I decided to interview one of my friends who is studying at Trabzon University. All permission was provided and I made her aware of the project and I informed her about the aim of this interview. She accepted to answer these questions willingly.
- Can you tell me something about yourself?
- I am X. I am 23 years old and I am studying at Trabzon University in the department of English Language Teaching. I like looking at other perspectives and I want to be a voice for the other people.
- In Turkey, what do people do or say (or not do or say) if they want to be seen as gay [lesbian] [straight]?
- I do not think people in Turkey want to be seen as gay since the attitude towards gay people is not acceptable as we know. They even try to hide their identities in order not to take attention to themselves.
- How is this different in another country? How is it similar?
- In some Muslim and Muslim-majority countries, it is almost the same since they see this situation (I do not know the situation is a good word to use here) unacceptable. However, in other countries, even their laws allow them to get married to whom they want or they simply do not justify those people by taking their gender identities into consideration. Those countries just see those people as people, as supposed to be.
- Why do people sometimes want to be seen as straight [bisexual][lesbian]? Why do they sometimes not want to?
- In a place where homosexuals’ existence seems unacceptable, of course, homosexual people are going to hide their identities and do not want to be seen as lesbian, or simply gay. The only reason here is to be accepted by society. Even if the acceptance by society or family does not seem such a big deal, there are dozens of people commit suicide because of a lack of feeling safe. In addition, people sometimes want to be seen as bisexual in a place where they are for the very first time. The reason why they have treated like that can be the fact they are homosexual and just try to measure the people’s attitude, just after that, they can explain their own identities. In contrast to all these, I do not think some people want to be seen as a lesbian. Overall, I want to say that people want to be seen as how they are going to be accepted by the community.
- Is it easy to identify someone as gay [straight] [lesbian]? Why or why not?
- Why do we have to identify people as gay? Why don’t we try to accept people how they treat us? The important thing is to accept people with who they are. The identification just occurs after we meet someone.
- In Turkey/your university, which gender identities seem natural or acceptable? Which do not? How can you tell?
- Of course, homosexuality is the only natural one in my university since I am in Turkey. Once, when I was walking with one of my gay friends on the campus, one boy passed through and intentionally hit my friend to make him fall. How can someone do something like that to a living creature? I never pick flowers, for instance, since I do not make a creature suffer because of me. The anger in those people is patriarchy.
- After people move from Turkey, do they change how they think about gender identities? If so, how? If not, why not?
- They may change their hard thoughts but only a few of them. Since they are going to experience the fact that all those are just human beings as we are, they see their thoughts nonsense.
- How about when foreigners move to Turkey?
- They are going to be amazed by the thoughts we have. They are going to see the anger and I think it will make them stand for those LGBT people.
- How safe do you think your university or practicum school is for LGBT students? How do you know?
- There is no safe place at my university. In the first year, there was a community standing for female rights but I think they got closed. So now, as I said in the previous question, they are not.
- What do you think to be an ally to LGBT students mean?
- Even if you are a homosexual, you just stand for the LGBT students around you. That term defines me as who I am the most.
- Do you think it’s important to be an ally to LGBT students?
- Of course. Because of their emotional burnout or something else, LGBT students are not enough to stand for themselves, they just need people supporting them. So, having all around them will make them feel more comfortable and safer.
Initially, our webinar topic was about gender equality which can make some forms in society, education, family, etc and is related to one of the most important problems all around the world. And our first discussion centered an advertisement called “ If Women’s Roles In Ads Were Played By Men”. Actually as soon as I saw this advertisement, it evoked me the reflection of the commodification of the woman in society. Because people want to see female figures in all aspects since the female is accepted more attractive, appealing, and so on. Besides, the woman has some roles are worn by society. When I have thought about gender inequality, I constantly have remembered “ Orlando “ by Virginia Woolf and started to think about the theme of the book because Virginia Woolf is trying to voice all the women in the world because of patriarchal dominance. Also, it tells us by changing genders, Orlando is able to reflect upon the different roles and experiences of each gender. So, I can say that this work is really a masterpiece in terms of showing the roles, expectations of each gender. Especially in our society, the woman figure is constantly torn between what society expects her to be and what she really wants to be because there are some stereotyped roles that are given the woman ranging from looking after her children to cooking.
After this webinar, I have started to analyze my own teaching process and the materials I use in my courses (coursebook, texts, etc.) critically. For example, I have recognized that I try to mix my students while grouping them because when I was in my high school years, my teacher divided the class basing on gender criteria like a girl should be matched with any other girl or vice versa. Additionally, I adopt the idea of giving some responsibilities to the students but not limited their gender roles like having my male students sweeping the class or having my female students carry the books to help me in order to give some messages, for example, the females can be strong, carry something by their own, etc. Another dimension is short stories that I bring the class because I strongly believe that stories, fairy tales have vital roles in the children’s life. That’s why this webinar inspired me and I have thought the using these stories in my classes in a different way I mean changing some scenes. After this webinar, I checked the units are placed on the coursebook and I have realized that there is a unit named “ Occupations “ in 6th grade but again a female is depicted for hairdresser, on the contrary, a male character depicted for driver so I will touch this point changing occupations’ roles in a drama activity with my 6 graders. These kinds of biases may not be broken easily because each and every student have cultural luggage but when we integrate this issue into the course it becomes easier and permanent.
