Kneading Dough and the Discovery Channel

On a recent test I gave to a ninth grade world geography class I asked the students to list five things new they had learned about Africa (the region we had just studied). One student's response was "that Africans aren't cannibals." When I saw it, I smiled and wrote down next to it "I am so glad you learned that!" A little strange you may think, but on one of the first days of the unit I asked the students what they knew about Africa and this student raised his hand and said (in all seriousness) that he knew Africans were cannibals. It was one of those moments when you want to jump up and down, and pull your hair out. Instead I said, "oh really, where did you learn that?" He replied that he had seen it on the Discovery Channel. This brief incident gave me an idea of where I needed to start: Africans are not cannibals. As an intern teaching at the high school level, I sometimes feel like I am fighting a useless battle. I know my students watch hours of TV every day where they receive all kinds of messages about how savage, exotic, or strange people in other places or the world are. A possibly more subtle message comes from a set of National Geographic DVDs that we have in the social studies resource room at the high school. They are about different aspects of life in Africa, one highlighting a soccer team from Zanzibar; another, two women in Kenya and Tanzania. These films all switch back and forth from human stories to the stories of animals who live in the African wild with classic National Geographic scenes of the leopard getting its prey or of the wildebeest mother protecting her calf. For me the images of the animals too closely parallel the soccer players (on the team called the Leopards) or the Kenyan woman carrying for her child. They send the not so hidden message that Africans are closer to the wilds of the animal world than white US Americans are.

I can't say I know a whole lot about the world, but I do know, as a Euro-American, how these ideas and images of others as cannibals, or animals get folded into our minds, into our being. Not unlike the flour that I was just kneading into some bread dough, these ideas become so much a part of us that we don't even know they are there, let alone how to remove them. As I take my first few steps as a teacher I am daunted by the task of teaching about the world without furthering these stereotypes, and hopefully at times pulling them out of students so they can look at them, examine them, and discard them. This time in the Africa unit we focused on lot of the pillaging of the continent by Europeans during colonization. However, in looking back I am realizing that I didn't do much to make the people there more human. That will have to come next time. The great thing about teaching is that you get to try again and hope that you don't do too much damage along the way. If there are any suggestions out there they are welcome. Thank you for your time in reading these musings, e.