Category: Education - Elizaveta Friesem

Blame is not the answer: Reflecting on our implicit biases

2/8/2017

After the 2016 presidential election one half of the country has turned to the other half of the country, and accused it quite unequivocally of such serious sins as overt racism, sexism and homophobia.

But blame is not the answer.

In the modern America we should beware not of the explicit prejudgment (although it certainly exists as well), but of assumptions that are hiding under the surface of our own consciousness. They are called implicit biases. It turns out that we all have them, whether we want it or not. Because of these biases we often contribute to social flaws even when we are actively trying to make them go away.

This video explains how each of us can learn about our implicit biases. We can learn about them by taking an ingenious Implicit Association Test created by Harvard scholars. The test is free and fun to take. The video describes how the test works, and talks about the importance of acknowledging our own implicit biases for making the world a better place.

Video games for change

7/31/2016

If you want to help your friends, students or children discuss LGBTQ experiences, why not use a video game for that? Some video games have been described as having problematic representations of gender and sexuality. As more and more people are becoming not only consumers, but also producers of video games, we suddenly have indie games that tell stories from the LGBTQ point of view. Many of these games are free and available online. Here I am going to talk about three games that seem particularly suitable for helping people around you better understand what it means to be LGBTQ: Dys4ia, Lim and To Kill a Black Swan.

Dys4ia is an autobiographical non-game created by Anna Anthropy aka Auntie Pixelante. In this game, the player controls a character undergoing hormone replacement therapy and transitioning from sex assigned at birth. "The game consists of several chapters, and each of them employs low-level systems of interactions (controls, collisions, movements in space, micro-challenges and so on) to express a range of visceral states like frustration, stress, humiliation or relief."

According to Patrick Gann, Dys4ia can help non-transgender people empathize with those who feel uncomfortable with the sex assigned to them at birth. Yang argues that the power of this game lies in the player’s very lack of real influence over the eventual outcome: “It’s taking its turn in the larger dialogue outside of the game, saying, ‘No, now YOU listen to ME for once.’ ”

Although Lim does not explicitly tell a story of LGBTQ experiences, this is one of the possible interpretations of this game. Lim is about the external violence that one experiences standing out, and an internal self-violence of blending in. The game is very simple. "Players navigate a maze as a multi-colored square, encountering brown and dark blue blocks throughout the series of rooms. The blocks react violently to the player’s presence in the space, shaking erratically and seeking out the player to collide with him/her. As they push the player’s block around, there is often the possibility of being shunted outside of the maze completely, becoming isolated from the experience of the game and being forced to navigate the maze from the outside."

The game also offers an option to blend in, which, as the player soon discovers, comes with a price. There is no graphic violence, but sound and visual effects that the player encounters will make her physically uncomfortable. The game allows the player to get a taste of intense discomfort that people marginalized because of their difference feel. Lim and Dys4ria were praised by a famous media scholar Henry Jenkins for their effectiveness and originality.

Finally, there is To Kill a Black Swan, "a short murder mystery visual novel about a detective, a yoga course attendant, a grieving wife, an obsessed cleaner, a 'bro', and a bitchy friend." But I won’t tell you more about it – it is a mystery after all!
These three games are, of course, not a magic bullet, and I am not claiming that by playing them one can suddenly understand LGBTQ experiences, or cured from homo/transphobia. You should not simply tell a person to play them and hope that the games will be self-explanatory. However, they can certainly be a nice way to start (or continue) this very important conversation.

This piece was previously posted by www.cultnoise.com

Reflection on this semester

12/12/2015

Now that this semester is (almost) over, it is time to reflect on what I myself have learned as I was teaching about 80 students in four different classes across three educational venues in Connecticut. During this semester I was thinking a lot about what I want to accomplish as an educator. I want my students to become more self-aware, I want to help them notice complexity in the world around them, and to see the value of having a dialogue with people who are different from them. I am pretty sure I chose these goals because they are something I myself am striving for.

I do not need my students to leave the class with identical sets of facts in their heads. I do not mind if everybody remembers different things from our discussions. Facts come and go. But an ability to ask how we know what we know will stay with us, and allow us to decide why and how certain things become “facts” in our lives. As much as I want to be more self-aware about what I think is true, I also have a long way to go identifying my biases and dealing with them. Most probably it is a life-long journey. I want my students to appreciate this journey too, and to always be able to question beliefs that guide their actions.