Last but not least there are some useful tips that we can employ in our classes about how we can integrate gender equalities in the course like promoting mixed group work activities and cooperation between each gender and being a role model for students as a teacher. So no matter how much the teacher is aware of gender inequality, without showing it to the students via some activities, stories, responsibilities, raising awareness towards gender equality stands beyond the society’s expectations.
First of all, I want to start my sayings about the analysis of the coursebook, after focusing on the efficiency of the coursebook that is a tool for touching upon social and environmental issues in the classroom environment. In today’s world, we have lots of different coursebook choice but if you work at a state school, there is a certain coursebook that is published by the Ministry of Education for English course and so you are responsible for completing the units that are served in the book. In other words, you are deeply attached to the units. On the other hand, I could use different materials including coursebooks while I was working at private language institutions. We as an English teacher candidates can turn this situation as I mentioned before into an opportunity to increase awareness about social and environmental issues to lay the foundations of social justice education.
Now I will try to evaluate the coursebook that I have used in my practicum side and it is used by 4th graders in Turkey. Initially, I want to mention “Unit 2/ Nationality” is a unit presents different countries and nationalities. So this unit is open to promote cultural awareness between the students, especially towards the Black people. In other words, we can cover this unit against racism.
On this page, as we can see, only white people are touched throughout my examination of this unit I could see there is no place for black ones. So we can have the students draw a person then color him/her black as group work and also they can write some personality features ( age, country, hobbies, etc.) under the picture then they come to the board and introduce their characters one by one. Also, the other alternative activity can be conducting drama activity, to put it differently, we can want the students to change their identity and choose another country and nationality also. One of them can be American, Brazilian, etc. and make a dialogue for establishing a friendship.
The page showed above is about 7th unit/ Jobs of the book deals with jobs, their actions and where the jobs work but there are some gaps. To exemplify, nearly all the jobs are ideal ones ( lawyer, doctor, teacher,etc.) for example garbage man, cleaner, butcher and so on. Also, butcher, the grocery store is given in the 5th-grade coursebook and in the 2nd unit/ My Town as a building name. However; these jobs could be presented to the students in the Jobs unit. For example, the teacher can throw some garbages ( like sheets, plastic and glass objects) to the classroom and the teacher can want the students to be garbage man and collect the garbage. Then she/he wants the students to separate them to recycle. In this way they can recognize the importance of garbage man, maybe cleaner and so on for our lives and they can grasp the jobs are not limited to the only ideal jobs.
In the 9th unit/ My Friends is about physical descriptions of the people but there are some sensitive adjectives, in other words, they may offend the students for example fat, short as a bodybuilder so the teacher can prefer using puppet to teach these kinds of words not to use the students directly. And also there is not any disabled person example in this unit. In order to increase awareness towards the disabled people, the teacher can integrate some examples of them to the course. For example, the activity showed above touches upon not disabled people’ description but the teacher can bring a photo of the disabled persons and the students to describe him/her and in this way the students can grasp they are together with them and we do not isolate them. In addition, the teacher can say the students this course we will be disabled people some of them symbolize visually challenged ones, and the other group symbolizes the deaf ones. So the teacher covers the unit like this to empathize with disabled people and have the students look from their perspectives.
Lastly, the 10th unit/ Foods and Drinks is a sensitive and problematic unit to some extent because each and every student may not have the same economic conditions. While I was talking to my friend that works with 6th graders and as she was telling her practicum experiences about the “Yummy Breakfast” unit, any student said “We have not any food in our fridge and I do not know what croissant means” to her. So the teacher while covering this unit, she/he should be more sensitive and shape his/her course by taking precaution.
My name is Merve KILIÇ. I am 22 years old and I am from Artvin and I graduated from Anatolian Teacher’s Training High School in Artvin. Now I am studying at Trabzon University Department of English Language Teaching as a senior student.
I participated to this project because I want to increase cultural awareness between people especially towards black people. I have some black friends and I worked with them last year. Also I had a project for community service and talked them. Then I recognized that people who live in Trabzon behave rudely to them therefore people have some bias towards the people who are not like them. Actually not only black people but also other cultural or religional differences may not be valued. So I try to touch this issue and try to a find some solutions reaching more people. And also the other reason for being interested in this project I as a teacher candidate want to engrain students’ opinion in differences (skin color, different opinions, different cultural elements and so on) should be valued because in the classroom environment despite we are the same nationality, we have the same skin color but there may be lots of different cultural dimensions. To put it differently, having the some physical similarities is not enough for being at the same ground and my overall aim is to give a message like each and every opinion, cultural difference, etc. are unique and should be respected. So I did decide to participate this project.
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The topics that I want to be interested in racism, gender inequality, environmental issues, and quality education.
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