What would be good inclusivity training?

[EdnaMode]

Not a professor but:

At my large corporation I still hear people referring to a large group as "Hey guys" or "The guys working on..." as if male is the default and also "man hours" instead of "staff hours".

I don't feel included.

Many women, including servers at restaurants, often refer to a clearly *mixed group of people as "You guys", so to a significant number of women the term "guys" is not gender-specific.

(Since I wouldn't, by definition, be part of an all-female group, I can't say whether these same women would refer to an all-female group as "you guys".)

I'm in an engineering field where prior to becoming a professor, when I was in industry, I was often the only woman in the room, and now that I'm teaching, I'm the only woman in my department (we had another one, but she retired last year), and often in my classes, I'm the only woman in the room. I will say "Okay, guys, let's get started," to my classes whether they contain men, women, either, both, whatever. I am not the least bit fussed if someone refers to our faculty group as "guys." In my world, guys is a gender neutral term. If someone says "Okay, men," then I might be vaguely annoyed, but more likely would be amused like when a few years ago, a photographer who was trying to herd our students into place (they had been presenting their capstone projects and were all dressed up) to take photos with their project sponsors and faculty. When the photographer made that comment, one of my students said rather loudly "Dr. Mode is a girl! Erm... a lady!" Then the photographer saw me and apologized. I said it was fine. I have more things to concern myself with than being referred to as a "guy."

[mahagonny]

I find it helps to identify areas where I have a blind spot for bias, by acknowledging my own situation, and how those particular characteristics either help or hinder me in seeing things more dimensionally.

For example, I've always worked to include statements about native American land use and the presence of enslaved individuals in the colonial areas I write, talk, teach, and give tours on.

Just recently, however, a discussion about how those statements can begin to become rote recitations made me realize I was using some of the phrases I'd come up with long ago to cover up for further areas of inequality that needed to be discussed.

I'd been, for example, saying that "the area in which this English town's settlement occurred was not used by native Americans for any permanent inhabitation of their own," without mentioning that until the English arrived, it was an area where passage to the oyster banks and fishing weirs downriver did occur, and where hunting and the transportation of game took place.

In other words, as if it were "OK" that the area was settled by the English (with some reimbursement, but not on any par with the value gained for it), and that cutting of lines of transportation and communication were inconsequential interruptions of Native life.

I was still leveraging, or creating an unspoken apologetic for, the harmful activities of English arrivants over a more covalent acknowledgement of that harm and the responsibilities incumbent on those responsible then to have done better by those they 'inconvenienced,' and on us to listen, learn, and find out how recompense, restitution, or a simple acknowledgement of harm could help societal heirs find peace.

Amendment of life starts with an acknowledgement of harm. Where class, race, gender, and other kinds of group membership have been used to override others, one does (I believe) inherit some of the responsibility for addressing that harm.

And unless I start by looking at myself and understanding what some of those categories are, I'm just going to be playing a 'blame-game' on others.

So, honesty, I think, requires that we start with who and where we are in what has become a kind of food chain of competitive harm.

M.

So you're at work while you're sharing these ruminations. You're making a profit.

[smallcleanrat]

Curious as to how people on this thread would assess the following situation (based on my real experience taking a college course):

1) Course was titled "Music in World Cultures" but exclusively covered what you would expect from an intro course on the history of Western art music/classical music (e.g. Bach, Beethoven, etc...). Not sure why they just didn't name the course to match the content.

2) One of the assignments was to attend a performance of music "not part of your own culture," and turn in a write-up covering the event.

This led to a lot of frustrated students, as the prof, based on no other knowledge of each student other than name and physical appearance, began vetoing students' choices based on very broad categorizations of "cultures." He also didn't care what culture a student had actually grown up with, only ethnic background.

So, a Chinese-American student who had been born and raised in Minnesota was not allowed to do their assignment on Chinese music. Nor were they allowed to do the assignment on music from Japanese, Korean, Philippine, Thai, etc... traditions because these were "all Asian; so all from the same culture."

Hispanic students had a similarly broad ban including Spain and all the Latin American countries.

A student from South Africa was allowed to do his write-up on a concert featuring various styles of African music because "he's not black, so his culture isn't *really* African."

Were the students arguing with the prof just making an issue where there was none? Or was this a situation that might have benefited from some rethinking of this particular assignment and the prof's interactions with the students?

