On this blog I will be talking about what we did and worked on on last week. Hitting a little closer to where they are, we covered the topic of education and education disparities and it’s connection to racism. Starting off, we reviewed the previous week’s topic on housing and housing inequalities so as to help ground us to where we were and tie the two topics together.
We then moved on to covering the basis of what educational inequality was and their understanding of how it showed itself in their lives and their community. What caught my attention was that some of the youth were unaware of the various education inequalities that were present in the education system. This might have been majorly due to not as much exposure to other places and schools and their various conditions. We therefore got them into an activity where each of them looked up the ratings of their schools on GreatSchools and were shocked at what they found, with some being higher, and some being lower than expected. Another group of students, who had undertaken a spring project of visiting and identifying differences between their school and another school in an affluent community then shared their experiences and what they noted. With these activities, they were able to identify not only that there are educational inequalities, but also that they exist within our communities.
After, I led an activity to demonstrate how allocation of different resources, in this sense, educational resources, affects one’s outcomes in the future, especially their careers. With this game of coin toss, each student was given different amounts of coins that they were able to bet with, and then they played against each other, flipping a coin with the winner taking the amount of coins bet on. Even with the seemingly ‘fair’ chance of winning of losing from a coin toss, the ones with the most number of coins at the beginning either ended up with more, or ended up with less than they started with, but still more than the ones that had less coins at the beginning. With this game came the understanding that with unequal distribution of education resources, the playing field was skewed and the ones that have less have to put in much much more effort to be at the same level as the ones who had more, and have more to lose than their other counterparts. When we were having a debrief and discussion, the youth were then able to have a better understanding of how educational inequality plays a big part in their lives and others’ too.
Finally, with this in mind, we had a discussion on how it relates to racism and tied it to what we had talked about previously, which was housing inequalities. The students were able to connect systemic inequalities such as zoning, which affected who lived where, with the underrepresented minorities mostly living in low value areas. Where one lives, ultimately affects where they get their education and that in turn affects the educational resources they require to thrive or otherwise, and that has a direct impact on one’s future outcome and that of their families. This then becomes a perpetual cycle in underrepresented communities unless everyone is aware of it and makes intentional decisions to affect change.
In their subsequent presentations, the students were able to articulate what they understood and what they would want to inform others in a bid to sensitise their community and people they interact with.