Blog 4, Prompt 6

Today, I entered my classroom with the ideas from Megan Boler’s piece All Speech is Not Free: The Ethics of “Affirmative Action Pedagogy” still swirling in my head. The words affirmative action are two hot, buzz words that can sometimes be polarizing because people are quick to misinterpret its definition and its intention. Boler states that there is an inequality of speech within the classroom and therefore, we must practice a historicized ethics: one where the unheard voices are promoted, while the dominant voices are silenced. This will help the underrepresented children develop their critical agency and resist self disclosure from the dominant voices. I arrived this morning ready to put affirmative action pedagogy into practice. Then I realized, “Wait a minute…there aren’t really any white children in this class! Any there aren’t any in either of my groups!” So this whole silencing the dominant voices thing might be a little trickier than previously thought.
I sat down with my five first graders, who all happen to be boys, but are of different ethnicities. We go around the table, with each boy taking a turn to play the game. The first week, we decided that the best way to see who goes first every time is to roll the dice and whoever gets the highest number is the first. Every time we get together, the boys ask “Who is going to go first?” I respond “How do we figure this out?” and they automatically start rolling the dice. And like clockwork, one student always claims that he should actually go first. While all of the boys are probably of either Latino or Cape Verdean descent, today was the first time I noticed that this particular boy is the “lightest” (skin, hair, etc.) of the group. Hmmm...

Throughout our session, I noticed that this student was almost exhibiting a dominance over the other boys: he would reach out and grab pencils from them, get up without asking (unlike the others), and shout out answers. I reminded him to raise his hand, and ignored his shouts and corrected him when I noticed what he was doing. I need to remember as I continue to become a teacher, I need to examine each situation and look for the dominant voices are they will change. The dynamic of the group will change as the children in it change. Developing critical agency for the unheard voices is paramount in their educational and personal development. As Boler noted, there is no one effective pedagogy so I must be flexible as the needs of my students change. Fully developing the students to their fullest potential will give them the tools they need- there will be less broken rungs on their ladders.