Kelly Reed Class Visit - Get Your Make On!

For this activity, we decided to create items that play off of the gender expectations for both boys and girls. Toys are one of the first and most significantly gender coded items that kids are exposed to. For the sword, we intentionally mixed these codes to draw attention to these gender expectations. One side is black with flowers and the other is pink with flames. By mixing these concepts and codes, we neutralized the message of the sword being for boys, and pink and flowers being for girls. The toy is now a toy for anyone.

This message is represented in the portrait of Merida from Brave. One side of the portrait shows her being presented as stereotypically 'girly' and 'princess' like. The other side shows her more traditionally masculine, holding her sword with out the flamboyant colors of a typical Disney princess. This represents the theme of neutralizing the messaging of boy vs girl, as reflected in both pieces of our artwork.

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Pecha Kucha + Reflection

Pecha Kucha Video Pecha Kucha Slides Pecha Kucha Rubric A central theme throughout this course has been the importance of understanding the ‘why’ behind our practice as educators. The day to day hustle of being a teacher can often cause us to neglect reflective processes, which can negatively affect our practice in the classroom. Having just finished my first year as an English Language Arts teacher for a 6th and 7th grade emergent bilingual population, my ‘why’ is tested daily. Juggling the various roles of teacher, mentor, counselor, and conflict negotiator, while attending professional development and master’s level courses, is a tiring day to day existence. Once I am at home, sitting down to reflect on my day and practice takes the back-burner to shutting my brain off for at least an hour, before going to bed in order to repeat the process over again. Like Sinek says in his TED Talk, knowing your ‘why’ is pivotal to having others buy into your messaging. If I want my students ...

Assignment A: Safe Spaces

Quotes for Discussion "When the official curriculum stigmatizes or, worse yet, vilifies LGBT people, bullies feel like moral champions, like guardians of the American way." Standing up against bullies that stigmatize LGBT individuals can be incredibly difficult in a middle school (and, I am sure, all schools). I find myself having internal battles each day when I hear students use a slur for LGBT people, due it being so often and widespread. "If applied across all disciplines and grade levels, integration and interpretation of LGBT experiences and contributions can transform our classrooms into safe spaces." When starting teaching this year, I was actually surprised to see that one of our projects in our curriculum revolves around the story of a trans student. I am interested to see how many teachers are choosing to teach this unit as a form of integration, or how many do not due to its topics. "Teachers cannot legislate friendships or alliances; they ...

Assignment B - Taking it All Home!

This week's reading was theTeaching Tolerance article Teaching at the Intersections by Monita K. Bell. In this article, the idea of 'intersectionality' is discussed, and what that means for educators and our students. Various student experiences are discussed throughout the article as a way to make sense of the idea of intersectionality. In my experience, intersectionality has been framed as the threat of discrimination due to one or multiple of your identity markers. In this way, a student in the article, named G.G., is used as an example of the ways in which multiple markers can disadvantage someone beyond just one of their identity markers. Being black and female and queer presents the potential for increased instances of discrimination due to one, multiple, or all of those markers. In order to be effective educators, we must view our students " through an intersectional lens: recognizing that race-, gender- and class-related circumstances a...

Collins Compositions

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