First, to be a culturally responsive educator, one
must be mindful and present. With this, we have to be mindful of our implicit biases and understand our personal backgrounds, our own cultural identity, family history, what makes us tick, our habits, etc. Hammond calls us to list information about ourselves and our culture, in order to recognize who we are and what our culture is all about. Once we do this, our implicit biases will shine through and we will know what we must work on.
By understanding ourselves and our culture, we must also protect and maintain our self-management and emotions. As educators, we need to be able to identify our triggers in order to maintain our emotions. When we feel triggered or attacked, we have an amygdala hijack, and we will lose some control of our emotions. I appreciate Hammond’s S.O.D.A acronym to help this: stop, observe, detach, and awaken. These four steps help calm ourselves before an amygdala attack happens. We need to stay away from these attacks because our emotions rule the classroom and set the tone for our students’ emotions and attitudes as well.
Hammond then draws us into our interpretation aperture, which is important in regards to our implicit biases. When we view a snapshot of two LatinX students talking during independent work, we may immediately think that they are cheating. This is where Hammond calls us into creating spaces for alternative explanations. She lays out a protocol for us - description, interpretation, and evaluation. I found this to be extremely important when it comes to being a culturally responsive practitioner, as we need to stop, think the situation through, and then evaluate it without our implicit biases guiding our reactions.
Understanding our own culture, which helps us understand our implicit biases, will assist us in assessing situations properly. It is truly a full-circle moment because we need all three pieces for us to be culturally responsive teachers. Completing the first two steps of understanding ourselves, and our triggers, we can move to interpret situations without our culture, triggers, and biases clouding our responses.
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Carly,
ReplyDeleteYou summarize and explain what Hammond said about self-management and emotions so that it is very clear and well understood. I can often struggle to understand the science side of education so it was helpful to read how you explained triggers and the amygdala and how it affects our emotions and how we react. I also like how you mentioned the S.O.D.A. method and how it can be used in the classroom to avoid impacting our students in a negative way from an emotional outburst. Having self-awareness as an educator seemed to be a theme through this chapter. I think often teachers are trying so hard to be aware of their students' that they then forget to be aware of themselves as well, which as you mentioned is important to avoid bias and triggers. How can we expect students to be aware of themselves and others if we have not yet figured out how to do so?
Emma Allen
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