As teachers, it's imperative for us to be able to recognize these barriers, not only in ourselves, but in those with whom we have stewardship, our students. They both perpetuate and are victims of these barriers. We see it every day in classroom and playground behavior, those who bully and ignore, and those who are bullied and isolated. Here is our chance to step in, engage and teach how both can bring down the barriers and improve relationships.
Before I get to the barriers, though, let me tell you a story.
The radio announcer said it was one hundred fifteen at four o'clock straight up, but it had to be hotter than that. Ambient air temps had to be one twenty, one twenty five if you factored in the radiant heat from the cement slab-sided shoulder from the underpass at Tropicana, from the asphalt and the idling of a thousand cars and trucks as we stagnated there waiting for one more transition of the eternal highway construction that is Interstate 15 in Las Vegas.
Not so inside my sedan, air conditioning blasting since I left the airport that by the time I reached the freeway it cooled down to the seventies and to where I could wrap my hands around the leather-clad steering wheel. Not that I needed to since nothing was moving. A hundred and thirteen miles to go before home, the first three of which would take me almost as long as the rest of the commute to St. George.
From the underpass a pedestrian caught my eye in my rear-view mirror. His broken, awkward gate demanded my attention and I turned to see what seemed to a mirage in the heat waves, a mexican male, seventy something clad in canvas pants and boots with a flannel shirt buttoned at the cuffs and neck.
He was carrying a big brown paper sack and he couldn't walk a straight line. He was moving, though, right past my idling car determined to get wherever he was going in his inebriation, making better time than I.
That guy's going to die out there. If the heat doesn't get him the dehydration will. Look at him, he can hardly take his next step. But he does, one after the other. The effort looks extraordinary.
And there's a break in the jam, brake lights extinguish and traffic advances and I roll past the drunk mexican on the shoulder. We make maybe thirty yards and halt. I know he's somewhere back there. I avoid the mirrors, out if sight out if mind, and think about a bar-be-que when I get home.
In my peripheral I know he's there walking and I try to keep him out if my sightline. And that's when the little devil and the little angel popped up on my shoulders.
"Pick him up," said the angel and while I mulled that over the devil says, "Are you kidding me? Do you know what that guy's going to smell like?"
The angel knows now much I like to be able to sleep. "Just pick him up, take him over to UNLV's medical center and drop him off."
"What if he pukes in your car?"
And the debate went on. The traffic moves again. See ya. We stop maybe twenty yards this time.
I don't say this to pat myself on the back. On the contrary, I was a racist prick, but the angel prevailed and I pulled out of the lane on to the shoulder and waited for the drunk mexican to reach my car.
I opened the passenger side door, the ambient air temperatures so different from inside to outside that it sounded like the break of a hermetically sealed hatch on a spaceship. The pedestrian reached the opening and bent down to see me.
"Hey Pedro, need a ride?" Yes, I really said that.
"Yes!" He said. His enthusiasm was surprising to me. He turned away, bent over more, enough to allow his frame to rock back and collapse into my passenger seat. He shifted his paper bag and its contents to his right arm and used his left to pick up his left leg by his trousers and move it into the footwell, revealing the stainless steel brace that connected to his boot. Then he did the same with the other leg. Brace on that one, too.
"Thank you for stopping. It's pretty hot out there."
He then told me he somehow lost the drain plug from the oil pan of his pickup stranding him and his grandkids somewhere near Moapa on I-15. He'd hitchhiked his way to Vegas to find a new plug and eight quarts of motor oil, the prize he had in his bag, and was making his way back when I was kind enough to pull over and offer him a ride.
Every declaration of my kindness and his gratitude cut me to my core. I made this guy walk half a football field. No guile, no judgement from him, just gratitude. I couldn't say the same for myself, instantly ashamed.
We merged back into traffic and made our way north. He was a decorated Vet, wounded in combat, ran his family farm in Overton with three generations living under his roof, two of the third were waiting for us when we reached his truck.
