Week 1 Class Participation Essay: Your Personal
Understanding of Class, Diversity and Social Justice
Details
Format requirements for Personal Understanding of
Diversity/ Social Justice Paper:
3-4
pages written in Microsoft Word’s 12-point Times New Roman font, 1
inch margins, double-spaced. Include a title page with name and date
(not to be included in the 3 page requirement)
The essay should be an honest self reflection on your experiences and
personal understanding of class, diversity, social justice and equity. The
assignment is for you to consider and write about any areas of personal
growth, misconceptions, personal ‘isms’, barriers to learning, ‘aha’
moments, and thoughts on leading through the lens of social justice,
diversity, inclusion, and/or equity. What (if any) impact did this reading
have on your life personally and professionally? How do you foresee taking
the impact moving forward? How (or were) your previous perceptions and attitudes
challenged? What paradigm shifts or new insights did you obtain about
yourself, your cohort as a collective or as individuals?
— what I wrote
I never had the opportunity to
be part of a class that provides a safe classroom environment where students
can be open and honest in discussing the topics of this class. One of the
things that I have also noticed is that the professors ask the students for the
pronouns they would like to be by.
The DIVERSITY: The Evolving
Language of Diversity reading fact sheet mentioned that “Language not only
expresses ideas and concepts but actually shapes thought.” We discussed in
class how the language we use in our daily lives could be intentionally or
unintentionally biased. People have used this type of language for generations
because it is sometimes unheeded or acquired by what is around us. At the same
time, language is evolving as a reflection of society’s evolution, often based
on stereotypes.
One of the controversies
mentioned in the reading concerns the use of the terms Latina(o), Hispanic, and
Chicano(a). How can those three terms limit what people from Latin America
would like to be called? How were those terms created by the government to
group people and not wholly represent them? How many people interested in being
grouped by the provided terminology need to be in agreement, agree, or feel
that their voices are heard and that they do not feel represented?
It also refers to how the words
that we use in daily life can influence the way that we think, act, and behave
as individuals.
For the reading: Center for
American Progress – The Top 10 Economic Facts of Diversity in the Workplace. We
discussed how our country has, over the years, become more diverse in the
workforce industry. How many underrepresented or minority groups have more
representation on visitability in everyday jobs and in the execution or
management positions, locally within the city, the state and nationally?
Diversity in the workforce: One
example is how the workforce has increased by 10 per cent over the past 40
years. As a result, the economy has busted. Diversity has also impacted the
country’s competitive economic market and how the economy will benefit from the
economy by changing how the business looks demographically.
In Leadership for Social
Justice: Preparing 21st Century School Leaders for a New Social Order, one of
the things we agreed on as a group is that to create change, we need to educate
ourselves and become the leaders that our nation needs. By obtaining
preparation, we can become leaders who can act courageously to create, advocate
for, and promote social justice for everyone equally how the need to obtain a
deeper understanding of social justice is necessary to create education and a
shift in the direction of how we would like our country to become. Our country
needs leaders of action and leaders of reaction.
