Week 4: (Thoughts) Biased: That’s what teachers are

I’m returning to Week 4’s topic because of a conversation I had at work.

Background

In a communication course, we tasked our students to each share a meme and explain the context behind their choice. A colleague of mine got angry because a student of hers shared what she deemed to be an extremely offensive meme (see image 1 below). According to her, the student wanted to showcase the misconceptions behind defects in babies, and in particular autism. However, she firmly believed that he could done so without the use of this particular meme and more thought should have gone into his selection. She told me: “This is not how I want my students to be. I want them to be more critical”.

Image 1. (Anon, 2020).

My view (which I shared with her) was that controversial topics are extremely valuable because they present us with teachable moments. Banning controversial topics from the classroom only means that we can’t teach our students how to be critical about them.

Her student, based on what she told me, did not have any malicious intent. Even if he had found the meme funny, it is not offensive unless he used it to hurt. Moreover, genuine laughter can’t controlled. No one can suppress it. However, we can talk to an “offender” after he or she stops laughing.

Also, I added that I respect her wish to “shape her students” in the way that she considers to be appropriate but personally, I try to avoid stands. For me, the goal isn’t about getting my students to think out of the box, but to think about the box. Instead of imparting my moral code or morality, I would rather get them to think about the concept of morality.

The teacher is bias

Among other flaws, which I will not go into, the teacher is biased. The teacher has views on everything from religion to politics to dress codes. The teacher is human, and is therefore susceptible to being triggered. The teacher might be someone who whole-heartedly believes in the administration’s view.

To illustrate my point, here is a video of a teacher attempting to enforce her views in class:

Video 1: The Common Sense Conservative (2017, November 17). High School Student Destroys SJW Teacher Who Says She Is Smarter Than The Dictionary [Video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRhdkxHm51Y

We have avoided many important questions simply because they are deemed to be too sensitive or offensive. I would bet the tip of my left finger nail that no ethics committee will approve a study investigating the effects that a teacher’s religion has on the teaching of critical thinking. In this course, we question the implications of our “experiment” of using new technologies on our students. We’ve raised the point of how doing so is unethical. But, why haven’t we examined (or at least with greater scrutiny) the effects of our teachers’ biases?

Two paths with automation

The robot teacher offers two paths forward. In the first path, the robot teacher allows for the possibility of removing the teacher’s intrinsic quality of being biased. Recently, I received a warning from Facebook (see image 2 below) for a meme I used that was considered offensive. Let me be clear, I’m not a Nazi or Hitler sympathiser. I chose that meme because it was satirical. However, an automated system is unable to detect the nuances behind the meme. Moreover, despite being a mass-murdering maniac, Hitler was a great orator. It is important to our enemies and potential enemies in order to stop or prevent them from appearing.

Conversely, any institution that wishes to exploit teachers’ susceptibility to biases has also found its magic bullet in the robot teacher. It is not an understatement to say that there are many who still view teachers as the morally-upright, near-omniscient, ever-objective guardians of knowledge. It would be very dangerous the robot teacher were to be perceived this way. A perfect example is PragerU (short for Prager University) on Youtube. PragerU is a non-profit organization that creates and shares videos on various political, economic, and philosophical topics from an American conservative or right-wing perspective. It is clearly biased in its’ political agenda and video 2 presents an example of this. However, I would imagine that there are unsuspecting individuals who might take what is presented by PragerU to be the gospel truth. Without a solid foundation in digital literacy someone might actually believe that Prager University is an actual accredited institution when it is not.

Video 2: PragerU. (2020, December 7). How the Left sees the world: Power, race and class [Video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jAAIekJB3wk