Windows and Mirrors: Cultivating Identity, Empathy, and Justice in Education

Throughout an academic school year, students spend a significant amount of time in the classroom, averaging around 180 days. Creating a supportive and inclusive learning environment is paramount to their success. The concept of "windows and mirrors" provides a powerful framework for educators to foster such an environment, where students feel safe, valued, and inspired to learn. This approach involves offering students opportunities to see reflections of themselves (mirrors) and opportunities to observe differences in the world (windows).

Creating a Safe and Comfortable Classroom: The Foundation for Learning

Before students can engage in the task of learning, they must first feel safe and comfortable in the classroom. Fostering this environment requires educators to understand the cultures of their students and the broader community and to cultivate their classrooms in a way that acknowledges and represents that culture. By doing so, we can provide students with a physical space in which their identities and voices are appreciated and valued.

Acquiring the necessary cultural knowledge can be achieved through various means, such as take-home surveys, intentional questions, and dedicated time for student interaction. For example, surveying students about local preferences can provide valuable insights into their backgrounds and interests. Reflecting these preferences in the classroom, such as displaying cultural artifacts, can create a sense of belonging and recognition.

Mirrors in the Classroom: Reflecting Students' Identities

The concept of mirrors, as articulated by Emily Style and Rudine Sims Bishop, emphasizes the importance of students seeing themselves reflected in the curriculum and classroom environment. When students see their identities, cultures, and experiences represented, it validates their existence and fosters a sense of belonging.

Mirrors can manifest in various forms, including:

Diverse Literature: Providing books with characters who look like them, share their cultural background, or have similar experiences.
Representative Visuals: Displaying posters, artwork, and other visuals that reflect the diversity of the student population.
Culturally Responsive Teaching: Incorporating students' cultural backgrounds and experiences into lessons and activities.

When curriculum and pedagogy are carefully constructed, the most powerful mirrors can magnify, helping students see and define themselves and their communities while gaining a sense of self that transcends time. They can allow educators to look closely at complexity and nuance. They surface previously ignored details. Blurred mirrors, on the other hand, reflect poorly, distorting our senses of self. Think, for example, what “single story” narratives mean for those students whose social identities are portrayed. Flat narratives that paint you and your ancestors as perpetual heroes or perpetual victims. Or narratives that portray only one way of being and belonging to your regional, cultural, racial, ethnic, or linguistic group.

Windows in the Classroom: Expanding Perspectives and Fostering Empathy

While mirrors are essential for self-affirmation, windows provide students with opportunities to learn about different cultures, perspectives, and experiences. Windows broaden their understanding of the world and foster empathy for others.

Windows can be created through:

Diverse Literature: Reading books with characters who are different from them, come from different cultures, or have different experiences.
Guest Speakers: Inviting individuals from diverse backgrounds to share their stories and perspectives.
Cultural Events: Celebrating different cultural holidays and traditions.
Discussions and Activities: Engaging students in discussions and activities that explore different cultures and perspectives.

Clear windows are those that make it easy enough to see contextually bounded lived experiences. Well-constructed curriculum and pedagogy help students see through clear windows, challenging stereotypes, exposing assumptions, and developing comfort with difference and discomfort. Through clear windows, students begin to recognize sameness among differences and resituate the sameness in ways that don’t essentialize and the differences in ways that do not denigrate. Dirty windows are difficult to see through, providing only flat, one-sided, distorted and often deficit-based views of those who are different from you. This can take the form of idolizing another person’s language, culture, and identity or internalizing a deficit-view of your own while wrestling with imposter syndrome.

The Teacher as a Window: Sharing Your Humanity

In addition to providing mirrors for students to see themselves, educators should also offer windows for students to get to know their culture, background, and interests. Being vulnerable and showing our humanity to our students increases their comfort in the classroom and trust of us as teachers. Showing one's own humanity can manifest in placing photos of family and friends near our desk, putting up a flag, or simply sharing our interests.

Creating a Culture of Learning: Accessibility and Engagement

Once a safe and comfortable space is established, educators can focus on building a culture that promotes learning. Making learning accessible to all students is the first step in fostering this culture. Visual aids, such as anchor charts, reference charts, sentence stems, and word walls, can enhance the learning environment.

Igniting Justice Imagination: Courage and Critical Hope

Equity and justice-oriented education can be revolutionary. Educators can ignite their students’ justice imagination. Igniting students’ justice imagination involves at least two components: courage and critical hope. Educators are to develop students’ understanding of systemic and institutional injustice. A nuanced understanding of injustice is facilitated by engaging with mirrors with high degrees of amplification and windows cleared from smudges that seek to mar, blur, and erase. Mirrors and windows humanize. They set the foundation for imagining equity. A justice imagination enables students to paint a vision of an equitable world. Without a vision the people perish. Equipped with critical insight into themselves and others, students are positioned to create a new future and paint a new world onto canvases. Courage and critical hope are the brushes and paints that students use on their canvases.

Inclusive and representative curriculum and classroom celebrations become the norm, necessary and insufficient. Through equity-oriented education that also provides windows, students can see beyond their lived experiences. Education should equip students with the skills, knowledge, and critical understanding of the world, the peoples of the world, and the histories of the world. For some students, this may mean developing a nuanced understanding of those who traditionally have been “othered,” shining light on those who previously were rendered invisible. Students take this knowledge into their lives, where they are neither expected to abandon their home communities or colonize the communities of others. Instead, learners gain the ability to facilitate and to live in a heterogenous, multilingual world.

Practical Strategies for Implementing Mirrors and Windows

Classroom Library Audit: Analyze your classroom library and determine where there are strengths and gaps in diversity.
Book Selection: Fill your shelves with books that offer children mirrors of their own world and windows into the diverse world beyond.
Introduce the Concepts: Introduce the terms "mirror books" and "window books" to students, share examples, and discuss the importance of reading both.
Student Reflection: Encourage students to find mirror and window books to read and reflect on their choices in writing journals.
Collaborative Projects: Have students write and illustrate their own mirror and window books and share them with their classmates.

The Importance of Diverse Literature

Some of the most powerful tools in the classroom are books. Reading books that offered mirrors (seeing themselves) and windows (seeing the world in which they live) reinforced the importance of valuing our differences and appreciating our diversity. Mirror and window books are found in all genres and across all ages. As our diverse and inclusive classroom library grew, so did our discussions and actions. Students were engaged and curious. We had wider and deeper conversations and they asked thoughtful questions that led to further inquiry. My students were on their journey to self-discovery and to understanding their important role as citizens of the world.

All children need and deserve to see themselves and people that look like them represented in the books they read. It makes them feel valued, connected, and inspired. Look for mirror books that have relatable connections (dreams, challenges, friends, adventure), accurate depictions of characters, and do not perpetuate stereotypes or bias. Equally important as books that reflect students’ identities are books with characters who look different from them and have experiences that are unfamiliar to them. Window books introduce the rich diversity our world has to offer. Open their world with books that share stories, teach history, share cultures, and explore a wide range of unfamiliar topics and experiences.

Read also: Risks of Damaged Car Windows

Beyond the Classroom: Extending the Impact

The principles of mirrors and windows extend beyond the classroom walls. Educators can collaborate with families and community supporters to inspire students’ social justice imagination and envision a just future. Community-based programs that enhance students’ literacy, knowledge of history, and academic self-efficacy can further support their development.

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