[apl68]

Curious as to how people on this thread would assess the following situation (based on my real experience taking a college course):

1) Course was titled "Music in World Cultures" but exclusively covered what you would expect from an intro course on the history of Western art music/classical music (e.g. Bach, Beethoven, etc...). Not sure why they just didn't name the course to match the content.

2) One of the assignments was to attend a performance of music "not part of your own culture," and turn in a write-up covering the event.

This led to a lot of frustrated students, as the prof, based on no other knowledge of each student other than name and physical appearance, began vetoing students' choices based on very broad categorizations of "cultures." He also didn't care what culture a student had actually grown up with, only ethnic background.

So, a Chinese-American student who had been born and raised in Minnesota was not allowed to do their assignment on Chinese music. Nor were they allowed to do the assignment on music from Japanese, Korean, Philippine, Thai, etc... traditions because these were "all Asian; so all from the same culture."

Hispanic students had a similarly broad ban including Spain and all the Latin American countries.

A student from South Africa was allowed to do his write-up on a concert featuring various styles of African music because "he's not black, so his culture isn't *really* African."

Were the students arguing with the prof just making an issue where there was none? Or was this a situation that might have benefited from some rethinking of this particular assignment and the prof's interactions with the students?

That prof sounds pretty silly. 

So, were I in the class, would I have been discouraged from going to a performance of Mozart, since I'm obviously of European descent?  Or would it be okay, since I'm from Arkansas and presumably grew up hearing nothing other than country & western and bluegrass?

[mamselle]

What a mess!

I can speak to this directly, I teach art, music and dance history with a strong eye to global inclusivity.

I'm going to guess the professor hadn't done any, or much, teaching outside their own trained, Western-oriented music history background (which, until about the 1980s/90s, was all that was taught to any great degree, anywhere.

My U/G dance program was unique for bringing in Bharat Natyam, Ghahanian, and folk dance experts as artists-in-residence in the late 1970s, when I was there; the city's symphony orchestra had Ravi Shankar as a guest soloist, but little to no background teaching had yet been developed in support of those efforts.)

Around the 1980s, the publishing houses that created music educational books for schools began including some Hispanic songs and maybe a French-Canadian piece or two. (I was working as a staff assistant briefly in an elementary school and saw these coming into the mail room). Churches I attended or did workshops for were beginning to use hymns with bilingual texts, but often had no native speakers to help with pronunciation, so sometimes the texts were in the hymnals, but never used. (One church that declared itself an El Salvadoran sanctuary site, on the other hand, mixed Spanish and English texts almost evenly).

By the 1990s, the term 'global music' was popping up in the more updated theater sites I knew of, and a friend's husband became a booking agent for Andean pan-pipe groups, Camerounian drummers, Gamelans performers, and so on. A Harvard professor, Kay Kaufman Shelemay, published on the use of these resources in teaching, created a music ed. curriculum, and authored books for teachers to ground the process in a better framework.

By the 2000s, issues around acculturation, accommodation, etc. were being examined, and discussed both in academic classes, and among ministers and musicians I knew. But most of the profs were still those who had been trained in the 'bad old days,' when Western music (and art, and dance, and theater) was all there was on offer. So that probably explains your experience, but it doesn't excuse it, at all, at all.

It sounds like the prof had just not thought through very clearly what the depths of 'culture' meant or how generally or specifically different cultures differ.

I can see, in some ways, wanting to move students out of their own comfort zones, in the same way Spanish teachers have to get those whose home language/first language is already Spanish to examine their grammar and pronunciation practices, on the one hand, while inviting their input to a class of non-native speakers on the other.

But lumping together the "Chinese, Japanese, etc." groups as 'simply all Asian" is dumb, wrong, and just bad practice. I've recently been working on a Korean dance image for which it's possible that Afghan/Persian influences (via the Silk Road), as well as Chinese or Japanese works, were precursors, or affected follow-ons. Those are all very different cultures, their art looks different, and their musics are all different, too. (A fruitful comparison between, say, Balinese Gamelans and Korean dance music might have been a very productive paper in the class you describe, for example).

And that's exactly where the self-identification of the teacher should have been worked out beforehand. Part of that person's identity was clearly that of someone who had had very little exposure to other cultures' musical works, believed in leveraging Western concepts over taking each culture's works on its own terms, and didn't extend themselves any further than they had to in order to offer a balanced class with a more self-aware hermeneutic.

