The one teacher that inspires me up to this day is Ms. Ali, a 5th grade teacher at an urban charter school in St. Paul. She is extremely passionate about her students and the service she provides for her community. Over ninety percent of the students in her classroom are students of color. Ms. Ali is well rounded and very particular about the way she addresses her students. For instance, she refers to all of her students as “scholars”. She has high expectation of how they act, learn and carry themselves. For instance, when she first welcomes her students to the classroom, she would often say, “Keep your head up”, “You are a soldier”, “You can do anything you set your mind to”, “You gotta push through”. She teaches them various chants that …show more content…
Ali is an African American woman from an immigrant family, so most of her students relate to her life experiences. More often than not, she talks about her struggles in school when she was younger. For instance, one time she was teaching a grammar lesson and she realized that it was difficult for students to fathom. She stopped the lesson, and she started telling her students about a time when her elementary teacher was explaining a lesson and she did not understand because she knew little to no English. As she told her story, I saw students’ faces light up and some of them chuckled. In the end, she gave her students a morale that they may not understand this lesson, but one day, this grammar point will come naturally. After the short story, she went back to the lesson. Ms. Ali executed this element profoundly because she developed an informed empathy. According to Ladson-Billings (2006),” This informed empathy required the teacher to feel with the students rather than feel for them “(p. 31). As I have witnessed in this case, this empathy created solidarity between Ms. Ali and her students. In addition, Ms. Ali assigns projects that connect her students to their prospective community. One day, she organized a class trip where they went on a walk around their school community and observed the neighborhood. This was meant to be a quiet activity. She allowed students to take pictures, and record audio so that they can share with each other when they get back to the …show more content…
Ali’s lived experiences lead her to have strong sociopolitical consciousness. Growing up as an African American child from an immigrant family, she faced disparities at first hand. Positive examples of this element is the use of her lived experiences as a teaching tool for her students. Any chance she gets, she tells her students personal experiences or asks them to share how they connect/disconnect with the texts they read. Moreover, I noticed, in her book selections, the text are diverse and more often than not, include immigrant families, people of color, etc. She is particular about the books she provides her students. I love how Ms. Ali is strong minded and focused on teaching her students from a multicultural perspective. However, from my observation of her classroom, I think it would be best if she focused on deconstructing the narratives present in their curriculum. Sometimes teaching a child inherent oppression and how to identify is just as strong and powerful. In the future, I will approach this element by being conscious of my own sociological stands. I will educate myself about my school environment, and school policies to best serve my students and their families. According to Ladson-Billings (2006): “Teachers who foster cultural competence understand they must work back and forth between the lives of their students and the life of the school. Teachers have an obligation to expose their students to the very culture that oppresses them” (p. 36). I know some
Cowhey’s book is broken down by the major themes and concepts she teaches her first and second grade students. Each concept relates back to her personal pedagogy of implementing a Multicultural Education. These major themes include empathy, freedom, peace, activism, community, and social justice. Cowhey’s pedagogy uses “language and literacy to teach about the world with rigor, depth, and challenge in a way that engages and
As Pollock states, “Equity efforts treat all young people as equally and infinitely valuable” (202). This book has made me realize that first and foremost: We must get to know each of our students on a personal level. Every student has been shaped by their own personal life experiences. We must take this into consideration for all situations. In life, I have learned that there is a reason why people act the way that they do. When people seem to have a “chip on their shoulder”, they have usually faced many hardships in life. “The goal of all such questions is deeper learning about real, respected lives: to encourage educators to learn more about (and build on) young people’s experiences in various communities, to consider their own such experiences, to avoid any premature assumptions about a young person’s “cultural practices,” and to consider their own reactions to young people as extremely consequential.” (3995) was also another excerpt from the book that was extremely powerful for me. Everyone wants to be heard and understood. I feel that I owe it to each of my students to know their stories and help them navigate through the hard times. On the other hand, even though a student seems like he/she has it all together, I shouldn’t just assume that they do. I must be sure that these students are receiving the attention and tools needed to succeed,
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
Courageous Conversations About Race: Chapter 5. Authors Glenn E. Singleton and Curtis Linton in Chapter Five of Courageous Conversations About Race broach the topic of race, by asking the reader to evaluate his or her own consciousness of race. According to the authors, in order to address the achievement gaps between African American students and White students, educators should shift their energy towards focusing on the factors that they have direct control of inside the classroom rather than on the factors that influence this achievement disparity between races outside the classroom. The first step towards addressing the racial achievement gap begins with educators addressing their individual racial attitudes for, as the authors purport, “As we become personally aware of our own racialized existence, we can more deeply understand the racial experiences of others” (Singleton, Linton, 2006). In all honesty, I think Singleton and Linton hit the bull’s eye by suggesting that the first step towards initiating culturally relevant teaching is for the teacher to really examine his or her attitudes, values, and principles.