We parked on the northbound shoulder and made our way to the southbound side where the pickup and his grandkids were waiting, happy to see him. I installed the plug, filled the engine with oil and listened to make sure no noticeable damage was done and they were on their way.
Back in my car I sat there and wondered on the shoulder of that freeway what other drunk mexicans I had in my life. This stereotype is the result of a psychological predisposition, or barriers stuck in our psychological context.
The main barrier I allowed was indiscrimination, but there was also allness, fact/inference confusion, and disconfirmation. Others include intensional orientation, polarization and static evaluation. I'll take these in that order:
Indiscrimination
When one focuses on classes of individuals and fails to see uniqueness and individuality. This is the impetus of stereotyping. I had a frame-of-reference on Mexican males. I'm not entirely clear where it came from, but I'll admit media has a lot to do with it. Regardless, this barrier prohibited me to see this man as anything other than a drunk Mexican due to my inability to be aware of what made him unique. Had I really observed his gate while he walked, I would've noticed the pattern of his steps as opposed to the random stumbling I thought I saw.
Students concentrating on acceptance and popularity subvert their uniqueness. Those who don't mask what makes them different often become victim of this and other barriers.
The cure to this is consideration, a thoughtful kindness, a critical look at all the non-verbal cues apart from assuming where they come from. This enables us to see non-verbal signals for what they are instead of attributing some kind of characterization to them.
For students, developing the ability to recognize uniqueness in their peers encourages disclosure, a positive influence in building relationships.
Allness
When one assumes they know all there is to know about another based on limited information. This is a common barrier, one tied to values found in the cultural context and roles found in the social context. What I saw was an older Mexican man wearing a flannel shirt, canvas pants and boots carrying a brown paper bag, staggering. On those clues alone I thought I knew all there was to know about him.
When one assumes they know all there is to know about another based on limited information. This is a common barrier, one tied to values found in the cultural context and roles found in the social context. What I saw was an older Mexican man wearing a flannel shirt, canvas pants and boots carrying a brown paper bag, staggering. On those clues alone I thought I knew all there was to know about him.
We do this with people who sport artifacts that might be outside of our own accepted cultural norms, like tattoos, piercings, wild hair styles, unusual clothing. We see an artifact, gather other limited data and confirm the barrier that we know all there is to know about this person. In law-enforcement this is called profiling.
Many students are driven by artifacts - clothing, shoes, hairstyles - in identifying and encouraging acceptance. If one doesn't sport the right artifact they can be or feel ostracized from their social context.
The cure here is to remember there's always more to learn about anyone. Engage in communicating, ask questions, clarify, and never assume you've closed the book on the person. Allness is a myth - a good, relationship-building notion to pass on to our students.
Fact/Inference Confusion
Basing evaluations on assumptions. My inferences were the staggering and the brown paper bag, associated with a racial stereotype. The facts were that his gate was impaired by braces on his legs and the bag contained motor oil, not alcohol. Shame on me.
Basing evaluations on assumptions. My inferences were the staggering and the brown paper bag, associated with a racial stereotype. The facts were that his gate was impaired by braces on his legs and the bag contained motor oil, not alcohol. Shame on me.
Shame on us when we infer a characteristic about someone based on assumption. Inference is the staple of intensional orientation. When an assumption about a student's reputation travels the gossip superhighway among peers, its influence of personal destruction seems unsurmountable. It's as carcinogenic as sexting, but much older and better entrenched. When young people feel they've failed in acceptance, or when the data around them conspires against them, hopelessness is a common default response.
The cure to this confusion is the temporal context, it's time. Observing over a period of time allows the assessor to gather more accurate data and separate assumptions from the reality of the context. The cure in student contexts is to teach avoiding assumption and stopping rumor.
Disconfirmation
The disregard of another. I ignored this man. We do this with people with whom we're afraid, with whom we do not want to engage. I wasn't alone. There were three lanes of cars full of people doing the same thing, exacerbating the affect of disconfirmation.