Questioning oneself is not easy. I know that from experience. It is very human to want to be sure about things, to look for clarity and certainty. But the world is not black and white. Kind people do bad things, smart and rational people commit terrible mistakes that ruin their lives and lives of others. Labels fail to describe life, no matter how carefully we choose them. This semester I felt again how resistant students are to accepting this complexity. But I do not blame them, because I myself want things to be simple and neat. I have to mentally pinch myself once in a while to remember that I often tend to fall in the same trap that I am hoping my students will avoid.

Finally, I want students to able to talk with others about this complexity. I want them to engage in a dialogue with each other, respecting diverse opinions, accepting that usually the answer is not either/or but both/and. Do I myself know how to do that? I would lie if I say that I am an expert. I want to do what I preach, but I do get sad, frustrated, annoyed when I think that somebody does not understand me; I feel the need to be right, to show them that I know.

They say: “Physician, heal thyself.” Can I really teach students to do things that I myself might take the rest of my life to learn? While I do not believe that I can bring them to a state when I can step back and say proudly something along the lines of: “Now, you are whole,” I hope simply that I can learn with them. And perhaps if I do my job well enough they will be encouraged by this experience to find their own ways to learn, and their own ways to make the world a better place.

Dealing with Feedback

11/8/2015

I have not written anything here for a while because I have been teaching four different courses in three different places. I love teaching. It always helps me learn new things. But of course teaching is tough, if you really care I mean. I do care, and that is why I make sure to ask my students what they think about my courses. I learned that teaching is kind of like leadership. You want to excite students, to energize them, to encourage them to do stuff. And good leaders should regularly ask their followers for feedback, to make sure that everybody’s opinions and needs are taken into consideration.

So I give my students many opportunities to tell me how they feel about the course. I remember that when I was in college, I really wanted my professors to ask me this question (I had so much to tell them!). But they never seemed to care… I want to be a different kind of educator. This is why I always acknowledge my students’ reflections, and use many of their ideas to adjust my course. I started to use more PowerPoint for visual learners, I write on the board more to explain what I am saying, I help my students with note-taking, I add new activities, etc. All in all, feedback is a very useful educational tool.

But part of me is always dreading it… I know that I am not perfect, and never will be, but damn it, I really want perfection! Very stupid… When students give me suggestions (some do it more thoughtfully than others) I am reminded that I never can please everybody. Neither should I try. Still, this upsets me. I am trying to find a middle ground, making sure that both students who want discussions and those who want lectures, those who prefer more rigor and those who need to be hand-held are satisfied. In the end, of course, nobody is completely satisfied.

I will keep asking students for feedback, and I will work on refining ways to get helpful reflections at different times in the course. I guess I will never be entirely over my perfectionism, though. But maybe it is not that bad, after all, because it means that I will always be thinking about possibilities for improvement.

Are you media literate?

6/29/2015

Being media literate means being able to critically engage with media texts: to ask who produced them and with what purpose, to examine values embedded in them, to note techniques used to attract our attention, to think of different possible interpretations, and to consider things that are omitted.

Many people can identify media texts that, in their opinion, others should be able to critically analyze in order to see their flaws. Some know how to pick apart certain portrayals, and want others to do the same.

However, sometimes we can forget that the true media literacy happens when we are able to use our critical thinking skills in order to analyze texts that we like. We think that other people should be able to analyze messages that they enjoy. But we can become oblivious of the need to question media messages that we ourselves agree with.

It’s easy to critically analyze messages that we deem problematic. It’s much more difficult to do so with media texts that we think are "good." Try always keeping in mind these questions: Who produced this media message and with what purpose? What techniques are used to attract my attention? What values and lifestyles are represented? How can different people interpret this message differently? Only by asking these questions of media messages that you like you can become truly media literate, and help others to do so as well.

Want to learn more? Visit Media Education Lab!

How Technology (Dis)Connects People

12/3/2014

The story of Yik Yak, an anonymous gossip app that went horribly wrong, is actually nothing new. Yik Yak has been used to bully people, not to help them connect with each other. But so were many other social networking tools. Even the most famous and well-established ones, like Facebook, have been notoriously unable to stop online harassment. Worse than that, they are sometimes unwilling to. It’s not our problem, they proclaim. The platform we provide is neutral, and what people do with it is entirely up to them.