As stated in my Week 3 Journal Entry, at one point I was helping in a classroom with a child who speaks Spanish. Instead of trying to force the child to speak English, I tried to use some basic Spanish when I worked with them in order to make the child feel more comfortable. I believe by making this small effort to speak the child’s native language that the child was more willing to participate in class and try to learn English. An additional example of making a relation from the text to a personal experience is when I was in elementary through high school. I did not realize until reading Spring’s book how little cultural diversity was taught in my elementary, middle, and high school. I went to school in a very Scandinavian county, and we did not have a lot of diversity. There were several students in the district who came from Hispanic, Asian, or African decent—but they were very few. I cannot recall a day when a teacher spent time to discuss a one of these student’s cultures, which is utterly ridiculous. With the amount of time spent in school and the amount of diversity in the world, it seems illogical to barely speak of ethnic and cultural diversity. Even though there were only a handful of students in the district from different cultures, it would have been beneficial to learn more about the rest of the world because when high school is done we all go out into that diverse world. I know I will take the time and make the effort to teach my future students about the beauty of diversity and
Delpit, Lisa. “The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People’s Children.” Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflicts in the Classroom. New York: The New Press, 1995.
The problems currently arising are “not really in the debate over instructional methodology, but rather in communicating across cultures and in addressing the more fundamental issue of power, of whose voice gets to be heard in determining what is best for poor children and children of color” (Delpit 19). Administration must be able to respectfully gather information about a student in and out of school to help understand where they need the most structure and guidance and when to let them work independely. The current educational system in place has a mold that students need to fit, and for students of lower income familys, that mold is often expects less of them so naturally, the type of schooling provided for racial minorities is [they] one that prepares them for their respective place in the job market.” (Ogbu 83). Social reproducation is not a reality that society must accept and best try to break without a complete solution, but instead one that can be broken by a refocusing and recommittment to the students that often need the most guideance and resources for them to succeed and break social
Lacking the necessary support, many start to devalue the importance of doing well in school deciding that perhaps school isn’t part of their identity. In Susan’s case she’s eliciting multiple forms of subordination, and within each dimension she’s being subjective to different types of oppression; racial oppression, gender oppression, and class oppression, she’s experiencing cultural alienation and isolation and is not only based on her ethnicity as a Latina but is also influenced by how she is treated as a female, as a member of a certain socioeconomic class, and in relation to her English language proficiency, and even her perceived immigration status. In this sense, students like Susan experience different forms of discrimination or marginalization that stems from
She explains that African American and Latina/o students and their families continue to have high educational aspirations despite persistent education inequities. The culture of power as the “norm” of Whites.
By reflecting on my experience as a child, I was able to clearly ask myself, “Does this teaching method affect the oppressed students in my classroom, and if so, how?” As mentioned before, I had a student that struggled with math and writing. This student, along with about 3 other students in her class, was a Black female. Most of their writing prompts consisted of content that was all about a Caucasian male that went into space, or did something with his wealthy, loving family. Besides the fact that these girls cannot relate to these types of prompts, it also leads them to believe that women don’t often do big things like going into space or become wealthy with loving families. Although I never had the chance to teach a full class in an anti-oppressive way, I have made sure that I take every student’s culture, ethnicity, ability, class, and language into consideration when teaching/mentoring.
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.
“An array of knowledges, skills, abilities and contacts possessed and used by Communities of Color to survive and resist racism and other forms of oppression” encompasses the main idea of Community Cultural Wealth. It is vital to understand that students will step foot into the classroom with a variety of cultures zipped up in their backpacks, and it is our job as educators to make sure that equality is instilled/taught in our classrooms. The second a student feels a sense of discrimination, whether from ourselves or their fellow classmate(s), is when the safe and comforting environment of the classroom begins to diminish. Here I will discuss just how important it is to see the differences amongst students as an advantage
...'s Children, is an important tool in the education of teachers to help them to see teaching is not a politic-free practice that has little to do with social justice. Through reading multicultural theorists like Delpit, teachers are better prepared to deal with the issues like injustice and "remove the blinders built of stereotypes, mono-cultural instructional methodologies, ignorance, social distance biased research and racism" in the classrooms (Delpit, 1995, pg.69).
They suggested that teachers needed to go beyond practicing multiculturalism in the classroom, they need to embrace it as a modicum of everyday life and find ways to get involved in organizations and events that encourage social justice. The techniques suggested by the authors were realistic and easy to implement in the classroom. The authors acknowledge that though white educators will experience some difficulties in teaching cross-cultural courses, these difficulties should not discourage them from teaching multicultural content. This article should be a required reading for all multicultural courses because it can provide a sense of enlightenment for all students, regardless of their cultural backgrounds. It exposed some of the trials and tribulations that white professors’ experience, and even acknowledges some of the thoughts that I would have as a black student being taught by a white professor. I think having this article as a required reading will impact white students by making them consciously aware of their white privilege and will influence them to explore it and their racial identity. For students of other ethnic backgrounds, it will help us to better understand the perspective of white people, and teach us how to better communicate with them so that they too may understand our
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 to gain a high level of respect for those unlike them, preferably from a judgmental and prejudiced view. Diversity has a broad range of spectrums. Students from all across the continent; students from political refugees, indigenous Americans, and immigrants bring their cultural and linguistic skills to American classrooms. Students not only bring their cultural and linguistic skills, but they bring their ethnicity, talents, and skills.