Frankly, it sounds like they embraced laziness and self-aggrandizement, in the form of adhering to what they already knew without trying very hard to learn more, and you and your classmates were the losers.

And if people don't do the work of taking a step back and looking at themselves with new eyes, and from the eyes of those 'others' they seem so often to despise or deliberately misunderstand, they shouldn't be teaching a class that suggests they have.

Grrrrrrrr..........(goes off to prep music lesson....and Friday's theory class will, in fact, be looking at and listening to Jamaican steel drums and analyzing how they're used and where they came from--then comparing them to the African mbiras we studied last fall).

M.

[marshwiggle]

That prof sounds pretty silly. 

Absolutely. Especially evident here:

2) One of the assignments was to attend a performance of music "not part of your own culture," and turn in a write-up covering the event.

This led to a lot of frustrated students, as the prof, based on no other knowledge of each student other than name and physical appearance, began vetoing students' choices based on very broad categorizations of "cultures." He also didn't care what culture a student had actually grown up with, only ethnic background.

All of this pompous "prof-as-God" nonsense deserves all of the criticism it gets.
Particularly the veto part; not being able to trust the students to follow instructions that he could in no way verify is just obnoxious.

So, were I in the class, would I have been discouraged from going to a performance of Mozart, since I'm obviously of European descent?  Or would it be okay, since I'm from Arkansas and presumably grew up hearing nothing other than country & western and bluegrass?

Unless there was some pretty clear definition of what "culture" means early on in the course, it's totally bogus, for reasons like this.

[mamselle]

I find it helps to identify areas where I have a blind spot for bias, by acknowledging my own situation, and how those particular characteristics either help or hinder me in seeing things more dimensionally.

For example, I've always worked to include statements about native American land use and the presence of enslaved individuals in the colonial areas I write, talk, teach, and give tours on.

Just recently, however, a discussion about how those statements can begin to become rote recitations made me realize I was using some of the phrases I'd come up with long ago to cover up for further areas of inequality that needed to be discussed.

I'd been, for example, saying that "the area in which this English town's settlement occurred was not used by native Americans for any permanent inhabitation of their own," without mentioning that until the English arrived, it was an area where passage to the oyster banks and fishing weirs downriver did occur, and where hunting and the transportation of game took place.

In other words, as if it were "OK" that the area was settled by the English (with some reimbursement, but not on any par with the value gained for it), and that cutting of lines of transportation and communication were inconsequential interruptions of Native life.

I was still leveraging, or creating an unspoken apologetic for, the harmful activities of English arrivants over a more covalent acknowledgement of that harm and the responsibilities incumbent on those responsible then to have done better by those they 'inconvenienced,' and on us to listen, learn, and find out how recompense, restitution, or a simple acknowledgement of harm could help societal heirs find peace.

Amendment of life starts with an acknowledgement of harm. Where class, race, gender, and other kinds of group membership have been used to override others, one does (I believe) inherit some of the responsibility for addressing that harm.

And unless I start by looking at myself and understanding what some of those categories are, I'm just going to be playing a 'blame-game' on others.

So, honesty, I think, requires that we start with who and where we are in what has become a kind of food chain of competitive harm.

M.

So you're at work while you're sharing these ruminations. You're making a profit.

Hunh?? Do you ever read anything I say? I'm an independent scholar. No-one is paying me for my time, except when I'm teaching my music students, and then I'm very involved with their lessons, there's no down-time when you ask a kid to construct the chords on an Eb major scale that they've never worked with before.

Where do you get these observations from?

(Never mind. I probably don't want to know.)

M.

[Parasaurolophus]

If people in Wales, who are the descendants of the original Britons, have recent ancestors who died due to working in the Welsh coal mines, why can't they claim that is "continuing harm" due to the Anglo-Saxon invasion, which forced their ancestors to move to that region?

Last I checked, Edward I didn't send the Welsh into the coal mines.

There was certainly a historical wrong committed against the Welsh. The restitution for that harm has come in the form of self-government rights and relative territorial autonomy. Happily, this move is entirely sensible since the Welsh still exist as a community and culture roughly continuous with the island's original inhabitants, although of course modern-day peoples have nothing in common with their ancestors of a thousand years ago. There may well have been additional modern harms against them--perhaps including efforts to extinguish the language. I imagine there have been efforts to redress such wrongs as well--largely via self-government rights, no doubt.

