Kevin's FNED 246 Blog

                         The Academic and Social Value of Ethnic Studies

    I decided that I am going to use connections for my blog #4. The Academic and Social Value of Ethnic Studies talks about how these schools will not provide the classes for the students who are showing their interest. To me, this piece was very easy for me to connect this to the past readings due to how similar they were. I was first able to connect this to the four i's of oppression. The oppression that stood out to me that I was easiest to connect to the most is institutional oppression. Institutionalized oppression happens when social and written rules, laws, regulations, curriculum, media images and privileges who allow a dominant group as a whole to benefit at the expense of a subordinate group. The people in power are being shown and taught whereas the culture and history of the not so privileged aren't.  This shows the culture in power due to the fact that it is not allowing the non-privileged people to show their history/cultures and where they come from in a classroom. 

    The picture that I have chosen is a picture of how so many people can be affected by one person. In this picture, I imagined that all of these people are in a classroom and the person in the middle is the teacher and that all of the people around the teacher are the people who are affected either positively or negatively in the classroom. Attached HERE talks about how to become a more diverse teacher and the importance of accepting different diversities and cultures in a classroom. A point that I wanted to bring up in class was a connection that I had between the video we watched last class and the reading The Academic and Social Value of Ethnic Studies. In the video, it talked about how students from a school in Tucson, Arizona where the students got their ethnic studies taken away from them. The students finally felt comfortable in their environment for once as they were learning on how to grow as a culture. I could connect these two with each other because Sleeter talked about how respecting other people's beliefs and where they come from are such important values and this is also shown in the Precious Documentary where the man claimed that they were threatening America, and they had no respect or beliefs.