Education

***IF YOU CAN, PLEASE READ AS AN ATTACHMENT, THANKS <3***

Alliyah Allen
Prof Jody Cohen

Race-ing Education

October 7, 2016

Calling the Theoretical to Practice: Owning My Story and Finally Dancing at the Party

“Representations are flimsy because they always require upkeep, updating, and upping the ante. While not easy to destroy, representations are contested even after they have been established. While they aspire to the status of incontrovertible truth, more often images manipulate our ability to reason, going around, rather than through it.” (Leonardo 117)

How does race affect the way we view language in education?
This is the question Nelson Flores and Jonathan Rosa pose in their article, “Undoing Appropriateness: Raciolinguistic Ideologies and Language Diversity in Education”. They note first that students who come from non-white racial or ethnic backgrounds, and who are classified as language learners who are unprepared for English-language academic work[1], are in fact being viewed through a lens which “frames their linguistic practices as deficient” – no matter how fluent and/or “appropriate” they are (Flores 149).

*this work is mainly without citation though i draw from many specific theories that i didn't make up myself. if you have any questions about where an idea came from, please let me know so i can clarify! all this stuff is jumbled in my head 24/7 so i often forget which book or which class it came from, or if i'm secretly brilliant and came up with it myself, but i can try!*

“In all, the Marxist compromise to legitimate racism while bracketing “race” at best is not without difficulties or at worst reproduces racism at the level of theory. This is unfortunate if Marxism otherwise could help explain the experiences of students of color.”

I have heard a few people refernece the job as a curator thoughout class and I wanted to post a BMC specific job description to the position. As the art history team mentioned in class, we are creating a visual story. The supplied link mentions a few responsibilities that reinforce the purpose of a gallery space thats is physically in proximity to an academic building or built within it.

http://www.brynmawr.edu/humanresources/Recruit/Curator.shtml

Our class discussion in ed, and also in english left me stuck and overloaded. So I turned to our paper assignment for english. When prompted how I read literary texts and what discipline I could rely on to unpack it, I thought to my major religion and furthermore, womanism. As I started thinking about how I wanted to write the paper and tie womanism to Beloved, I noticed that a lot of what I was reading applied to how I feel about our discussions in our ed class, and also exhibiting africa. so here's goes my approach to intersectionality and refiguring language/frameworks/mindset/conceptions of self, our true selves, our racial selves, etc.: 

“Hold up, did you just hear, did you just say, did you just see, did you just do that? Then the voice in your head silently tells you to take your foot off your throat because just getting along shouldn’t be an ambition.” -- Claudia Rankine, citizen

I am originally from Boston, but just spent thi spast summer living in New York City alone and felt like myself for the first time. In both spaces I have a level of anonymity, privacy, security, and joy to exist. My existence is simple. I am one of many on a train car, cafe, museum, sidewalk. I cherish the small and mutual interactions I have with people. I know there are other things happenin garound me that trouble me and leave me feeling exhausted after a day, but nothing compares to the exhaustion I feel in college. 

Living in a dorm is a funky thing. It's a weird quasi-freedom where you don't live with your parents but you also don't really live alone; someone else cooks your meals, someone else cleans the bathrooms, you only occupy one room, and you live with at least 100 other students. (And the people who clean the dorms, who cook the food, who keep the college running are majority people of color.

I feel like I am "raced" more by black people more than anyone else. Unless I am having a conversation about race, of course, I feel most hyperaware of my race when I am around other black people. I don't know if that hyperawareness comes more from insecurity or judgement or coincidence. But that is what I've experienced. That hyperawareness doesn't feel good. It doesn't always feel bad, but it's uncomfortable in a way that's hard to decide. Like I'm constantly trying to prove with every word (even though I don't know a lot of slang), every cultural reference (most of which I don't understand, to be honest), and every thing else that goes through my mind (which is a lot).