With all of the broken treaties, there are vast areas of the country potentially requiring some sort of redress. Even a small city of 100 000 on appropriated lands would probably "cost" at least $1 000 000 per person, including homes, businesses, infrastructure, etc. which works out to 100 BILLION dollars. Thus the "cost" of all disputed land would be in the trillions at least.

If the land were handed back, and all non-indigenous people and businesses were required to vacate the city, it would create a huge refugee crisis. Meanwhile, the value of an empty city to the new owners would be minimal, without people to operate the infrastructure. Bulldozing everything to get back to anything like its original state would be impossibly expensive. So the only way to make any use of the space would be to preserve its non-indigenous residents. In that case, would the municipal government be replaced by completely indigenous leadership, so that the non-indigenous residents have no say over what happens? If so, they'll all leave as soon as they have a chance. The only ones who'll stay are those too poor to go. If the municipal government authority is preserved, then at most indigenous "ownership" of the land will come down to some sort of tax revenue to indigenous groups in perpetuity.


The point of this speculation is that any "compensation" can only be symbolic in any realistic economic sense. Unless and until that is universally recognized then slogans like "landback" will, like "defund the police", generate all kinds of controversy while hindering discussion of any realistic improvements to the status quo. (And like the people in poor neighborhoods most hurt by defunding the police, the people in indigenous communities without clean water or decent housing will continue to be most affected by the delay due to the intransigence of activist ideologues, many of whom aren't even from those communities.)

I don't think anyone is calling for us to evict Montréal, Toronto, or Vancouver. Instead, the calls are to respect the terms of existing treaties and extant law concerning unceded lands. That means, among other things, that the Crown can't just build large new energy extraction projects willy-nilly, as it has done not just in history or even in living memory, but is doing in some parts of the country now. It also means not stealing children and experimenting on them, neglecting them to the point of death, or covering up their abuse--but that, I hope, is a given. Sadly, that's also in living memory. It's also worth noting that symbolic gestures are important to the people affected, although of course they probably prefer to have those symbolic steps accompanied by concrete action where possible.

By the by, a really good example of what to do comes from the lower Mattagami dam projects. The original dams were developed without consent, and with a host of other problems. The extension of the dams righted some of those wrongs but was still problematic in a number of respects; eventually, the government of Ontario stepped in and negotiated an acceptable compromise which both addressed the wrongs caused by the first project (in the '60s, IIRC) and addressed contemporary concerns. In essence, it made local Indigenous groups into proper partners in the project, rather than dictating terms to them as had Ontario Hydro in its previous attempts.

Not a professor but:

At my large corporation I still hear people referring to a large group as "Hey guys" or "The guys working on..." as if male is the default and also "man hours" instead of "staff hours".

I don't feel included.

I'm quoting this as the source rather than the responses that came after.

'Guys' is definitely a generic form of address--just like 'man' was generic for 'human'. We've largely abandoned the latter, but not the former. It works for some people, and not for others; one needs to know one's audience!

For my part, when in doubt, I go with 'friends'. 'Comrades' is good, too, but triggers the fascs.

Curious as to how people on this thread would assess the following situation (based on my real experience taking a college course):

1) Course was titled "Music in World Cultures" but exclusively covered what you would expect from an intro course on the history of Western art music/classical music (e.g. Bach, Beethoven, etc...). Not sure why they just didn't name the course to match the content.

2) One of the assignments was to attend a performance of music "not part of your own culture," and turn in a write-up covering the event.

This led to a lot of frustrated students, as the prof, based on no other knowledge of each student other than name and physical appearance, began vetoing students' choices based on very broad categorizations of "cultures." He also didn't care what culture a student had actually grown up with, only ethnic background.

So, a Chinese-American student who had been born and raised in Minnesota was not allowed to do their assignment on Chinese music. Nor were they allowed to do the assignment on music from Japanese, Korean, Philippine, Thai, etc... traditions because these were "all Asian; so all from the same culture."

Hispanic students had a similarly broad ban including Spain and all the Latin American countries.

A student from South Africa was allowed to do his write-up on a concert featuring various styles of African music because "he's not black, so his culture isn't *really* African."

Were the students arguing with the prof just making an issue where there was none? Or was this a situation that might have benefited from some rethinking of this particular assignment and the prof's interactions with the students?

(1) is a common failing in my experience, and a real problem. The department needs to crack down on that sort of thing or change the course title--or even just its descriptive blurb.

