Katie's Korner
In an ideal world, we would all be unbiased. If we’re unbiased we can be all of the IB learner profile traits with little to no effort. Open-mindedness is easily achieved without bias, as is risk-taking, reflectiveness, and communication, it goes on. Biases are intrinsic to society in the way we form our understanding of the world and the systems that function within it. Some of these biases might be as simple as favouring one colour over another, but they can also be as harmful as confirmation biases and other such concepts.
The role of teachers is a unique one because while we inherently hold our own biases and beliefs, we need to do our best to remain unbiased in our teachings to allow our students to form their own understandings.
This is easier said than done, and it's an active ongoing commitment that teachers need to make in their classrooms to remain a neutral voice. Because we largely teach a secular curriculum that holds certain values at its core, it is how teachers interpret this curriculum to abstain from letting their biases influence the concepts and values that they’re teaching. To ensure that we as teachers are doing our utmost to remain neutral, we need to have resources that consider multiple perspectives and backgrounds when approaching the same topic.
For example, Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet can be approached with the traditional reading of it as a tragedy. However, it can also be read focusing on the genre of comedy, which is something that the Baz Luhrmann film adaptation (1996) highlights the hilarity of Romeo & Juliet. This example would represent someone who has a traditional literary reading bias, compared to a more modern literary comprehension bias. Both interpretations of this play are valid in their own right, but they approach the same topic from different perspectives.
When connecting biases and ethics, there are implicit biases that everyone will walk into a classroom with, student or teacher. The work that teachers do is to differentiate between a harmless bias, versus a harmful one that violates ethical principles. A harmless bias would be having a preferred colour over another, but a harmful bias would be preferential treatment of one ethnicity over another. It would be up to the teacher to discover where these biases intersect with ethics, and create discussion, provide information, and answer questions students may have.
Ultimately, it is not up to the teacher to ‘make’ the student change their views and opinions. It is, however, up to the teacher to provide as many avenues as possible for students to be well informed on their own biases, as well as be able to consider alternative viewpoints of their peers and the world around them.
