Standard 5 Reflection

Seattle Pacific University's Standards for Teacher Leadership states that teacher leaders "establish a culturally inclusive learning climate that facilitates academic engagement and success for all students."(Standard 5, SPU).  The course "EDU 6525, Culturally Responsive Teaching" enhanced my learning in this area, along with my district's professional development focus of cultural competency.  Below is a reflection that demonstrates some of my learning for this standard:

 EDU 6525 has been powerful in learning how culture can impact our daily lives, specifically in education.  While I have been on a personal journey in digging deeper into cultural competency and understanding hidden biases and privileges I may have, it has been eye opening to see the implications it can have for my students and my profession as an educator. 

As I ponder over the major takeaways of this course, the things that stick with me the most are aspects of multicultural education that I want to pass along as an educator.  Before we can get to that point, however, I know that slowing down and truly understanding what culture is and digging deep into others cultures is what is most important.  Especially as an educator, it is imperative to focus on continuous learning of cultures in order to do what is best for students.  Beyond this, I look forward to using what I’ve learned to positively impact my student’s relationship with our education system and expand their knowledge on cultural competency as mine is increasing. Finally, I plan on using my position as a teacher leader to have important conversations with other educators to discuss the amazing things that minority educators before us did for our profession and how we can continue the work. 

I continue to go back to the initial lecture notes on culture as an overarching theme for the progression of my understanding in this course.  Prior to starting this course, I expected the majority of our conversations to be centered around race.  I knew how important these topics were in education, especially with the tensions that face our nation today.  What I didn’t realize is the impact that culture has on education without even considering race as one of the factors.  One’s religion, opinions, traditions, thoughts and opinions, upbringings, political views, socioeconomic status, and race all can go into a student’s experience within a classroom or a families experience with an educational system (Mvududu, 2018).  This led to so many “aha” moments and got the wheels turning for next steps and application within my cultural competency journey focusing on the world of education. 

After each new topic throughout the weeks and each new story or article read, I kept going back to the iceberg comparison that was given in the “Culture” lecture notes.  The idea that we only see the very top of a person was powerful for me as I thought of each of my students as an iceberg (Mvududu, 2018).  As I learned about a new area that various cultures can struggle with in education such as access or materials, I would find myself actually sketching an iceberg for some specific students.  This practice was incredibly helpful in determining between what I actually knew about them and things that were a huge “question mark” underneath the surface.  While I did know how important getting to know each student was prior to the course, when I thought of the iceberg metaphor I continued to be more motivated to learn more about each student and their families.  Particular students would come to mind after reading a particular article or after finishing lecture.  Being able to identify areas of the iceberg that was unknown helped me plan next steps for increasing students’ overall experience in a school setting. 

Taking the iceberg metaphor into account not only changed my thinking and planning around students, but it changed my actual instruction.  It allowed me to question the “why” behind students’ actions and brainstorm the cultural aspects of why particular students are choosing to do specific things.  For example, I have a couple students that really seemed disengaged with picture books and wanted nothing to do with them unless they had a read-aloud component.  In other areas of the day, they would perform exceptionally, specifically around auditory directions.  This is unusual for this age, but I didn’t start to really put the pieces together until learning about these particular students’ culture. 

A parent of one of these students mentioned to our grade level team that picture books and storytelling do not go hand in hand in their Hispanic culture.  She said that when they were growing up, picture books were not a common household item, regardless of means. Many families in this culture continue to embrace oral storytelling, making it an area for family bonding across generations.   After hearing this, my student disconnection to reading picture books made so much more sense and provided one more visible “piece” to that iceberg.  With having this knowledge, I was able to allow these students to have access to more listening centers than normal.  I was also able to turn other subjects into oral storytelling opportunities to help them learn in a preferred way and also help them become "experts" at something. 

Due to having quite a large percentage Latinx students and students that speak Spanish as their first language in our building, I also really connected with the work that Sanchez did in laying out the obstacles for the education of Mexican Americans.  I was particularly interested to learn about his struggles to disprove the correlation between low intelligence on American IQ tests in Spanish-speaking children (Sanchez, 1996).  While there are actions taken to prevent this, our building and district still have a tendency to over-diagnose Engligh Language Learners and minorities alike, for special education.  It was interesting to see some of the correlations between the actions we take to prevent this in our building and the work that Sanchez did in getting the word out about bilingual education.  Some similarities I saw are considering the years of exposure to English, the years of education in the United States, and the family background (Banks, Sanchez 1996).  I think Sanchez’ work in educational reform is huge for our education system today, and I don’t know if my students would have the same access they do now if it weren’t for brave educators like himself. 

Since this iceberg metaphor was so powerful for me, and allowed me to uncover something really important surrounding books and storytelling within my own classroom, I took great interest in our Multicultural Literacy lecture unit as well.  I have always been passionate about exposing my students to various races and cultures within books.  I think it is important for my students to see a reflection of themselves in some of the books we have in our classroom, in addition to book with main characters about a culture or race that may be new to them.  I also think it is important to use literature to teach about important people in our history that often get overlooked due to being a minority.

            While I held these beliefs for my students and work hard to have a classroom library that reflects these beliefs, I didn’t consider the implications these same things could have for my profession as an educator until after this Multicultural Education lecture.  Not only is it important to have books that reflect various cultures, but it important to continuously work to learn more as an educator about cultures and their preferred learning and communication styles. 

