Alecia Talbot-January blogpost
Invasive curiosity is when questions are asked and information is explored at the cost of someone else’s boundaries and privacy. Anytime someone feels uncomfortable by invasive questions asked to them or feels as though their personal boundary has been invaded, this is considered invasive. Curiosity is only innocently curiosity as long as it is not at the expense of another person.
In the classroom, I believe there needs to be a healthy balance between fostering kids’ curiosity and respecting the identities and well-being of the students in your class. As we know from experience, students sometimes parrot harmful information that they hear from home or their peers, and it’s usually important for any harmful statements, even out of curiosity, to be addressed as a whole class. As teachers, we often have to make split-second decisions about how to best handle an uncomfortable situation, and we can do this by asking questions and clarifying misunderstandings and stereotypes. I find the best way to handle curiosity is by being proactive and making time for conversations around cultures and identities that are both familiar and unfamiliar to the kids.
I think both of our previous read alouds, Alma and How She Got Her Name and The Suitcase, are excellent pieces of literature to use in discussing this SEL skill. Alma is a great story to bring everyone together and have the shared experience of discussing the history of their names. I did this with my class, and it was incredible to see them bonding over their name histories and the similar and different ways their names were chosen. They asked questions of each other and had some great conversations.
The Suitcase is a great book for conversations about both our shared and different experiences. You could approach this by reading the book once through and asking questions and inviting student responses. I plan to talk about what decisions were made in the book and how they affected the characters in the story. Then, it might be worthwhile to have a conversation about what better and more respectful decisions could have been made. I think this would also be a great opportunity to ask students what would be in their “suitcase” and involve some different identity and culture conversations as well.
