Practicing Awareness of Microagression

While listening to this week's video regarding microagression I began to think about a situation this past fall that I now would consider a form of microagression. One of the student's that I work with is from Haiti and speaks Hatian-Creole. We have had many issues communicating with this family going back to his past July. I had tried to discuss the language barrier issue with my supervisors, but with no success. Most of the resistance was because it would cost $45 an hour to use an interpreter. Side note- we had success in December meeting with the mother and interpreter and have two more meetings set up :)



        October rolls around and student A is starting to exhibit very unusual behaviors; sudden arm spasms, going cross-eyed, and mouth chewing. I am not a medical doctor, but those symptoms can be related to seizure activity. I observed these behaviors for two days and then went to the school nurse who came to observe. She saw the same unusual behaviors and told me that she recommended calling an ambulance because she thought this child was having seizures. I have to be honest, I did not do that because I had no way of communicating to the mother that her daughter was going to the hospital. I emailed my supervisor immediately to discuss the situation. In essence the response was, if she is not falling to the ground, don’t call because we can’t communicate. I was not happy with this response, but did as I was told. I sent a letter home to mother in French ( that was the closest to Hatian-Creole that Google translate could get me) and English about the unusual behaviors we were seeing, hoping mother would take her daughter to the doctor. All of October went by with no response back from mother and the unusual behaviors were still occurring. I again brought this to my supervisor’s attention with no answer about what I should be doing next. I just hoped nothing serious happened.

       In November our preschool program had an in-service about dual language and the topic of family culture came up. My student was an example. The associate supervisor out loud addressed the medical issue I thought my student was having and said that it is possible that because of the family’s culture, they may see this medical issue as voodoo. It took all I had not to get up and leave the in-service. How insensitive and inappropriate to say! It still makes my blood boil as I write this.


I feel that this situation could be viewed as a microinsult because the associate supervisor was questioning the families background/heritage.  I cannot tell you how upset I was on this in-service day, and how upset I am to this day that it took from July- December to actually be able to communicate with this mother. There should not be hoops to jump through at any time when it comes to communicating with parents.