This course 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 are aspects of
multicultural education that I want to pass along as an educator. Prior to doing any of those things, 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.
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. 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 there is rarely any picture books at
home, by choice, and many families rely of oral story telling. 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.
Due to having quite a
large percentage of students of Hispanic race 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 unfortunately was not
surprised to hear of 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, especially of Hispanic dissent, 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 (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 protestor 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.
Comments
Post a Comment