Although this one relates to school rather than adult education, the case of the clock that a teacher thought was a bomb illustrates many aspects of the need for culturally responsive teaching.
Is an image worth 1000 words?
The first point to be made is that it is dangerous to comment at a distance. I saw people jumping to conclusions in the case of the Syrian boy washed up drowned on a Turkish beach. That his family were rich because he wore label clothes (though I couldn’t see that in the picture), that he was well fed, that his father was in fact the captain of the doomed boat, that the family were being sponsored to go to Canada, that the family were jumping the queue (there is no queue). It was amazing to see so many ‘facts’ being deduced from one image. But that incident does illustrate our capacity for jumping to conclusions and that alone should give teachers in any context pause for thought about what conclusions they are drawing about the people in their classes and how that affects the teacher’s approach.
In the case of Ahmed Mohamed in Texas USA, the simple act of bringing a home-made clock to school to show his teacher unleashed a grotesque series of events which in turn, unleashed a global media frenzy. The teacher feared the clock might be a bomb and Mohamed was taken away in handcuffs from the school by the police and suspended by the school, even after it was clear that the device was harmless.
https://www.facebook.com/ajplusenglish/videos/619769144831263/ A Muslim boy was arrested at school in Irving, Texas, because his teachers thought his homemade clock was a bomb.
Bearing in mind the caveat above about commenting at a distance, the case raises a series of questions.
- How have other students bringing items from home been treated?
- What about the sharing of food?
- Why was the ‘bomb’ travelling in the vehicle with Mohamed and the police?
- Why did the first teacher to see the clock not raise the alarm?
Certainly the context is very different in the USA where it is usual to have campus police both at universities and high schools, where lock-down practice is as much part of the annual calendar as fire practice in my experience.
The interesting thing for me is how and whether this could have been handled differently, bearing in mind that several people invoked the school’s duty of care to its other pupils and staff in defence of its actions (and justified no doubt by the latest shootings in Oregon). This is not about bringing weapons into educational institutions, it is about how we react at a visceral level and what the consequences are. In this particular case, the outcome is probably positive for Ahmed Mohamed but for students who are misjudged on a daily basis, this leads to disengagement on a huge scale.