The disregard of another. I ignored this man. We do this with people with whom we're afraid, with whom we do not want to engage. I wasn't alone. There were three lanes of cars full of people doing the same thing, exacerbating the affect of disconfirmation.
William James noted, "No more fiendish punishment could be devised than that one would be turned loose in society and remain unnoticed by the members thereof."
Students can get pretty adept at selective disconfirmation. It's one thing to be ignored by another, only to be exacerbated to be ignored by a group, isolating and diluting identity of the one being ignored.
The cure is to drop the "dis." It's confirmation, acknowledging the presence of another both verbally and non-verbally. Confirmation one's presence is a simple as a greeting and a bump or handshake, yet it validates the presence of the other, a fundamental in developing relationships.
Intensional Orientation
The tendency to view people in terms of how they're labeled or talked about instead of how they actually are. How often do we do this with students? We tell a colleague about a problem student we've had in class, orienting the colleague to them instead of allowing them to form their own evaluation of the student based on their own observations. We're all quick to do this because it's much easier to take someone else's word than it is to form an assessment on our own.
Students do this with each other. In fact, recent research on the human behavior of gossip indicates it's a survival instinct. This barrier happens on a primal level, one that seeks to preserve one's self. These labels transmit on the backbone of rumor and are just as injurious as a direct insult.
The tendency to view people in terms of how they're labeled or talked about instead of how they actually are. How often do we do this with students? We tell a colleague about a problem student we've had in class, orienting the colleague to them instead of allowing them to form their own evaluation of the student based on their own observations. We're all quick to do this because it's much easier to take someone else's word than it is to form an assessment on our own.
Students do this with each other. In fact, recent research on the human behavior of gossip indicates it's a survival instinct. This barrier happens on a primal level, one that seeks to preserve one's self. These labels transmit on the backbone of rumor and are just as injurious as a direct insult.
Intensional orientation labels the student, the person and it does not allow them to prove themselves otherwise. This orientation can be both negative and positive.
The cure is to extensionalize, go to the person, not a third, to find out more about them. Pretty simple, really, and yet if we lack assertiveness, we rather default to someone else's evaluation. In threat assessment, are you going to trust someone else's label? As you evaluate threat assessment with students, how apt are you to default to existing labels?
Polarization
The fallacy of either/or, a barrier of extremes. You either are or you are not. This is another easy barrier to default to because we only have to see another in one of two ways. Are you that shallow, that unsophisticated? Neither is anyone else. In education contexts it's so easy to polarize. We do it by good and bad, by straight or hood, by smart or dumb. It's atrocious.
Static Evaluation
A barrier influenced by the notion that people don't change. This is subtly dangerous. Ask any parent who failed to see changes in their drug-addicted child, or the teacher who overlooked subtle tells of escalating violent behavior.
The cure is observation and recognizing that everybody changes and are capable of change outside of expected social and cultural contexts.
The cure is to extensionalize, go to the person, not a third, to find out more about them. Pretty simple, really, and yet if we lack assertiveness, we rather default to someone else's evaluation. In threat assessment, are you going to trust someone else's label? As you evaluate threat assessment with students, how apt are you to default to existing labels?
Polarization
The fallacy of either/or, a barrier of extremes. You either are or you are not. This is another easy barrier to default to because we only have to see another in one of two ways. Are you that shallow, that unsophisticated? Neither is anyone else. In education contexts it's so easy to polarize. We do it by good and bad, by straight or hood, by smart or dumb. It's atrocious.
In student circles, the polarization happens in cliques and peer groups. You're with us, or you're not, a huge influence in disconfirmation.
The cure is to find middle ground and eliminate the false dichotomy. What do we have in common, especially when it comes to values? Stress and explore the commonality. It builds relationships.
Static Evaluation
A barrier influenced by the notion that people don't change. This is subtly dangerous. Ask any parent who failed to see changes in their drug-addicted child, or the teacher who overlooked subtle tells of escalating violent behavior.
The cure is observation and recognizing that everybody changes and are capable of change outside of expected social and cultural contexts.