Reflections

I am grad­ing papers, one of my least favour­ite tasks in teach­ing, and one that always pushes me towards pro­cras­tin­a­tion and reflection.

Today’s fleet­ing reflec­tion star­ted out with “how can I stop all the Asian-Aus­tralian students/Asian inter­na­tional stu­dents sit­ting near each other and only quot­ing Asian-Aus­tralian friends as sources in their stor­ies?” when I real­ised this con­struc­tion is enorm­ously prob­lem­atic. Equally good ques­tion: How can I stop all the Anglo and European-Aus­tralian kids sit­ting near each other and only quot­ing Anglo and European sources in their stories?

So, here we are again with the ghetto men­tal­ity, on all sides. It just reflects what’s going on in soci­ety, I guess. I have a couple of times in class asked for the ‘quiet ones’ to par­ti­cip­ate more and have held the brash ones back which has allowed for more bal­ance in class between the ethnic con­tri­bu­tions (ste­reo­type or no, it’s what hap­pens) and I try to make sure that in small group work, there are mixed groups, and espe­cially not groups with one Asian inter­na­tional stu­dent guy and a couple of Asian inter­na­tional stu­dent girls because they will always defer to him, whereas in a group of just girls, they will par­ti­cip­ate brilliantly.

Mean­while, I have two Asian-Aus­tralian stu­dents who are com­plete geek girls into manga and SF and have to stop myself from seem­ing to favour them and ostra­cising the rest of the class.

I think, if I’m ever the one actu­ally run­ning a course again rather than just tutor­ing for someone like this is, I’ll set the second assign­ment as one where they must write or com­mis­sion a story from out­side your own cul­ture so they get that real learning/sourcing/interviewing exper­i­ence instead of the quote-a-friend trend.