In my opinion, the morale of this story is simple. Technology is not a solution. When we bring in new technology, we are responsible for teaching people how to use it ethically, and for monitoring their activities. The latter task is for creators of digital platforms to handle; the first one is for media and digital literacy educators. And, since new media and digital tools pop up every day (Yik Yak, for example), these educators definitely have a lot to do. The importance of their work cannot be underestimated. Only if we teach people how to use technology in responsible ways, it can be really used to connect us.

Just stop: The "tricky" concept of consent

5/3/2014

There is one thing that makes me really mad: the way people misunderstand sexual violence. I was going to sleep already when I read this article about the fight against sexual assaults on college campuses. In general, there are different kinds of sexual violence: rape, child sexual abuse, street harassment. And it seems just mind-blowing to me how often the victim is blamed for what happened.

There is this amazing misconception, that if the rapist is not a total stranger hiding in the dark alley (which happens in a fraction of assault cases), it is most probably the victim’s fault. She drank, she wore inappropriate clothes, she was flirting. Blablabla. And poor men of course cannot resist, because as soon as they see a naked shoulder, they have an erection, and as soon as they have an erection, they just can’t think straight. Poor things.

Let’s just imagine a hypothetical situation. A guy with his girlfriend is getting into bed. They get naked, everything is great, everybody’s happy. And then, before they really get into it, the girl suddenly gets a stomach ache. Let’s say, she has eaten something wrong for dinner. So all of a sudden she is not into sex anymore. Or, another scenario, a landline phone is ringing, her mother leaves a voice message with some upsetting news. Again, the girl suddenly does not want to proceed. So what, the guy won’t be able to stop? Will he have a heart attack or be traumatized by this lost erection? No! It’s totally possible for a guy to stop in the middle of sex if the girl – for any reason – has changed her mind.

So all these stories about a couple getting into bed, and the girl suddenly asking the guy to stop, and the guy not stopping and having sex with the girl without her consent, and then the girl being accused of confusing the guy with her changing moods – these stories really drive me mad. In the story described in the article I mentioned above, they have already had sex sometime during the previous year, and this time she went in bed with him willingly, and then he did things that she clearly asked him not to do. And then she had hard time explaining to the University what happened, because they did not want to believe her.

So all these arguments about drunken girls in miniskirts... Puhleeze! Just stop this bullshit. Is it so difficult to educate everybody (including University administration) the simple rules of determining where consent starts and ends? I thought colleges are about teaching.

Growing up I spent a lot of time with my grandfather, who always encouraged my "non-girly" interests...

4/20/2014

...He made me a bow and arrows and together we would roam forests and parks looking for mushrooms and bird nests. I did not climb trees but I spent a lot of time hunting weird creatures who lived in muddy ponds. Together with my grandfather we read books about animals around the word, and I dreamed of having a pet bat.

I would not call my childhood self a tomboy. I remember sometimes wearing dresses, having long hair, drawing princesses and dreaming of being one. The word "tomboy" supposedly refers to a girl behaving like a boy. I combined behaviors considered boyish and girlish. I did not have to put myself into a gender box. I was just me. Well, this blissful state was not going to last forever.

It was not until recently that I realized why I felt so different in middle and high school. Other girls used cosmetics and acted in ways that I would now call "feminine". I think, I wanted to be like them, but I did not exactly know how. I was trying to learn, and the media became my guide. I remember looking through Burda magazines that my mother was collecting; admiring perfect hair, skin and outfits of female characters on television; wondering why on earth I could not look the same. These were painful years. It seemed to me that everybody was always looking at me, judging my appearance and finding my looks inadequate.

It was not long ago – three-four years, perhaps – that I started to care less. And only a couple of years ago I learned about scholarship on media representations of femininity. I wish I knew this stuff when I was growing up. This is another reason why I study gender; and this is why I study media; and this is why I am interested in education. I am looking for ways to help young people understand that they don’t have to judge each other according to gender standards contained in media texts; they don't have to painfully try to be perfect.

I wish everybody could be as carefree as I was when I was getting out of the forest, my coat torn, by boots covered in mud, but with a basket full of mushrooms and so so happy.