I grew up on an acreage in a rural community outside Edmonton. I went to a small rural high school until half way through grade 11 when I transferred to a new school because the bullying I had been going through since grade 4 was too much and I needed a fresh start. In the two high schools that I attended in my schooling, there was not much diversity in the cultures of the students or families in the school, the teachers or the community.

Growing up in a predominately white community there was little knowledge of other cultures. I can imagine there were some rather powerful encounters for the people of other cultures coming into this community. I did not explicitly see it but that does not mean those types of interactions did not go on in my community. This perception of my community is a lens that I see it through, I did not see the injustices occurring so to me they weren’t there. My lens is not being exposed to that type of hatefulness. To a certain degree, I think that makes me a little nieve to what actually goes on in the world. I was sheltered living where I lived. My mom made sure we saw many places like Seattle, Los Angles, and New York, but I still feel like I saw the world through this sheltered lens. Since going to university I have learned a lot and have seen many different cultural groups in the three universities I have attended. Since moving to Regina and participating in a volunteer placement for another education class I have seen more range in the SES, ability, and ethnicity of people. I want to believe that these experiences are changing the lens I see the world through, but in order for that to happen, I need to stay open-minded.

Along with the place I grew up in I have a lens to what schools mean to me. Being isolated and ridiculed during the majority of my schooling has in many ways altered my lens of what relationships should be like. The way I view the social interactions between students is more serious to me because I have a personal connection to being treated badly by my peers. This lens through which I see schools is one of the biggest reasons I decided teaching is something that I want to pursue. For a long time, I didn’t believe teachers were meant to help students with their social problems becuase many of mine never did. That thought didn’t change until my grade 12 year when my favorite biology teacher reached out and gave me a place I could be when times were tough. Lunch hour was really hard for me becuase I felt very alone when I sat eating my lunch alone in the hall. I didn’t have friends to hang around and waist the 45 minutes with so it felt like an eternity. My biology teacher gave me an open door invitation to each lunch in his classroom. This pretty much saved me, I had somewhere to go and I was able to feel like I belonged at school instead of dreading it every day. The lens I will bring into the classroom is one that sees teachers as guides to students as well as being someone there to help when help is needed.

Something that creates bias is the idea of the “single story,” this is the idea that for many cultures or people from other countries there is only one story created about them as a people or the way they live in their culture. This single story is one true or untrue belief about the culture or the people of a culture and it is the only one that is perceived by others. This idea comes from a TED talk that we viewed in lecture today where an African woman told her story about her interactions with the single stories about her culture and how she lived. In my own schooling, I was told a single story about the indigenous population. Learning about the residential schools and the issues that they still went through today created a single story that indigenous people always live in poverty, have dead-end jobs, and do bad things to good people. This was not the intended story to be left in minds of students during social class in jr. high, but it was the story that was left in my mind. It didn’t help that there wasn’t any indigenous students or teachers in our school to change how that story was written. There was no struggle between who’s truth mattered more, there wasn’t anything to change the perception that we had created. This is a bias that I will bring into the classroom. I am working to change that bias and to become educated through the volunteer placement I am in.

As a future teacher I acknowledge my biases I will be bringing into the classroom and the unique lens I will be looking at it with. There is nothing without bias, as a teacher I hope to reduce the bias that I show in the classroom to give each student a fair chance no matter where they come from.

Jessica Wiedemann

Jessica is a student at University of Regina. Her passion for helping others and advocacy for the prevention of bullying in schools has lead her to a career in education. She is a dog lover, photographer, and a food lover.

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