(2) is strikingly bad pedagogy. You don't want to put yourself in the position of policing that sort of thing, so if you're going to give that assignment, you need to (a) take the time to explain what you mean by the relevant terms, and (b) either take students at their word, or require them all to give a brief explanation of what they take to be their culture, and why their selection counts as coming from a different culture.

[kaysixteen]

Some issues and comments here:

1) when American hss teach 'Spanish', and teachers thereof find themselves having to correct the pronunciation of Latin kids, is it still largely true that the type of Spanish being taught is European, not Latin American?

2) Academics and coastal highly educated liberals may whine about lack of 'inclusivity' in academic circles, but for most of America, this looks like egghead liberals doing mind-numbingly stupid things, and actively criticising and denigrating their own culture and heritage.   Which is especially problematic when those people are working class folks who live in crappy places, send their kids to sh*tty schools, and have not 1/10 the prospects of those academics and other assorted liberal elitists.

3) WRT issues of cultural accomodation and 'appropriation', this is silly to the extreme of nonsensical.   Almost all things done and practiced more or less anywhere originated elsewhere.   Ideas, technology, art, music, etc., all are memes that float in the air and are borrowed almost everywhere, if they are any good.   And, sadly, sometimes if they are not so good.   I just ate an admittedly rather lousy frozen Aldi 'Mexican pizza' for dinner.   At least I did not pay much money for it, but I will apologize to no Mexicans for the thing, nonetheless.   And I suspect most Mexicans would think it ludicrous to ask for any such.

[mahagonny]

I find it helps to identify areas where I have a blind spot for bias, by acknowledging my own situation, and how those particular characteristics either help or hinder me in seeing things more dimensionally.

For example, I've always worked to include statements about native American land use and the presence of enslaved individuals in the colonial areas I write, talk, teach, and give tours on.

Just recently, however, a discussion about how those statements can begin to become rote recitations made me realize I was using some of the phrases I'd come up with long ago to cover up for further areas of inequality that needed to be discussed.

I'd been, for example, saying that "the area in which this English town's settlement occurred was not used by native Americans for any permanent inhabitation of their own," without mentioning that until the English arrived, it was an area where passage to the oyster banks and fishing weirs downriver did occur, and where hunting and the transportation of game took place.

In other words, as if it were "OK" that the area was settled by the English (with some reimbursement, but not on any par with the value gained for it), and that cutting of lines of transportation and communication were inconsequential interruptions of Native life.

I was still leveraging, or creating an unspoken apologetic for, the harmful activities of English arrivants over a more covalent acknowledgement of that harm and the responsibilities incumbent on those responsible then to have done better by those they 'inconvenienced,' and on us to listen, learn, and find out how recompense, restitution, or a simple acknowledgement of harm could help societal heirs find peace.

Amendment of life starts with an acknowledgement of harm. Where class, race, gender, and other kinds of group membership have been used to override others, one does (I believe) inherit some of the responsibility for addressing that harm.

And unless I start by looking at myself and understanding what some of those categories are, I'm just going to be playing a 'blame-game' on others.

So, honesty, I think, requires that we start with who and where we are in what has become a kind of food chain of competitive harm.

M.

So you're at work while you're sharing these ruminations. You're making a profit.

Hunh?? Do you ever read anything I say? I'm an independent scholar. No-one is paying me for my time, except when I'm teaching my music students, and then I'm very involved with their lessons, there's no down-time when you ask a kid to construct the chords on an Eb major scale that they've never worked with before.

Where do you get these observations from?

(Never mind. I probably don't want to know.)

M.

You're posting a lot of information about yourself, and then touchy when someone inquires further.
I should have explained my reason. I have the impression that you are a freelance tour guide. An honest living if there ever was one. And you seem to love to delve into parts of those parts of history that implicate white people as thieves, interlopers, exploiters. And I wondered if you do this because it's in style and therefore profitable (tips!) or because it's your particular take on history. The white guilt craze probably won't last forever.

Downer: You didn't mention whether this was a required did you? Maybe I missed it.

ksaysixteen makes good points.

[Caracal]

My main thought that in most cases I work pretty hard to give students as little info about myself as possible. I like asynchonous online teaching because they have even less info about me than in the classroom. I might tell them something about myself -- what fruits I like, or what I did on the weekend. But I keep it innocuous. I focus on the material that it to be taught, and avoid focus on identity. I generally think faculty who talk a lot about themselves with students are probably doing something wrong, if only wasting time.

