Challenging Normative Algorithms

It was the mid 90’s. I remember sitting in the classroom and looking around at the rest of my classmates, all of us stunned and feeling viscerally disturbed. Our Sociology 101 professor had just screened the drag queen documentary Paris is Burning for us, mostly suburban, sheltered, heterosexual kids. My background was especially conservative, coming from a religiously devout immigrant family.

The pedagogy could have come straight out of a Sociology 101 professor’s handbook if there were such a thing, since the lesson was both so obvious and painfully necessary: what we believed to be normal, what we knew to be normal, what we felt to be normal down to our bones was not necessarily normal for other persons. Or even close to normal for other groups of people. Thus normal did not and could not be equated with right.

I would experience that disruptive feeling briefly again, as a young adult who had doubled down on his conservative upbringing, after accepting a ride from the office to the train station from a perfectly friendly coworker, who also happened to be gay.

And now, twenty years later, that visceral feeling again, but this time in reverse, after engaging with content from conservative media, like the National Review, which I have gradually grown opposed to over the years. This was again, at the behest of class, this time for my master’s in educational technology. What is it with liberal institutions of learning and their insistence on challenging students’ normative beliefs? To be fair, the main purpose of this lesson was to intentionally disrupt the algorithmically determined echo chamber in which technology companies have enclosed us. Challenging beliefs was simply a side-product.

So, yes, mission accomplished. I need to confront yet again the disgust I feel for opposing norms–because to be honest, disgust is what that visceral feeling feels like–and to start the mental process of turning that disgust into mere disruption, turning disruption into engagement, and engagement finally into understanding; eventually helping us, as educators, to be better equipped to respond and engage with students from all backgrounds and experiences.