This past Saturday, the scholars, along with our new sophomores took part in a series of workshops as part of our Teach-In. The Teach-In workshops included:
Sex-E Collective Presents: Consent + Risk, a workshop that teaches youth safe sex and sexual consent, pregnancy and STD prevention.
I’m Right Here, Tho! which is a workshop that deals with being the only minority in class and self advocacy.
Justice is What Love Looks like in Public: Hop Hop and Spoken word for Social Justice. A workshop that uses Hip Hop and poetry as a form of self-expression and communication to convey what justice means in society.
Hoodies and Halos: Symbolizing Stereotypes & Popular Culture in Art. This workshop spoke about how art and media stereotype different groups of people.
Performance from the Self to the Selfie: How do we construct our identities? This workshop discussed how self-identity is dealt with in performance art and photography.
The workshop that I attended with the scholars was I’m Right Here, Tho! During the workshop, we spoke about self-advocacy when one is the only minority in a classroom. Similar to Halos and Hoodies, we addressed stereotypes on a social level and how those stereotypes affected people in group settings. We viewed a few YouTube videos such as this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ylPUzxpIBe0 that addresses the etiquette involved in how to ask people about their cultures. Some of these videos were humorous and generated a conversation with other people on social media and within our group of scholars, mentors and advocates about what racism is and how to be sensitive to cultural differences. We also viewed a video of a social experiment that took place in a college that taught a group of non-minorities students to see from the point of view of the minority students who were in the classroom. It was very eye-opening and the scholars, mentors and advocates all shared our experiences with racial insensitivity, how we dealt with it then and how we plan to deal with it in the future.
After each workshop concluded, people from each workshop gathered into groups to discuss what we learned and shared ways to deal with some of the issues that came up in our workshop discussions. The scholars came away more informed on the topics and had very insightful experience.
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