What is more important to education? The content or the how the content is taught? Many policy makers today believe that the former is far more crucial to the development of our youth. With high-stakes testing and an entire industry of textbooks and test making, the current system places empirical results over all else. Unfortunately, this approach only helps with the lower levels on the depths of knowledge (DOK) and Bloom’s Taxonomy charts. It only helps with basic recall of facts and knowledge. A second area of concern with this type of teaching is that only instills one point of view in the pupils. This is also problematic for diverse classrooms with students from various backgrounds. Would an approach that reinforces critical thinking and higher levels of DOK be more appropriate? A technique that incorporates the diversity of the classroom and life experiences of those students can be explained by Christopher Emdin and Django Paris who are two advocates of Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy or Reality Pedagogy.
Django Paris’ article about Culturally Sustaining Pedagogy builds upon Gloria Ladson-Billings work. Paris advocates that we should approach this pedagogy by “support[ing] young people in sustaining the cultural and linguistic competence of their communities while simultaneously offering access to dominant cultural competence.” (Paris 95) This approach seeks to sustain and cultivate the culture of communities that have been affected by structured inequality. Designing lessons that are student-centered can be effective in promoting this.
Personalizing learning for students takes the idea of differentiating instruction to fit the needs of your students is vitally important to fostering an environment that makes ...
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...he potential for establishing a dedication to education. Emdin’s five C’s can guide educators on how to foster the environment needed for reality pedagogy. Getting to know the student’s interests, hobbies, and culture will be paramount to determining how to approach the lessons. Following these suggested practices will make teaching content easier.
As a teacher, I will have to keep this in mind for all my students. Fostering an environment that cultivates and promotes the pluralistic society that we live in will be beneficial. It can help to combat the deficit approaches in education that stifle or suppress minority culture and language while promoting acceptance of a multicultural and equitable society. I hope to be able to work towards this type of classroom. With self evaluation and acceptance of student ideas, I believe that I can create this environment.
He contends that naturalism, which means the belief that education is a natural progression that ought to be associated with natural, real life approaches and settings has contributed to the vagueness of the curriculum (Buras, 1999). As a result, naturalism had led to pedagogies that are process-oriented and child-centred through out the school system. Hirsch believes that such pedagogy is an insecure way of learning and is therefore responsible for the curriculum’s indistinct state (Buras, 1999). He also believed that post modernism and constructivism as well as multiculturalism were all factors that contributed towards this knowledge crisis (Lecture notes). For Hirsch, Learning involves the use of what he would call core content which encompasses relevant background knowledge, intellectual capital, traditional subject matter, book knowledge, shared national culture, vocabulary, and sol...
...s the growing linguistic and cultural diversity within the classroom (Weinstein et al., 2003 p.270). Hack man (2013) argues that in order to provide an overall positive learning experience, teachers must be ever vigilant of the classes multicultural dynamics. Moreover, the environment of the classroom must be kept in mind when structuring these lessons, as a safe and supportive environment is not only requirement of the Quality teaching framework (2003), but it is a necessity in allowing students to take intellectual risks. This unit is centred on strategies, which incorporate socially justifiable principles, including student empowerment and social responsibility. The collaborative learning practices, which define this unit and ultimate assessment task, encourages students to listen and appreciate their peer’s perspectives that often appears different to their own.
Differentiated instruction adapts learning to the students’ unique differences. It is a must for teachers to learn as much about each student as possible. Understanding students helps guide teachers’ decisions to match appropriate materials and strategies to each learner’s needs. The strategies and activities are student-centered, based on readiness, planned with flexible grouping designs, and changed as needed to meet the needs of all learners. These personalized experiences give students access to all of the information and skills they can assimilate in their learning journeys (Chapman & King, 2005). This approach meets the academic and related needs of a wide array of diverse learners in schools (Edwards, Carr, & Siegel 2006).
As an educator one must understand that the children you will be teaching will all come from different backgrounds, different ethnicities, different homes with different values. No one student will be the same, and no one student will learn the same. The role of a modern educator is to harness this idea of diversity and channel it into a positive learning atmosphere for children of all backgrounds. “I define culturally responsive teaching as using the cultural knowledge, prior experiences, frames of reference, and performance styles of ethnically diverse students to make learning encounters more relevant to and effective for them” (Gay, 2013, p.50.). The hope for all teachers is to capture the minds of their children, as educators we must learn how our students learn, adapt to their skill set and channel our curriculum to their strength.
