes that diversity in the classroom is a gift that the teacher needs to make use of in order to
further the learning opportunities of all the students. However, even after working on assessment 1,
I did not believe that this class really added all that much to my teaching all that much. I came into
this class believing that my mindset was already in favour of diversity, and that policies and news
and media were all extra to the actual learning process. However, after some specific lectures, and
especially after this assignment, I can very gratefully say that my time in this class has been well
spent. I know now that I have to be knowledgeable about policies and hidden messages in curricula,
media, and everyday communication (Kumashiro, 2015).

Honestly speaking, I was expecting assessment 2 to be more of assessment 1. In assessment 1, I

found myself doing a lot of reading about diversity and social justice issues but all of the material
was removed from me and my teaching methodologies. I rationally understood that girls were not
pursuing STEM due to a variety of reasons, but, without any actual change in my pedagogical
thinking, I felt I would definitely not propagate those issues anyway so my work for that whole
assessment was all about getting the marks. With assessment 2, the moment I started working on it,
the whole game changed. Putting myself into the role of a student and trying to understand the
diversity and social justice issues abounding in the school system and out made me realize that,
without meaning to, before this task, I would probably be propagating a lot of issues, such as gender
inequity, symbolic inferences to racial inequity, narratives which might hurt those with learning
disabilities, etc. I realized that being open-minded and being mindful in my teaching pedagogies
were two different things entirely, and all the learnings from the class became personalized and
tilted toward the latter (Lawlor, 2016; Bostic et al, 2015).

Prior to this task, I knew the definitions of Marxist critical theory and that all knowledge should be
viewed with a critical lens, poststructuralism and its denunciation of the binary hierarchies hailed by
structuralism, symbolic interaction theory and many others (Ferfolja et al, 2015). However it was just
theory to me, until I started assessment 2. Actually putting it into use and creating and
understanding a set of questions which highlighted Critical Race theory and which would force me to
think of examples where this theory was in play all around us shocked me out of my complacency
and forced me to realize that racism was actually extremely prevalent in society, language, media,
and other forms of symbolism (Gillborn, 2015; Howard & Navarro, 2016). I found out that many
teachers tend to watch, rather than intervene, when racism rears its head in the classroom (Vass,
2015). Through this, I was able to draw in symbolic interaction theory as another foundational
theory to base our game on along with Intersectionality. Working through this task has helped bring
me to the idea that I need to watch what I say, how I say it, along with what I use as teaching aides
(Kumashiro, 2015). Everything can come with connotations and even if I dont think I am propagating
social justice issue through direct actions, propagating them indirectly through symbols and teaching
is just as bad. I believe this is what assessment 2 was trying to teach me, and I am grateful to say I
took this lesson to heart.
Internalizing these lessons of hidden racism in curricula, media and other symbols will help me as a
teacher to know exactly what I am teaching my students over and above actual subject content.
Knowing the issues of social justice and inequity that rage in our society, I can do my part to stave off
the overflow of these into the next generation. From now on, any lesson planning I do will carefully
take into account any hidden messages that are present in the websites I am using, in the language I
am using, in the images I might display, etc and I will also be careful to add in narrative to highlight
the importance of critical thinking and critical citizenship thinking in order to have a society where
social justice is met (Kumashiro, 2015; Lawlor, 2016).

Through assessment 2, I have internalized the concepts of Critical race theory, Symbolic interaction,
and Intersectionality and the big role that these theories play in everyday school and outside life.
The hidden messages of race that can harm us as well as the abilities of interaction to reduce this
harm are important to my teaching philosophy, and I will be highlighting this in my science and
mathematics teaching by using examples of heroes of non-white races and non-male genders. I
will also be introducing the concept of how some ideas might have germinated in non-Western
places but due to history being written by the victors, the ideas now have Western roots. I can add in
personal narratives of people of my culture in science who have done amazing work and ask for
other students to give their views.

In terms of pedagogies, critical thinking has been redefined for me after working on this task. It is
not just about Blooms taxonomy and use of specific words but the thoughtful action involved in firs
seeking, then highlighting both sides of an issue when learning something new (Aliakbari & Faraji,
2011). Critical citizenship has also been underlined for me as something I definitely need to
incorporate into my teaching pedagogies in order to empower the next generation with intercultural
understanding and a zeal for a better society (DeJaeghere, 2009). Collaborative learning has taken
on new meaning for me as well, especially after understanding how it is different from cooperative
learning (Kaendler et al, 2015). I mean to implement collaboration in my classrooms wherever I can
as it is a foundational pedagogy for improving intercultural understanding and student emotional
wellbeing.

In conclusion, I found that this assessment has condensed my learnings together in such a way that it
has broken through my previous complacency and has kick-started a greater thirst to understand
how I can help, using my teaching pedagogies, to create an environment that succours diversity,
thirsts for social justice and has equity at its centre stage.
References

Aliakbari, M., & Faraji, E. (2011). Basic principles of critical pedagogy. In2nd International Conference
on Humanities, Historical and Social Sciences IPEDR (Vol. 17, pp. 78-85).

Bostic, J. Q., Nevarez, M. D., Potter, M. P., Prince, J. B., Benningfield, M. M., & Aguirre, B. A. (2015).
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psychiatric clinics of North America, 24(2), 245-259.

DeJaeghere, J. G. (2009). Critical citizenship education for multicultural societies. Inter-American

Journal of Education for Democracy, 2(2), 222-236.

Ferfolja, T., Jones-Diaz, C., & Ullman, J. (2015). Understanding sociological theory for educational
practices. Port Melbourne, Australia: Cambridge University Press.

Gillborn, D. (2015). Intersectionality, Critical Race Theory, and the Primacy of Racism Race, Class,
Gender, and Disability in Education. Qualitative Inquiry, 21(3), 277-287.

Howard, T. C., & Navarro, O. (2016). Critical Race Theory 20 Years Later Where Do We Go From
Here?. Urban Education, 0042085915622541.

Kaendler, C., Wiedmann, M., Rummel, N., & Spada, H. (2015). Teacher competencies for the
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review. Educational Psychology Review, 27(3), 505-536.

Kumashiro, K. K. (2015). Against common sense: Teaching and learning toward social justice.
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Lawlor, M. S. (2016). Mindfulness and Social Emotional Learning (SEL): A Conceptual Framework.
In Handbook of Mindfulness in Education (pp. 65-80). Springer New York.

Vass, G. (2015). Putting critical race theory to work in Australian education research:we are with the
garden hose here. The Australian Educational Researcher, 42(3), 371-394.