During the group forum discussions that we had in class, I think we all learned a lot about our specific group, but we all were able to also learn a little about all the other groups as well. I think this would have been a really cool project to have going on the entire semester, so we could have all been presenters on each minority group or everyone all read each article for the groups.
The group that I learned the most from was the religion group about the oppression of other religions by Christmas. I had never even considered that or really thought about it, but then Gretchen also mentioned that it is not only Christians that are oppressing people with Christmas, because our culture, Christians, agnostics, atheists, whoever, many people celebrate Christmas that are not Christians. Even people of a religion that is not Christianity oppress other people of other religions by celebrating Christmas so out loud as our culture does.
I would have liked to hear more about the practical ways to include all these different groups into our classroom. We talked about the research and the articles, and many questions did touch on this, but I would have liked to talk about practical ways, for example, to be aware of race in your classroom.
I know that my own research on gender will help me in my classroom to be able to emphasize that masculinity or femininity is not what makes a person "a man" or "a woman". It's also really important in the classroom to be the teacher that these students can come to and talk with when they are being bullied or feeling oppressed by being of a minority group.
Like I mentioned above, I think it would have been helpful to have this project over a longer period of time. Because of how short of a time we had, we were not able to cover all of the groups really thoroughly, and I would have liked a chance to read everyone's articles and ask my own questions.
