ECS 210- Week 9

A) My schooling has shaped how I read the world because it has influenced my perceptions of people around me and created expectations for social attitudes as well as actions. Growing up in a city, going to Catholic school, and being in mostly advanced placement courses the French immersion program, my surroundings have been heavily influenced by European orientations and perspectives. This schooling has created biases in the ways I interact with other people. For example, through my language education I find myself judging people who make what I consider to be simple English mistakes, and often have been asked during my summer jobs “why do you talk like that?” by rural co workers. Therefore, I bring bias into the classroom in expecting a specific dialect or type of English and French which are privileged by Eurocentric standards that do not correspond to the lived experiences of many groups in Canada. In terms of working against this bias, I think it is to continue to encourage people to improve their language capacities, while not disregarding their ways of speaking, writing, and knowing as illegitimate or less than academic language.

Single stories that were present in my own schooling include the insistence that high school was a time of preparation for university. This privileges students who have goals to continue on to post-secondary education, and not students who do not have the means to continue. It also implicitly discourages people who want to study in the trades or enter directly into the workforce. The truth that matters is that of the career adviser, who tells students what schools they can and can’t apply to. These decision are said to determine the future of students based on their high school accomplishments.