Toward Love: Honoring Indigenous Land in Our Classrooms
The stereotypes of the "giving Indian" or the "aloha spirit" as a mask to ignore the very real issues these communities face are things we must actively combat in our minds and our classrooms.
The stereotypes of the "giving Indian" or the "aloha spirit" as a mask to ignore the very real issues these communities face are things we must actively combat in our minds and our classrooms.
No space is truly safe if it does not reckon with the complete and total experience and existence our kids face each day.
We must give students the power to explore and share their stories and broadcast them, record them, so we don't unfairly distort the truth of who they or we are.
It's on educators to consciously choose to work on our implicit and explicit biases to start undoing the systemic oppression that has led us here. In doing so, we can help our students hopefully create a world much more loving, inclusive, and safe than the one we've created for them now.
We study literature in order to help our students, the future generations, develop their values and morals and better understand the world.
This work must be led by those who have been historically oppressed, and if I want to support them, that means I must work to explore their writing and show my students just how powerful those voices are.
Teaching with a socially conscious lens is not easy, nor does it happen overnight. There are some small steps you can take, though, to move you in the right direction.
"Aloha" isn't just a greeting; in a way it is their way of life, and when you distort that sacred word, you distort their way of life.
Educators engaging in emotion-talk with students can encounter obvious barriers when not taking the individual's cultural background into account.
There are some meaningful and important ways we can recenter power in our students' critical thinking.
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