SEL Equity: Self-Awareness
To break down the new CASEL guidelines to promote equity and social justice as it potentially applies to the disability community, I will be going section by section starting with (as implied in the title) self-awareness. For more information on these changes see our previous post.
Two new additions to the Self-Awareness aspects stand out as applies to our students: 1. Integrating personal and social identities, and 2. Examining beliefs and biases.
During my first year of teaching I had a student who had no idea that people have preconceived notions about people with visual impairments and what blindness means. I was stunned, particularly because he was preparing to enter the workforce. I put the day’s plans on hold and class shifted toward an in-depth conversation about these notions. Some of the ideas they found humorous, others disturbing, but without acknowledging them students would have no tools to deal with these potential situations.
To whatever degree they may want to embrace it, having a visual impairment is part of their identity and unless they plan on staying in a community of only visually impaired people for the rest of their lives (not a sustainable or healthy idea) they WILL encounter biases in all social and professional settings. As teachers, we don’t want to wear them down with things that will discourage them about entering the wide world but they need to be aware of these things. We also have to keep in mind that our population is not uniform. Often ECC instruction focuses exclusively on students’ visual impairments, but we need to address the other elements of identities with the same explicit techniques.
Some things to consider:
Types of assumptions they have already encountered.
The most prominent assumptions propagated across applicable cultures.
Viewpoints and feedback from adults with visual impairments who have encountered these things.
Settings where it is okay to not explain their visual impairment if that’s their desire and how to do so politely.
Settings where they need to give some summation of their visual impairment and how to do so effectively.
Understanding that it is NOT their responsibility to educate the world about the lives of people with visual impairments. If they want to share information, go for it! If they don’t want to share information, it’s well within their right to politely decline.
Techniques to combat roadblocks created by assumptions across settings.
Freedom to share fears and experiences regarding all aspects of their identities.
Their right to determine the place of their visual impairment in their multi-faceted identity, and the freedom for that place to change over time.
The list of considerations is by no means set in stone, merely some ways that practitioners can adjust ECC instruction to fit our evolving knowledge. The emphasis here is that such considerations can not be left out of explicit instruction. As a community, it is our responsibility to brainstorm, observe, research, and discuss such things to make our instruction more robust.
Next week I’ll be looking at three other areas of the updated CASEL guidelines: Self-Management, Social Awareness, and Relationship Skills.