I don’t believe many of the students I have worked with have much of a coherent worldview. Most of them seem to have white neoliberal leanings, with some of the more cynical ones appearing to be more set in their ways. I notice that when someone does not have a solidified view on a topic, it’s easy to change their mind with new information, since they don’t already have an opinion.

In Heather’s class, there is an intelligent student who doesn’t seem to think trying to work is cool. At one point, while discussing research questions, someone mentioned that a topic that has already been discussed might not make for a good research question. I asked if there were any exceptions to this rule, and one student pointed out controversial topics tend to still make good research papers because many people are on both sides of the issue. To head off questions about that, I brought up world languages, and how there wasn’t an expectation that we learn a language other than English in the United States (I don’t say second language, because for many English is a second language). The too-cool-for-school student immediately burst out that not learning a language other than English didn’t make any sense since there were so many other languages out there, and it’s difficult to find a Mandarin Chinese program, which is the most spoken language in the entire world. It was interesting to watch many of the students fall in line with this new view that I had intentionally brought up to push them toward. Absent arguments against wanting to learn a language other than English, there was little resistance to this new idea.

I appreciated how Inoue phrased white habitus as a workaround the loaded terms of white supremacy and racism. While it saddens me that so many whites hear those words as attacks, Inoue’s description has the added benefit of showing that it is the passive action and assumption of being a central figure that leads to white habitus, which leads to the problems of white supremacy and racism. I think this rephrase is a good way to reintroduce a concept without any of the baggage a white habitus would normally bring to discussing white habitus.

Overall, it seems like the majority of these students have not been exposed to learning outside of a white habitus structure, nor have they been exposed to internationalized texts. It would be fascinating to see a fully realized K-12 curriculum that does these things.