Teach Out Articles

 Teaching About Toxins 

Kelley Dawson Salas 

The author is a teacher who was concerned about her students who were ill. One student was missing school due to asthma, another was struggling with understanding, processing, and recalling information due to lead poisoning, and others were unwell due to diabetes. She was also concerned about other children that were overweight. Her concern went deeper than just the health and wellbeing of her students’ individual problems. She states that these “are public health problems that plague my city (and others in the United States) and that disproportionately affect poor people, people of color, and other populations that are concentrated in urban areas”. 

The author decided to teach a unit on public health problems. She focused mainly on asthma and lead poisoning. She taught the students about the signs and symptoms but wanted the lesson to delve deeper. She “wanted them to know that these diseases plague some communities more than others because of environmental and economic injustice”.  After learning about asthma triggers, the students were able to come up with possible reasons for these statistics such as more factories in cities and more traffic polluting the air. The students also learned that homes in cities are more likely to have lead paint than newer, suburban homes. 

As a result of their lessons, the class made several changes to their classroom to minimize asthma triggers. They cleaned more often to have cleaner air, removed the carpet, and swept more to remove dust. These classroom changes were a good way to connect the lessons to a real-life situation, but the author states that in the future she would like to enhance the lessons to help the children make a connection to air pollution and their community. She summarizes her intention of the lesson by saying, “Their illnesses are not their fault. The environment they live in is sick-and that is not their fault either. Someone has to make a change in our community and in our environment, so they can be healthy. Why shouldn’t they help make those changes?” 

 

 

Privilege, Power, and Racism 

Allan G. Johnson 

 

The author writes about the lack of acknowledgement of privilege. It is the elephant in the room that is not addressed but must be addressed. People must realize that someone else's misfortune is their fortune. “We live in a society that attaches privilege to being white and male and heterosexual regardless of your social class”. Those who have the privilege need to be part of the solution. “The bottom line is that the trouble we can’t talk about is a trouble we can’t do anything about”. 

Johnson writes about the Diversity Wheel. In the center of the wheel there are six social characteristics that can describe a person; age, race, ethnicity, gender, physical abilities/qualities, and sexual orientation. The characteristics are most likely out of a person's control. The outside of the circle lists characteristics that could be more fluid; work background, income, marital status, military experience, religious beliefs, geographic location, parental status, and education. The wheel represents how society sees you, not necessarily the person you are.  Any small shift in the diversity wheel could change the opportunities that arise in one’s life. This pertains to the earlier article about environmental toxins. A change in someone's geographic location can affect the quality of their health and healthcare.