These lessons are important in the classroom for several reasons. First off, we as teachers need to find ways to make sure that students from all ethnic backgrounds are included in classroom discussions and that they have the ability to apply themselves to the material taught in the classroom. However, teachers also need to realize that these practices need to be implemented so that stereotypes among the different cultures do not
Cultural proficiency is seeing the difference and responding effectively in a variety of environments. Learning about organizational and individual culture, in which one can effectively interact in a variety of cultural environments (p. 3). In simple terms in which educators are not only able to effectively work with diverse populations, but also believe that diversity adds positive value to the educational enterprise (Landa, 2011, p. 12).
There are many challenges that teachers encounter when teaching children with learning disabilities, learners that are English language learners, or learners who are culturally and linguistically diverse. As a nation we are faced with the challenged that our schools are becoming more diverse. The majority of our schoolteachers are still predominately white females, but our student population is slowly changing. We are seeing more minority groups in our schools that are facing different challenges. The scary part of it all is that our teachers do not have the skills to accommodate those differences. “The nation’s changing school demographics are creating a demand for new teaching skills” (Utley, Obiakor, & Bakken 2011, pg. 5). Our student population
Through this literature review, two major themes emerged. The first theme relates to the significance which existing attitudes, values, and belief systems have on how pre-service teachers perceive the diverse learners that they teach. The other major theme relevant in the literature, was the various approaches TEPs have taken when redesigning their curriculum to better prepare preservice teachers to be culturally responsive. Thirty-seven percent (n=6) of the articles reviewed consider how culturally responsive pedagogy is being addressed within TEPs. Trent, Kea, and Oh (2008) conducted a literature review on how teacher preparation programs were preparing preservice teachers for diverse populations. They reviewed empirical studies from 1994-2006 and found seven studies that
I can lead a more pluralistic school by ensuring that I am implementing a curriculum and training my faculty on the importance of demonstrating to students and the larger community the importance of diversity and inclusiveness. Moreover, it includes leading a school where learning occurs through meaningful interactions where ideas, information, and experiences are categorized by experience. Therefore, it is important that the teachers within my pluralistic school truly understand that all students can learn, and design activities that correspond with that view (Koppelman, 2015, p.
Diversity in classrooms can open student’s minds to all the world has to offer. At times diversity and understanding of culture, deviant experiences and perspectives can be difficult to fulfill, but with appropriate strategies and resources, it can lead students gaining a high level of respect for those unlike them, preferably than a judgmental and prejudiced view.
When evaluating myself on the Cultural Proficiency continuum, I’d place myself at “Cultural Competence” part on the continuum. This evaluation takes into account my experiences and practices while working in various schools and interacting with students of varied cultures, needs and ability levels as both a teacher and a learner. An effective educator is continually maintaining this dual role of teacher and life-long student in order to not grow stagnant within the classroom; this dynamic allows for growth along the continuum toward maintaining cultural proficiency.
The cultural diversity in society, which is reflected in schools, is forcing schools not to solely rely on content-centered curriculum, but to also incorporate student-centered lesson plans based on critique and inquiry. This requires multicultural education to a dominant part of the school system, not just an extra course or unit. Further, it demands that learning itself no longer be seen as obtaining knowledge but rather, education be seen as creating knowledge. Multicultural education should be seen as affirming the diversity of students and communities, promoting the multicultural ideas of the United States, and building the knowledge and behaviors needed for students to be a positive and contributing member of society and the global community as a whole.
The student and teacher must work to abolish preconceived notion. The teacher must learn to look past figures, attitudes, and clothing styles they might find to be very alien and negative. They must be willing to challenge the student to discover for themselves the validity of their learning, and never underestimate or dismiss a student’s capacity to comprehend. At the same time, the student must learn to grow beyond his or her own background. Their origins might define who they are, but backgrounds should never inhibit the ability to see the value in an opposing viewpoint. In Mike Rose’s “Lives on the Boundary,” he states, “We are in the middle of an extraordinary social experiment: the attempt to provide education for all members of a vast pluralistic democracy.” (Rose, 117) The experiment he talks about is continuous. It’s taking place in every institute of education in our country and in the world, and these...
The aim of education is to prepare students as contributing members in a productive society. The essential core values of knowledge, skills, critical thinking capability, and citizenship help students grow into adults who contribute positively to the community. I believe that education’s focus on teaching content matter leads to the development of well-rounded knowledge and skills in reading, writing, speaking, computing, thinking, science, and the social world in which we live. Specific content knowledge in these disciplines contributes to equity in education. Such knowledge becomes an internal asset for an individual and is priceless. Studen...
In conducting her research, the author understood that she needed to describe key issues of culturally diverse students, recommend a curriculum approach to address the issues, and discuss the challenges and benefits expected. In reading Cultural and Linguistic Diversity: Issues in Education (2010), s...