Shades of Noir

I find the Shades of Noir site to be a really valuable resource and it’s something I have dipped into many times since the start of this unit, to help me widen my knowledge and understanding. It has been a bank of resources that I have suggested to both colleagues and students. The resources are brilliant, they are up to date and many of the articles are from current and previous students. Many of the resources I see online are either based in America or another country or focused on something slightly different. The result of this is that we have to infer or extrapolate the results, whereas the resources in the shades of Noir are really relevant to us and our students.

‘A pedagogy of social justice education: social identity, theory, and intersectionality’,

in the Pedagogy of the Oppressed(2006)

Freire explains the role that identity plays in the shaping and implementation of education. One of his most important arguments is that students’ identities need to be taken into account in all educational settings. They should not be approached as if everyone in the classroom, including the teacher, is starting from the same place in terms of social status and identity. Although virtually no one discounts the central role that teachers play in a given classroom, Freire extends this point, expounding on how a teacher’s social identities play as much of a role in a classroom environment as anything else. He says that an ideal educational experience exists between a teacher and students rather than emanating from a teacher to students. A teacher needs to create experiences with, and not for, students, integrating their experiences and voices into the educational experience itself (Freire 2006)

I believe that this shows the importance of understanding where your students identify, It’s really important to understand that all students and teachers have a different starting point. It’s important to create an environment where both the student and the teacher create experiences together. This is definitely something that I have found in the past when I’ve just tried to teach level 1 IT from a textbook, I found that the students were not engaged, most had a negative approach to learning, and the procedural way of learning that I find useful didn’t work for them, I had to make the sessions much more relevant to them and to get them to understand the benefits of what we were trying to achieve for them to participate meaningfully. A lot of this I stumbled on and I wish I had read more about this then and really understood that I need to teach with the students not at them, which is what I would do a lot of as an IT trainer.

Witness: unconscious bias.

I agree with Josephine Kwhali that it’s difficult to balance the idea of unconscious bias when we have been talking about it for a long time.  I think that more of this is about people either being oblivious to it or not caring about it. I think for me, It’s not so much about being racist or not, I think that most people are not racist, but they don’t do anything to make the society we live in more equal. Not being racist isn’t enough we need to be more proactive in making changes that help make our society more equal. I see similarities between this and climate change, we are all aware of climate change, but what are we doing individually about it?

Assessment in Art and Design.

It’s interesting to be talking about how Freire talks about how teaching is done best when the experience is shared between student and teacher, it feels like the Crit takes that concept on, where everyone is getting feedback together good or bad. I have not experienced this but it feels quite intimidating.

It’s the sort of thing that previous exposure to this type of activity is really important. The students that come from a more privileged background, are more likely to have experienced this type of assessment and would get the most out of it. Students from a less privileged background may well have less experience in the process and would have a more negative experience and find it difficult and stressful. It is vital then that there is the support given so that all students get the most out of the experience.

A White Terrorist from Shades of Noir.

Every time we hear the news and there is some sort of awful atrocity, with either multiple deaths or injuries, if the perpetrator is either black or Asian then it’s a terrorist attack regardless of the motivation of the perpetrator. Usually, they will blame the local mosque if the person is a Muslim and they will undoubtedly pick up and charge their family members for aiding and abetting.

If it is a white perpetrator it’s always that that person had mental health issues. That is what lead them to do this atrocity. It’s so blatant that we have become immune to how shocking it is.

There are examples of this type of behavior across the criminal justice system, from “stop and search” directly targeting black and other ethnic minorities much more than white people. Through to cases where victims of rape and sexual assault have been pressured into not reporting it because the perpetrator has a bright future ahead of them.

These are all very large complicated issues, to extrapolate this down to a classroom setting, a lot of this is not about bringing in any prejudices into the classroom, and we must be mindful of the student’s mental health and help them where possible.

Over the years, I have done quite a lot of prevent training when I worked in further education, I was always a little skeptical of it as it felt racist to its core as its main function was looking for signs of radicalisation of young Muslim men and women. However all the signs of they talk about that may show that a student is being radicalised, are the same signs as someone being sexually groomed, for instance, it was all safeguarding signs. Having been at the university now for 3 years, I haven’t really seen the types of safeguarding training that we had in FE, I appreciate that the students are not under 18, however, the pressures the students are under are the same and we should all be aware of any safeguarding issues that may be affecting our students

Bibliography

Freire, P. (2017). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. London, England: Penguin Books.

Prevent scheme ‘built on Islamophobia’. (2017). BBC News. [online] 29 Aug. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-41082086.

‌psycnet.apa.org. (n.d.). APA PsycNet. [online] Available at: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2021-41883-001  [Accessed 28 Jul. 2022].