Dressing Up

Me:

Me in the Classroom:

This is my collage in response to the "Dressing Up: Exploring the Fictions and Frictions of Professional Identity in Art Educational Settings" reading by Amy L. Pfeiler-Wunder. The main point of the reading was dissecting the question: what parts of your identity and self expression do you share in the classroom and what do you hide? How does your sense of self and identity effect how you engage with and affect students?

My take away from the reading coupled with the TEDtalk "The Danger of a Single Story" by novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, is that it is best to:

1 make a practice of actively gaining new perspectives and seeking to inform yourself as much as possible and

2 build the kind of self awareness where you can identify when you are judging someone as you form your assumptions instead of becoming aware of it in retrospect or after you act or react. That way you can challenge where your bias's come from and let go of the impulse to judge others. This way you can best avoid bringing your own biases into the classroom.

The danger of a single story, or the danger of only viewing the world through your own personal experience, is that you may be quick to judge others and may accidentally harm others through words or actions even if you have the best intentions. Actively making a practice to challenge and deconstruct your own biases lets you truly see other people instead of just making assumptions about them and the way they live their lives.

This allows for a greater connection between people and better communication because it enables you to work with the actual kid in the classroom instead of working with your idea-of/assumptions of the kid in the classroom. If you develop a preconceived notion of a kid, it will be hard to appropriately address any behavioral issues they may have if you're also wrestling with making sense of your biases skewing the reality of who you're actually trying to working with. Becoming practiced at preemptively releasing judgement and trying to see the person actually in front of you will help you see reality, which is much easier to work with and connect to.

Pfeiler-Wunder walks through how to actively maintain this self awareness by walking asking you to label parts of your identify in a list and to dissect how those labels and those experiences may shape your perspective and to think deeply about how peoples possibly different experiences may bring a different point of view.

I think the most important thing about maintaining awareness in this way is it models to the students how to respect and get to know their peers.

Adichie talked about how she judged others through how she built her understanding of the world through literature, but it was when she gained access to more stories that she grew to understand other people and even herself more.

I was the shy kid growing up, so I hope to make all students feel encouraged and safe enough to express themselves and tell their different stories because it will be both detrimental to them and their peers if they cannot learn from each other.

Based off of this, in my collage I thought it was important to prioritize showing students exploring the world and using the knowledge I give them as tools to build their own lives in their own unique ways. I made it second priority to represent my presence by obscuring or hiding the visual representations of me behind the blackboard and the lessons. That way the students could be the stars of the show and I could be in the background supporting them.

I chose to represent myself with one of my mri scans, one of my ecg's, and an image of damaged esophagus lining from a packet I got from one of my doctors, all from different years in my life. The children hold tools cut out of my brain to show me handing them my knowledge. To unveil all the visuals that represent my identity, you have to pull part of me away from the kids, revealing the words "keep it up" to represent how they are supposed to take the skills they practice in my classroom and grow beyond needing me.

This visual representation of how I interact with the kids I think is also important in representing how they can interact with me and my identity but how it's my job to step back and let them form their own ideas and opinions and be their own people instead of trying to make them mini me's. That way they have the space to express their own experiences and their own stories and learn from each other as much as they learn from me, avoiding the danger of a single story.

The ladybug is my own personal symbol of good teaching because I was given a ladybug magnet for reading by one of my best teachers, which is why I included a kid finding a ladybug.