More on Technology in the Classroom

I think technology in the classroom has come up a few times in our class discussions. I have had conversations about with faculty and peers within my department, as well, and in fact it was a topic I had considered for my scholarly essay in this class.

I think as we move forward and technology becomes more advanced, more affordable and more accessible, we, as future instructors, are going to need to give some serious thought to the role of technology in our classrooms and how to balance the line between informational aid and cognitive distraction. Some research has shown that one individual using Facebook in a classroom negatively impacts not only their engagement and performace but also the engagement and performance of other students around them.

I think we’ll see more and more research examining the role of technology in the classroom and hope that faculty moving forward will follow the research and create intentional technology policies for themselves and their students.

Open Access

It wasn’t necessarily difficult to find an open access in my field (Human Development) but it wasn’t as easy as searching through the databases offered through the library. Before I landed on this article, I found a different article in a journal that “supports Open Access,” but the specific article I chose was not open access.

The article I chose for this post is Personality, Family Correlates and Emotion Regulation as Wellbeing Predictors.  When looking for this article, I went through ScienceDirect’s subject filter option within their Open Access articles and databases. I was struck, but not surprised, that most of the Open Access journals were from other countries than the United States. Many contained articles published in languages other than English.

This specific article came from a university in Romania and is clearly labeled on the digital access page as Open Access. Another article that I considered but didn’t choose specifically noted that funding for Open Access was given by Dutch Universities. The article came from the journal Procedia – Social and Behavioral Sciences, which is copyrighted by Elsevier. This journal is a subset (focusing on the social and behavioral sciences) of the larger Procedia collection, which highlights free access to users and author-retained copyrights as some of its key features. The article itself was clearly labeled as Open Access with direct links to access and rights, as well as information about the Creative Commons license.

The larger/parent ScienceDirect touted its over 250,000 open access articles in a large banner at the bottom of the homepage, so it did seem to want to assert itself as in the Open Access movement, but the specific information about open access seemed to vary by journal/article and was thus nested within specific links rather than openly available from any site I saw.

 

 

Ethics

It took me a little longer to find the “fun,” hypothetical case studies instead of the relatively more boring academic/research misconduct case studies. I chose this one because I’m really interested in the anti-academic bullying push at our school and this seemed to be a really good example of the type of thing that might happen.

I think the first thing I noticed was that while the case study clearly got the crux of the situation across, the author is by no means a professional writer. But once I got over that, I was struck by the gender distribution of power in this case study. Beyond the mentor/mentee dynamic, there is also the complicated gender dynamics. No racial or ethnicity factors were described, so that additional complicated layer can’t be considered.

The way the questions were framed were also awkward and leaned in the direction of blaming the victim. For example, “Why do you suppose Kara has let things get to this point? Has she been exploited in any way?” Like, why couldn’t the question be “What systems were in place that allowed this advisor to take advantage of the work provided by graduate students for so long that he doesn’t give a second thought to overloading a new student?”

On Privilege

Every individual is an intersection of identities and just as many identities run along spectrums, each identity is also associated with a certain degree of privilege. Privilege is not inherently or necessarily a bad thing; it is just something that we must acknowledge and to which we can choose to respond. 

I think a lot of the resistance to the concept of privilege comes from an introduction to privilege that floated around the internet and within certain social justice communities that privilege was Bad and those who had it were inherently discriminatory, but that’s not the case. When someone says “check your privilege,” they’re not necessarily attacking you or accusing you of anything, but rather they are asking you to call into question the systems of power in place that might have led to your assumptions, behavior, choices, etc. 

A common argument against the concept of privilege, let’s take white privilege as an example, is “I didn’t ask to be born white,” which may be true, but it’s important to consider is that just as I did not ask for white privilege or class privilege, people of color and individuals from lower socioeconomic statuses didn’t ask for their position in society either.

Another response to privilege is a complaint about identity politics or an accusation of certain groups playing the victim. But minority groups aren’t Taylor Swift. Their perceptions of slights against them on a societal scale aren’t imagined. There are studies upon studies about the different ways that white and assumed non-white people are considered in this country. Simple things like the type of complimentary hair and skincare products provided in hotels and spas show preference for white bodies over bodies of color. Accessibility is not a priority for all newly constructed or renovated buildings. Feminine traits are still often considered weaker or less desirable. Though subjective, the life experiences if individuals at varying points on the spectrum of privileges will be different. 

A few weeks ago, I attended a webinar about challenges for women in the academic workplace and two things really stuck out to me. The first was that one woman from the medical science field repeatedly insisted that if you did the work, it would be recognized and you would get “a seat at the table,” but the thing about privileges, power and stereotypes is that hard work is often not acknowledged or respected the same way for people in different groups. Especially because the panel was about women being overlooked for certain positions, it was just such an odd thing for that particular scholar to repeat, even when presented with cases where hardworking women were particularly looked over. The other thing I noted was that while the panelists did discuss the intersections between race and gender and the additional challenges faced in “getting a seat at the table” or being recognized in those intersections, the three panelists were white women from Western cultures. So even in a conversation about how difficult it can be to get a seat at the table, seats weren’t offered to those whose experiences were being discussed. 

As a well-educated, middle class white woman, I have (what I consider to be) a responsibility to recognize the relation between the way the world views me and my experiences, as well as a duty to consider how I can combat systems of privilege or use my privilege to advocate for and create space for those whose identities aren’t granted the same privilege.

Frances McDormand mentioned inclusion riders at an award show recently and there were outpourings of both agreement and complaint. Many said that inclusion riders (a requirement that a certain percentage of cast and crew be diverse in an actor’s contract) were a great way to even the playing field, advocate for representation and combat existing systems of power. Others suggested that the idea of an inclusion rider was insulting and said things like “I want people hired for their skill not their skin color.” But a huge problem, as with women in academia, is that many people of color with skills are being overlooked because of their skin color, while many white people are being hired because of their skin color and not their skills but no one has a problem with that, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. 

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