I don't really agree with this idea-or I guess I partly disagree with it. I'm neither trying "hard to give students as little info as possible," nor trying to tell them a lot about myself. I agree that the latter is suspect. However, teaching is about interaction and I don't think I could do that effectively if I was trying to make myself into a blank canvas. (I hated teaching online and asynchronous) I also focus on the material, but since the material for me is mostly about people, it sometimes makes me think or parrallels to my own life that students might be able to relate to and that might help them think about the material in different ways. I also think it might help students to see me as a person who can help them in the class, so to the extent this stuff humanizes me, I think that's good.

That said, I do have clear boundaries. I might happen to mention the existence of my wife and kid, but I'm not going to talk about fights I had with my wife or something. I also keep this stuff brief and infrequent. Just because I stand in the front of the room doesn't mean that I'm performing a one man autobiographical show.

[downer]

My main thought that in most cases I work pretty hard to give students as little info about myself as possible. I like asynchonous online teaching because they have even less info about me than in the classroom. I might tell them something about myself -- what fruits I like, or what I did on the weekend. But I keep it innocuous. I focus on the material that it to be taught, and avoid focus on identity. I generally think faculty who talk a lot about themselves with students are probably doing something wrong, if only wasting time.

I don't really agree with this idea-or I guess I partly disagree with it. I'm neither trying "hard to give students as little info as possible," nor trying to tell them a lot about myself. I agree that the latter is suspect. However, teaching is about interaction and I don't think I could do that effectively if I was trying to make myself into a blank canvas. (I hated teaching online and asynchronous) I also focus on the material, but since the material for me is mostly about people, it sometimes makes me think or parrallels to my own life that students might be able to relate to and that might help them think about the material in different ways. I also think it might help students to see me as a person who can help them in the class, so to the extent this stuff humanizes me, I think that's good.

That said, I do have clear boundaries. I might happen to mention the existence of my wife and kid, but I'm not going to talk about fights I had with my wife or something. I also keep this stuff brief and infrequent. Just because I stand in the front of the room doesn't mean that I'm performing a one man autobiographical show.

It varies. I had a student ask me if I was married recently, after class. I suspect the religious student was wondering whether I am heterosexual. I did give an answer.  But generally I prefer to not disclose stuff about marital status or sexual interests. I do sometimes tell students where I come from. I'd be more likely to be more open in an upper level course of students who have taken a class with me previously. But that doesn't happen these days.

[marshwiggle]

I don't think anyone is calling for us to evict Montréal, Toronto, or Vancouver. Instead, the calls are to respect the terms of existing treaties and extant law concerning unceded lands. That means, among other things, that the Crown can't just build large new energy extraction projects willy-nilly, as it has done not just in history or even in living memory, but is doing in some parts of the country now. It also means not stealing children and experimenting on them, neglecting them to the point of death, or covering up their abuse--but that, I hope, is a given. Sadly, that's also in living memory. It's also worth noting that symbolic gestures are important to the people affected, although of course they probably prefer to have those symbolic steps accompanied by concrete action where possible.

By the by, a really good example of what to do comes from the lower Mattagami dam projects. The original dams were developed without consent, and with a host of other problems. The extension of the dams righted some of those wrongs but was still problematic in a number of respects; eventually, the government of Ontario stepped in and negotiated an acceptable compromise which both addressed the wrongs caused by the first project (in the '60s, IIRC) and addressed contemporary concerns. In essence, it made local Indigenous groups into proper partners in the project, rather than dictating terms to them as had Ontario Hydro in its previous attempts.

FWIW, I'm completely in favour of things of that nature.

These quotations from this article  illustrate why I'm concerned about the ambiguity in language (specifically land acknowledgements):

"You wouldn't say, 'I acknowledge that my hair is brown, my eyes brown.' You just are on the land of these peoples," she said.


"A land acknowledgment should be an obligation," said King.

"You can have the nicest, most beautiful and most respectful land acknowledgment of all time but if you have no actions to back up your words, then why are you bothering?" said Saulis.


Are they ready to give us back our land? There has to be absolute action behind it," she said.

I actually agree that land acknowledgements without actions are pretty ridiculous, but does that mean that at some point in the future enough action can be taken that land acknowledgements will disappear? If not, doesn't that indicate that enough action has not, in fact, taken place?

Not a professor but:

At my large corporation I still hear people referring to a large group as "Hey guys" or "The guys working on..." as if male is the default and also "man hours" instead of "staff hours".

