Learning and Leading
Confronting Implicit Bias: Preservice Teachers Get “Woke!” as Aware Global Citizens
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Katherine Batchelor
When educators confront the implicit biases they carry, a deeper awareness emerges on their everyday decisions and behaviors based on these biases. For example, bias can affect beliefs teachers hold about students’ achievements, behaviors, and backgrounds. These biases, in turn, can influence teachers’ subjective thinking regarding students’ abilities and grades as well as reduce student expectations, thus, expanding the existing achievement gap between Whites and marginalized people (especially migrant and refugee children) in the United States. It is inevitable that preservice teachers (PSTs) will be teaching students with backgrounds, perspectives, and ideologies that are different than their own, especially since 80 percent of the U.S. population of teachers identifies as White, female, middle-class individuals. Discussing biases will potentially enable PSTs to recognize their personal bias and provide ways to avoid biases affecting their students. Negative stereotypes can be brought unknowingly into schools unless PSTs have the chance to explicitly challenge and reflect upon their own biases. “If we are to undo the racial inequities that continue to plague us, we must find constructive ways to talk about them and intervene constructively and consciously to end them” (Carter et al.,2017,p. 209). In college classrooms, controversial topics surrounding class, race, and gender are difficult to engage in, especially when students call into question their own privileges and power they carry with them in society. Therefore, this study investigated how engaging in discussions on race within a social justice framework impacts PSTs’ to confront their implicit biases to become aware global citizen educators.
The Short-Term Study Tour: Lifelong Learning Experience or Tourism in Disguise?
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Andrew Howe
Whereas long-term study abroad programs are generally conceded to offer students genuine cultural learning, there is more of a debate involving short-term study tours. Much of the criticism is directed at companies that specialize in such trips, often ones where students move quickly from one destination to another, never getting an opportunity to see more than just the briefest of highlights, ones that tourists tend to focus upon and that do not give an accurate understanding of the peoples and cultures involved. On the other hand, such short-term study tours do expose students to the larger world. The question remains: how effective are such trips when it comes to student transformation? This paper will explore these questions as applied to a specific study tour, a course concept employed in the Honors Program at La Sierra University. During the spring of their sophomore year, students for ten weeks immerse themselves in the history, politics, art, music, religion, and ecology of a particular region (currently Malaysia & Singapore). After they complete this course, they enroll in a three-week study tour to that area, visiting many of the places they have learned about. Assessment of this trip (surveys given out at two years to graduating seniors and five years to alumni) indicate that this model allows students, many of them the first in their family to attend college, to experience legitimate transformation, suggesting that if designed carefully there may be quite a bit of value in a short-term study tour.
The Global Regulation of Educational Systems: Towards a Universal Concept of Quality
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Claudio Ramos-Zincke
Through the growing expansion of a set of large-scale international tests, a mechanism for the global regulation of educational systems has been established, in an increasingly solid connection with national governments and with the national public spheres, uniforming the notions of educational quality. Such a global device exercises a soft power that operates flexibly through three central international organizations –the IAE, the OECD, and Unesco– interconnected among themselves and loosely linked to multiple international organisms and networks of experts. This study analyzes the characteristics of this multipolar network, its internal connections and the way of articulation with a peripheral country: Chile. Regarding the latter, we study: (1) the connection procedures, (2) the reception through time in the mass media of the operation and results of international tests, and (3) their effects on the education system national through the decisions of the educational institutions. It is remarkable the high diffusion and public recognition achieved by the PISA and TIMSS tests and the comparative smaller visibility obtained by the Unesco’s Latin American testing. The main effects have been both direct in the curriculum and indirect through various transformations generated by international assessment in the national evaluation system, which translates that global influence. The research uses the actor-network theory and, for the collection of information, it is based on interviews with key actors, documentary analysis, and press analysis regarding the period of application of these tests, since the late 1990s.
Digital Journalism in a Digital Society: A Mexican Case
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Florence Toussaint
Since digitalization became a world tendency, all countries introduced digital technologies in their economic, social, and cultural organizations. The use of internet has an impact on the way cultural practices exist in terms of producing, distributing, and consuming cultural goods and experiences, and in the manner institutions systematized their work. In this paper we discuss the impact that digital techniques are having in journalism. How, since 1995, the process of translation to the cyberspace began to take place in most of the national newspapers, those with a larger number of readers, followed by those small ones. Afterwards, as the process deepened, we saw emerging digital native diaries. Employing qualitative techniques and Political Economy approaches, we analyze the transition process from paper to digital journalism, and some cases of Mexican newspaper industry to point out the main tendencies. Driven not only by economic urgencies, but also because of the crisis of readers, traditional newspapers began to suffer, as journalism took a turn to digital. From the first digital papers to the actual ones, there is a large scale of differences: in design, social media applications, multimedia, and interactive devices. Also the search for a new financial model and profit making schema had been developed. The subject presents different issues: how to work journalistic genres thinking in new digital formats; how to implement traditional research techniques in the present context; the uses of bigger information resources; and how to involve the new audiences who might be more technical and less human.
