Apologies. It definitely wasn’t clear who I was addressing in that post and I’ve edited it to provide some extra clarity. That said, I think the points I made are still valid despite the miscommunication, yes?
I think so, yes.
There are some debates on CD where the consensus has become, through repeated thrashings of deceased equines, “live and let live, and don’t try to change my team”. I suspect that this is one of them. And yet…
…And yet, I do think that those same discussions need to be revisited every few years (not months, sorry folks). Not because anything has necessarily changed; more likely because nothing has changed (and, in some of those cases, to try to provoke more change). But within reason (and civility), it can be good to look through and see a) are there changes and b) is there new evidence and c) for the education of those who haven’t been part of those discussions in the past.
I can remember a time when the student/mentor debate/flamewar came up every few months, then about once a year. Now… well, I think the CD veterans have become quite adept with their backfires, firebreaks, and fire extinguishers to contain the flames and allow productive discussion that inevitably comes up with the exact same conclusion, every single time (see above).
I find myself constantly revisiting this subject, because of the inauspicious beginning of our team (in late 2003). It was brought about by a regional FIRST official who dearly wanted a few non-white faces to put in front of cameras to prove that he had increased diversity in FIRST. My kids and I found out in a shocking way that they were essentially zoo exhibits and we quit. We came back cautiously into FIRST in 2007 after the offending party was no longer a FIRST representative and we had a chance to address our concerns. But we came back with some smoldering fury, and we called ourselves “Team Ghetto Bot” to be as $@#$@#$@#$@#$@#$@#$@#y as we could. We changed the team name a year or two later to our school’s mascot, and the racial battle is now just an institutional memory, with a grainy YouTube rap video to remind us of what happened. But I remain aware that my personal prejudices, and institutional biases, can and do make it more difficult for my team to have the races, genders, sexual orientations, religions, and cultures of my students fairly and equally represented.
I’m not a fan of this question. Race and gender don’t matter when it comes to drive teams. Drive teams are usually reflective of the demographics of the school and/or team. A team that is all white students will have an all white drive team. A team that is all African - American will have an all African - American drive team. A team that is all females will, guess what, have an all female drive team. Asking this ignores the demographics of the teams.
From what I see, drive teams usually consist of students who have the motivation to want to do well driving the creation of the team. The most suited for the job will be given the job.
For what it’s worth, FIRST recently released an awesome Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion training.
For everyone who says their team is color blind, or gender blind, or whatever, I encourage you to take an implicit bias test to back that up:
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html
The gender & science one can be particularly illuminating.
Firstly I would state that we all have biases. Gender, religion, culture, ethnicity, etc. All of our awareness of our surrounding are filtered through these biases. Sometimes in very subtle ways that we are not aware of, sometimes in ways that we not only aware of but are doing so deliberately. As mentors we hopefully strive to be aware of these biases and continuously examine if we are letting our biases cloud or impact our decisions and actions.
I understand that sometimes to achieve at desired end state you need to actively drive change, which is the whole bias for so called affirmative action. However, I am troubled by many manifestations of affirmative action. I did not respond to the poll when it first came out as I was troubled by it, and puzzled but what it was trying to achieve.
As a team, we try to encourage, to built up, and bring out the best in our students, doing so in as unbiased fashion as we can. We have very clear policies against any form of discrimination, and promote a culture of “plusing” (positively building on others ideas rather than attacking or tearing down). I honestly believe we are succeeding as a team to be as open and unbiased as possible. However, we do not do affirmative action in our student or mentor recruitment, nor in role selection. At this point in time we have no African Americans (not surprising since we are a Canadian team). Nor do we have any students or mentors of African or Caribbean descent, which is not that surprising since those cultural groups are very underrepresented in our catchment area.
I will say that our drive team is representative of our team. We have a number of female mentors and students, and a significant representation from minorities, which makes sense as our catchment area is quite diverse. As had already been said, our drive team is selected by a test driven process. All students are encouraged to try out for drive team. The only requirement is a commitment from the student that if selected they will attend all driver training and drive practice and also are planning to attend the district events we are going to. The best candidates from the testing process become the primary drive team, with the runners up forming the backup drive team.
We have girls on the drive team, the fab team, and the design team. We have boys on the business team. We encourage students to join any subteam they are interested in.
All of that paints a rather different picture that responding to a poll and saying we have no African Americans on our drive team.