By this point in the course, we had also read some amazing stories of brave minorities in education from the Banks collection.  One that stands out to me is Chapter 11- “Race, Gender, and Calling: Perspectives on African American Women Educators” by Taylor.  I remember feeling so empowered by these women who helped change our educational system in face of so much adversity.  Through horrible conditions, adverse surroundings, and low pay these women worked tirelessly to provide an education to African American children who would not have been taught if it weren’t for them.  After communicating to the class through discussion posts about this chapter, I remember thinking that our “adverse conditions” in education right now are nothing compared to what these women went through.  It should be easy for us to fight as educators for what all of our students deserve, since these women did it in much worse environments than us.  

Reading this also made me want to continue their legacy as an educator.  When I read the quote about them from Franklin stating they were “a remarkable attempt to rehabilitate a whole people- to explode racial myths” (205), it made me want to share this with all educators.  Just like I communicate about the importance of diverse books in our classrooms, I want to allow other educators understand amazing things that minority educators in years past have done for our educations system today.  As a teacher leader, this chapter motivated me to have these conversations not only with my students, but with my colleagues, which was powerful. 

One of the final areas from this course that will stay with me as I continue my work around cultural competency is the severe deficits our educational system has around bias in instruction.  Around the same time that I was participating in a conversation about lecture in instruction, I noticed some discussion in some other professional development groups on social media.  One discussion that I related to in particular was around Rosa Parks and how some educational curriculum describes the story differently than what actually happened.  Teachers were discussing how their curriculum “water down” the story so much for students that parts of it were completely inaccurate.  This made me think of how some feel that multicultural education can “dumb down” the curriculum rather than enrich it- this was a perfect example.  This also made me think of Banks’ quote in the first chapter “Knowledge Construction and Multicultural Education” (Banks, 1991):

While the debate was continuing over 20 years ago about the implementations of cultural diversity being taught in schools, the debate is still continuing today.  While we’ve made progress, I’d like to see the authenticity of stories to be improved and knowledge of minorities leaders to be increased, especially stories around African American women.

There were many recent student news articles and books on Rosa Parks that described the situation as a fluke.  It described Parks as a weak elderly women who randomly decided “one day” to sit towards the front of the bus, rather than describing her as a brave protester who was intelligent and had intentionally planned for months for this particular moment on the bus.   I felt like this was a great example of how trying to change curriculum so younger students can understand a story actually does a disservice to those children and to multicultural education in general.  I was surprised to find that many of my own resources on Rosa Parks had similar issues.  This allowed me to really think critically purposefully as an educator when planning instruction to make sure that I make the most of the powerful impact I can have on student’s learning in this area. 

Since these things were my main “takeaways” from the course, it only makes sense that I have similar goals for myself as far as direct application within my classroom.  The main one that I’ve started doing already, but plan to do with more intent next year, is to have an “iceberg” on every student on file.  Before I meet the students, I know it will be very blank, with maybe just a name, a race, and perhaps some information from last year’s teacher.  I hope to be able to fill it throughout the year, digging deeper into some of the things I may not have seen beyond the surface in previous years.  I also plan to “lean in” towards conversations around race rather than shy away, specifically with educators. Since I have so much more knowledge about the amazing impact that minorities have had on education after taking this course, sharing this information with other educators would be a powerful opportunity.  Finally, I plan to think critically about the curriculum I currently have, identifying any areas of weakness related to culture.  Identifying those areas will only be the first step in improving the instruction for students years to come. 

Overall, I am so fortunate to have taken this course when I did.  My mind as an educator and society member is continuing to be opened and I am grateful for the opportunity to learn this information at the beginning of my teaching career.  I know that as I continue to empower myself with tools and resources to further my thinking in cultural competency, I am able to pass that along to our future generations. What a truly awesome and extremely important opportunity we have as educators.

Since taking this course and writing this reflection, I am continuing my work, both on myself and in the world of education, on cultural competency.  I am continuing to do everything I can in my classroom to ensure my students see themselves reflected in the curriculum they interact with and the books they are reading.  As I bring new books into my classroom library, I now use more than just an academic lens to ensure it is the right fit for my students.  I am also continuing to have brave, and at times, uncomfortable, conversations with other educators as my knowledge expands in this area.  
One of the biggest struggles for me this year was in March around Dr. Seuss' birthday.  I had previously done a lot of studying and reflecting on some of the research around his work.  While I had previously read about some of the racism in his earlier work, my new awareness in this area led me to "lean in" to some of the newer research rather than get defensive about a beloved and talented childhood author.  After beginning to follow an educator team named “TheConscious Kid”, and reading the book “Was the Cat and the Hat Black?  The Hidden Racism of Children’s Literature, and the Need for Diverse Books” by Philip Nel, I began to become more aware of the implications even some of the more popular Dr. Seuss books could have on our students.  

When the "Research on Diversity and Youth Literature" journal publish The Conscious Kid's research on the racism found in Dr. Seuss work (linked here), I could no longer stay quiet about celebrating "Read Across America Day" as "The Cat and the Hat" as the central focus.  While I knew it was going to be a very difficult conversation, as Dr. Seuss is beloved by many, I felt compelled to share my findings, especially with my district's current mission and focus on cultural competency.  Our building is now engaging in these hard, and sometimes gut-wrenching, conversations around racial implications in popular texts.  We are also looking into how we can showcase diverse authors and story lines when we celebrate reading next March.  I look forward to continuing this work as a building in order to learn and grow for our students.  

References:

Banks, J. A. (1996). Multicultural education, transformative knowledge, and action: Historical and contemporary perspectives. New York, NY: Teachers College Press.

Ishizuka, K., & Stephens, R. (2019, February). The Cat is Out of the Bag: Orientalism, Anti-Blackness, and White Supremacy in Dr. Seuss's Children's Books. Retrieved from https://sophia.stkate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1050&context=rdyl

Mvududu, N. (2018, January/February). What is Culture. Lecture presented on Canvas from Seattle Pacific University.