I don't feel included.

I'm quoting this as the source rather than the responses that came after.

'Guys' is definitely a generic form of address--just like 'man' was generic for 'human'. We've largely abandoned the latter, but not the former. It works for some people, and not for others; one needs to know one's audience!

For my part, when in doubt, I go with 'friends'. 'Comrades' is good, too, but triggers the fascs.

(Admit it. No-one can say the word "comrades" in their heads without a Russian accent. Seven decades of the Soviet Union established a lot of cultural memes.)

The term "guys" is neutral about why this group of people is together. They could be business colleagues, friends, relatives, or members of a sports team. "Friends", on the other hand, implies that they are joined by amity, which may not be the case in any of those, and "comrades" implies they are joined by an ideology or mission (i.e. "comrades-in-arms"). "Comrades" also subtly suggests that people in the group have to appear completely aligned with it, even if they have any reservations. (Also, "comrades" and "friends" both imply the speaker is one of the group.)

"People" is about the best I can come up with to be as neutral as "guys".

[apl68]

Some issues and comments here:

1) when American hss teach 'Spanish', and teachers thereof find themselves having to correct the pronunciation of Latin kids, is it still largely true that the type of Spanish being taught is European, not Latin American?

I don't know what it's like at this point, but it has been changing over the years.  When I was growing up, I recall my mother privately complaining now and then about Hispanic students being hard to teach in Spanish class because they assumed they already knew everything and didn't have to work.  She had grown up around Mexican Spanish, but had been taught to teach Castellano--much as she had grown up around colloquial English while being taught to teach school-teacher English.  It made teaching both English and Spanish frustrating at times.

Later, as a college Spanish instructor, she spent a good deal of time studying and traveling in both Latin America and Spain.  She learned to speak BOTH Mexican Spanish and Castellano better than before.  And had a good deal of time with a teaching assistant who had grown up in Buenos Aires, which is still another distinctive Spanish variant (You can spot a porteno accent from a mile away if you know what to listen for).  So she developed a greater appreciation for the varied forms of the language over time.  I get the impression that the same thing was happening in the broader profession around the same time.

Note that Mom's former Spanish majors are now mostly not teaching HS Spanish.  They're mostly teaching ESL students from Latin America, who nowadays immensely outnumber Anglo students trying to learn Spanish.  And for that matter now outnumber Anglo students period in many places.  For these teachers dealing with Latin American dialects is just an everyday part of life.

[Caracal]

My main thought that in most cases I work pretty hard to give students as little info about myself as possible. I like asynchonous online teaching because they have even less info about me than in the classroom. I might tell them something about myself -- what fruits I like, or what I did on the weekend. But I keep it innocuous. I focus on the material that it to be taught, and avoid focus on identity. I generally think faculty who talk a lot about themselves with students are probably doing something wrong, if only wasting time.

I don't really agree with this idea-or I guess I partly disagree with it. I'm neither trying "hard to give students as little info as possible," nor trying to tell them a lot about myself. I agree that the latter is suspect. However, teaching is about interaction and I don't think I could do that effectively if I was trying to make myself into a blank canvas. (I hated teaching online and asynchronous) I also focus on the material, but since the material for me is mostly about people, it sometimes makes me think or parrallels to my own life that students might be able to relate to and that might help them think about the material in different ways. I also think it might help students to see me as a person who can help them in the class, so to the extent this stuff humanizes me, I think that's good.

That said, I do have clear boundaries. I might happen to mention the existence of my wife and kid, but I'm not going to talk about fights I had with my wife or something. I also keep this stuff brief and infrequent. Just because I stand in the front of the room doesn't mean that I'm performing a one man autobiographical show.

It varies. I had a student ask me if I was married recently, after class. I suspect the religious student was wondering whether I am heterosexual. I did give an answer.  But generally I prefer to not disclose stuff about marital status or sexual interests. I do sometimes tell students where I come from. I'd be more likely to be more open in an upper level course of students who have taken a class with me previously. But that doesn't happen these days.

Yeah, I would feel weird about that question too. It seems awkward socially. The social convention for me is that I wouldn't usually lead with questions like that to someone I'm not friends with. If I meet someone in a professional context, it would be pretty odd for them to ask if I'm married. If I start chatting with a colleague in the hallway, it would be quite normal for me to mention wife and child, but the social convention in my world is that you let people lead on telling you anything about their personal life.