Learning Diversity: A Personal Journey

One of the difficult things required of us in life, and especially as adult educators, is to learn to understand experiences that stand outside of our own. As a white woman who is tall and reasonably articulate, I find that I am often accorded automatic respect. I have few experiences to draw on to understand the experience of others who are disrespected, treated poorly or simply made invisible by their race or class. People often assume that I am the teacher/instructor/professor even when I am in the classroom as a student. McIntosh (1989) describes white privilege as "an invisible package of unearned assets" that can be cashed in every day, an "invisible knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools and blank checks" (1). One of the central features of this privilege is the degree to which we remain unaware of this advantage. Just as white men are oppressive to others in an unconscious fashion, white women can extend this same oppression to women of color or lower socioeconomic status. As a new instructor, I would have been shocked had someone suggested that I was being oppressive to others. I had such good intentions, not to mention naivete. I was more than grateful to accept automatic respect in my first teaching experiences in the early 1980s. I began teaching adults at the age of 24 and several of my students were the age of my mother or older. A new instructor with little confidence, I was armed with a sketchy curriculum, knowledge of the subject matter and very little else. I met older women who were taking tentative steps out of the house with a safe subject: learning to sew. I met nuns who were leaving behind the habit, but could find few suitably modest or affordable clothing in stores. I met Vietnamese women who were performing childcare in other people's homes and wanted to make attractive clothing. I even had a few male students over the years who made interesting projects such as dog beds (the curriculum of the course in question required a simple blouse and a skirt). Further experiences as an adult educator introduced me to men and women with very different experiences than my own. In Toronto, while working in a historic house museum, I worked with children who attended a school with attendance representing more than 100 nationalities. At the same time, I studied for a master's degree in adult education and went to classes with men and women from other countries and with different backgrounds such as educating prison populations or working with Native Canadians. Returning to my hometown of Edmonton, I worked for the social services department of city government with teen mothers and poor families. In Calgary, while teaching in a bridging program for displaced women, I met women who trusted me enough to tell me about abusive husbands, brothers, and fathers. Later, in Florida, I taught and advised women living in Belle Glade, a poor, rural district. The women I met spoke and wrote a different style of English than I was accustomed to. It was my job to bridge the world of academic language with their language and coach them through writing an undergraduate thesis acceptable to the institution. This would enable them to graduate and improve their lives. While doing so, I formed some close relationships. In the same classes were Latino students from Puerto Rico, Cuba and Mexico as well as white men and women. All of these people had varied attitudes toward the value of education, ranging from viewing the degree as a ticket to job advancement to fulfilling family dreams for post-secondary education for their sons and daughters. I had come very far from my upbringing within a Dutch immigrant family living in western Canada. My parents came seeking economic opportunities and adequate housing, since living conditions after the war were very crowded in Europe. My mother, who grew up in Amsterdam, found the Edmonton of nearly 50 years ago to be little better than an overgrown village. …