“Also known as implicit social cognition, implicit bias refers to the attitudes or stereotypes that affect our understanding, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner” (Ohio State).
For the first week research and brainstorming for the entity I focused on the overview of what implicit bias is (defined above) and looked specifically at a game that isn’t meant to bring light of this implicit bias to people and allow them to open up their mind past this bias. The game that highlights this idea of implicit bias is called Buffalo: The Name Dropping Game. Buffalo is a game where two cards are drawn each turn: one card is a noun and the other card is an adjective. Players then race to name a person who is what those cards are describing. This game allows for people to have to think about people that come to mind immediately and this shows some implicit bias. A designer of Buffalo explains this, “It challenges stereotypes because it forces players to think of people that buck those stereotypes. So for example, think of a physicist. Albert Einstein or Isaac Newton may automatically come to mind. But what if you have to think of a female physicist or a black female physicist? You may have to think a bit harder,” (Singh). When approaching the current entity however one must focus more on implicit bias directly in schools more than anywhere else. When brainstorming I thought specifically through the eyes of the teacher and how their implicit bias may affect their work and their ability to treat students fairly. When making a game to help train teachers to not allow their implicit bias to get a better of them it is important to look at a few different things. First off is the idea of first glance and how a teacher might judge a student based solely on looks. Second is the idea of possible family connections such as siblings of kids the teacher has had in the past. Another reason for implicit bias could be the child’s past grades. All these things must be taken into account when creating a game to tackle this implicit bias. Taking into account all these factors of implicit bias and how it affects a school environment will help develop an accessible and helpful training tool for faculty. A good idea that could be made with this is a game where you are in the shoes of a teacher and you are collecting papers to grade. You end up finding a lot of papers that seem to be the same and you have to then figure out who is cheating. You only are provided with a picture and brief description of each student. This will show teachers’ implicit bias depending on who they choose. The game is a digital point and click type game that could be compared to matching games, Papers please has a similar layout where you can look at information of the person passing in the paper as well as the paper itself to figure out who you think is cheating. The game will bring across the objective of showing teachers how their bias could affect their work.
Garcia, Melissa. “Why Teachers Must Fight Their Own Implicit Biases.” Education Week, Editorial Project in Education, 25 July 2018, http://www.edweek.org/tm/articles/2018/07/25/why-teachers-must-fight-implicit-biases.html.
Singh, Maanvi. “Board Games To Fight Bias.” NPR, NPR, 30 Dec. 2017, http://www.npr.org/2017/12/30/574753348/board-games-to-fight-bias.
STATE, OHIO. “Understanding Implicit Bias.” Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity, kirwaninstitute.osu.edu/research/understanding-implicit-bias/.
Group Blogs:
https://etchermask.wordpress.com/
https://franksblog758232151.wordpress.com/
https://lousblog238092112.wordpress.com/2018/09/11/entity-one-week-one/
Will Montgomery Serious Game 