Unit Essential Questions: Who am I? How do I see things? Why does it matter?
Introduction
I grew up in Wyoming which is not exactly a state brimming with diversity. There were ranchers and townies, a few people of color (African Americans and Latinos mostly) who lived in apartments across town, and a handful of American Indians who left the reservations to find jobs in the 50,000+ "metropolitan" center that was my hometown, Casper. For the better part of my early childhood, I largely knew only one race and one culture. In the late 1970s, a group of Vietnamese families moved to Casper to escape persecution following America's withdrawal from the Vietnam War. They were sponsored by area churches who organized to help them find furniture and clothing to begin life anew. It was only later that I began to think about what that experience might have been like for those families leaving the dense greenery of Southeast Asia and coming to the barren landscape, both physically and culturally, of Wyoming. I remember one event from that time distinctly. My church organized a "night of learning" where the Vietnamese families came to church and showed us how to cook Vietnamese meals, how to greet people in their language, and taught us songs and traditions from their culture. While I am not sure what that night meant to those families who were so far away from their cultural hearth, I can say that it meant a lot to me. I began to see that there were other ways of seeing. From that night on I began to see the value of listening and learning about a culture as a way to understand, and then bridge, differences.
So often in adolescence it is the differences that divide us. Who is cooler or "lamer" than me? Who is smarter? Prettier? More popular? The list goes on and the Darwinian struggle to come out on top is often brutal. You can see it in the hallways of my high school. Students, intoxicated by insecurity and the fear that comes with it, finding a place for themselves through the act of picking on those who, for whatever reason, fall below them on the hierarchy of the acceptable. Hallways are defining spaces in a high school. They often serve as a gauntlet through which students daily walk trying to find their place in the world. Lockers, stairways, lunchroom tables are all places where these moments of truth are found. As humans we often believe our way of seeing the world is the only way. Particularly when we rarely, if ever, have to confront difference.
Like me, most of my students have grown up knowing only one race and one culture. Chicago is a city of ethnic/racial pockets isolated from each other by barriers both real and imagined. My school is a place of cultural confusion where last year was the first year our Mandarin teacher was not asked if she ate dog, where all Latino students are categorized as Mexican, where skin color is measured in shades, and Arab-American students face criticism for wearing the hijab. Our growing diversity is our strength and it serves as an opportunity for learning how to build bridges between cultures without sacrificing our own identities in the process.
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