Nicole's Fall FNED Blog

     For this week’s blog post, I will be responding to the “connections” option in the weekly blog assignment list. This week’s reading, “The Academic and Social Value of Ethnic Studies”, and its themes are highly interconnected with both the film “Precious Knowledge” and the reading “The Silenced Dialogue” by Lisa Delpit. This week’s reading heavily focuses on how marginalized groups are often left out of the picture when it comes to curriculum. This lack of representation for marginalized groups creates achievement gaps. However, when ethnic studies are added into school curriculums, students were more interested in what they were learning and performed better in school.       This reading connects to “Precious Knowledge” because the film displays how important ethnic studies are in the classroom. In the film, the Tucson school department was getting rid of their ethnic studies program because they were deemed “un-American”. These ethnic studies cla...

     For this week’s blog post, I have decided to choose the reflection option. Both the video and the article talked about there being four types of oppression: ideological, interpersonal, institutional, and interalized. As the name suggests, ideological oppression deals with ideologies, or stereotypes. In the video, Luna Malbroux uses the example of the ideology of a “real boy” in comparison to a “real girl”. “Real boys” are associated with sports, the color blue, and working in fields that are involved with math or science, while “real girls” are associated with beauty, the color pink, and working as caretakers. These stereotypes are so strongly instilled in society that it becomes the societal norm and turns to be oppressive. Another type of oppression that is discussed is interpersonal oppression. This form of oppression takes the form of being social – being within groups – and can be intentional or unintentional (i.e in the form of a microagression). Institutional ...

       For this week’s blog post, I have decided to write under the “argument” option from the blog post document. In her article, “Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom”, author Lisa Delpit argues that there is a power dynamic in the classroom, whether it is apparent or disguised. In her article, she discusses different versions of this power dynamic, starting with the racial power dynamic. She brings about the point that there is this form of “silent dialogue” between those with racial power (white people) and those who don’t have racial power (people of color and other ethnic groups). The typical American school “is based on the culture of the upper and middle classes – of those in power” (Delpit 25). The typical American school culture is based on the white American, made to promote their strengths and strengthen their weaknesses. However, this school culture does not account for their students of color and their experiences. Rather than lif...

For this week’s blog post, I have decided to choose the quotes option from the blog post list. In his book Privilege, Power, and Difference , sociologist Allan Johnson goes on to discuss the topics of privilege and power, and how it affects society as we know it. Through his first three chapters, Johnson displays how people can acknowledge their privileges as a problem and become part of the solution. In the first chapter titled “Rodney King’s Question”, Johnson brings up the idea that “we are not prisoners to some natural order that pits us hopelessly and endlessly against one another” (4). When it comes to the idea of privilege, the default idea is to think that we as humans cannot do something about it because it is not something that we actively try to do. Most people don’t actively want to be privileged; they were just born into their racial, social, and economic classes. As a result of this default thought belief, people tend to not do anything to act against their privilege and ...