I recently heard Robin Roberts talk about a piece of advice from her mother that has spoken to her throughout her career, “Make your mess your message.” So today, I will talk about the main “messes” in my life that I wish to make my “messages”. There are a few.
First, I grew up in poverty. That was a “mess”, as society might label it, that was handed down because of the circumstances that I was born into. However, I want to be very clear that growing up in poverty has very beautiful lessons. This is one of my messages.
Secondly, I loved math and science from the time I played outdoors, with a freedom to explore and learn on my own terms. Then in school, I was socialized to think like a scientist. I connected this with my own learning. Then in college, I was unconsciously asked to strip myself of my identity to fit it. This is my second “mess” that I would like to make my message–you should be able to be you and do what you love.
Lastly, for now, the third “mess” that is my message is to think about what you think. Yes, think about your thoughts and where they are coming from. I am not a psychologist, which many times I wish I had studied psychology more in depth, but I do know about my own experiences that shaped this message. This message comes from a sincere desire to make the world a better place through actively deconstructing deficit ideologies.
Today, I’ll speak about this third “mess”.
What are deficit ideologies? They are the negative thoughts and beliefs that we have about someone or something; many times it’s a group of people. These beliefs usually come from stereotypes about certain people because of their gender or race, but this could be associated with many attributes of a person. I’ll give you some examples of deficit ideas in the classroom: (1) Language deficit: A student walks in and speaks with an accent that you identify as foreign, unknown to you. You think, I don’t want them in my class projects; they will not do a good job. They can’t even speak English well! (2) Gender deficit: A female student feels inadequate in her Calculus course. There are few women and she has heard messages that women are not good at math. She has a deficit belief about her abilities. (3) Other deficits: A student walks into a classroom, sits in the back, and sleeps often. The professor tells another professor, “I have a student that sleeps most of the time in my class. I don’t know why they even bother to come. They are obviously uninterested or lazy. The parents must pay for them to come to college and want them to major in engineering.”
Deficit ideologies may be informed by many pieces of data–personal experience, societal stereotypes, social expectations, historical beliefs, racism or other forms of discrimination. Deficit ideologies usually take form without knowing much information about a person.
I personally have been a victim of deficit ideologies. Here is an example: as a Latina, people such as professors or hiring supervisors or research team members or teaching faculty have thought that I can’t do a job or succeed in learning something. They may have doubted my capabilities. They may not say it to me directly, but I can hear it in the way they communicate with others about me or how they communicate with me. One mistake and they are ready to remind me of what I don’t know or what I am deficient in.
Deficit ideologies also tend to continue living this way. If that student that comes in late and sits in the back of the room only to fall asleep gets an F on an exam, it confirms your deficit beliefs about the student. (Confirmation bias. More on this later.) This bad grade causes the professor to continue believing the negative ideas about the student that “they don’t care”, which impacts how the professor interacts or doesn’t interact with the student, which in turn causes the student to remain uninterested or disconnected, feeding the deficit ideology cycle again and again.
This may cause persons that are victims of deficit ideologies to fight, fight, fight to prove these ideas (and people) wrong or withdraw, give up, and look for something else. Thinking about this makes me sad. Fighting to prove people wrong only causes battle fatigue, a feeling I know all too well. I attribute my departure from Mathematics and Computer Science to the battle fatigue I experienced at MIT as an undergraduate student. I was so tired of being in all-guy groups where my ideas were constantly questioned, even though I had already done the work to show that they were right. At one point, I said to myself, I’m not going to care what they think; I’m just going to do my work. But as you know, team assignments, study groups, and even jobs happen in social spaces, not in isolation. There is always an exchange with people.
Sometimes I wonder if people who have deficit ideologies about others simply reject them to make themselves feel better about the person’s work, abilities, or image.
So as a professor who seeks to share this message with others, what is it that I do to fight deficit ideologies? What do I recommend for other well-intentioned faculty who want to challenge their deficit ideologies? First of all, this is great that you have the intent to challenge your beliefs. However noble, it’s not enough. Reflecting often about our decisions and actions and why we took these routes and not others is important. If you notice deficit ideologies spring up in your “why”, then challenge them. The challenge is the most important part. As humans, we are looking for proof to our beliefs. What if we looked for proof against negative beliefs? I usually seek to get to know a person more. I seek to learn more about what they have done in the past, what motivates them to be here, and I try to find connections. I also change the way I approach all people; instead of thinking the worst about a person, I think the best about them.
What? What did I do? What was my decision? What was the action behind this decision?
So what? So what does this mean? So what do these actions say about my beliefs?
Now what? Now what am I going to do about these beliefs? Now what am I going to do to challenge any deficit beliefs? Now what am I going to do differently?
For some reason, it comes easier to me to think positively about my students. As a mother, I see them as someone else’s children and believe that they are still learning. I try to get to know how they learn, what motivates them, what they want to do in the future, how they want to change the world. This always helps break down any deficit ideas that I may have about any of my students.
However, there are students who have internalized deficit ideologies presented to them throughout their lives. These, I call, traumatic educational experiences. Trauma is a different beast. Again, I am not a psychologist, but I have seen many students come into my math-heavy courses with trauma from past math experiences. As they sought to learn math, perhaps they struggled, and they may not have been treated well by their previous teachers, perhaps because of deficit beliefs about who is good at math and who is not good at math. This builds up and harms the student’s confidence. Imagine the type of trauma that I see when a student is scared to make a mistake as I try to teach in a one-on-one setting. It’s not fun to see. This is what I’m trying to avoid.
Many professors have such deficit beliefs about who is good at math and who isn’t. Some examples of these beliefs include: (1) You must solve problems quickly to be good at math. If you’re slow at arriving to the solution, you must not be good at math. (2) If I, as the professor, explain it to you (doesn’t matter how I explain it), you should be able to get it. If you don’t understand, then you must not be good at math.
These ideas SUCK. All professors should understand that learning takes time, that we must make mistakes in order to learn, that mistakes are good, that explaining things one way just because we learned it that way is not the only way to learn it, and there are many other beliefs that we need to question.
So in summary, deficit ideologies suck. We all may experience them. We need to think about what we believe in order to begin challenging deficit beliefs. Getting to know people better helps challenge these ideologies. Expanding our experiences as learners and teachers also helps.