On reflection, I really enjoyed group 4’s Seminar with Gillian last Tuesday. I’m not sure I was enjoying it at the time though as I was in one of the under-resourced groups!!
The whole session was designed to subtly explore ideas around structural inequalities and social justice which I felt it did extremely well. The lesson’s structure featured an element of misdirection where we were asked to focus on a creative task, but this element was altogether secondary to the ‘big reveal’ of the disparities in our resources and treatment. It was around 3/4 of the way through before the penny dropped for me…🙄
It was not only a great lesson in classroom management (ie don’t just focus on one subset/demographic as a teacher) but also elementary to extrapolate to a societal and global level. These ideas are also cast very movingly and unflinchingly in the Humans video from Week 2’s Learning Materials.
Being from a poorer (albeit Western) background myself this is a subject very close to my heart. Without wishing to labour the point, it has taken me 20 years longer to get to University than many of my classmates, largely because I started from a less privileged position. It still surprises me how some better off people can struggle to imagine and empathize with this fact.
Anyway, here’s a good video that explains that differential more succinctly and less personally/ranty than I can. 😄
