Prompt #6 : Kliewer

I believe that as a teacher it is very important to be able to respond and communicate effectively to your students. When in the classroom, you need to be able to take into account the socio cultural and linguistic differences of your students and be able to communicate with sensitivity and responsiveness to that. A teacher must respect the different cultures in his / her classroom and be able to communicate with their students in a variety of ways.

One Friday afternoon when the kids were a little too hyper, the teacher decided to read them a book and have them do a writing assignment to try to get them to calm down. The book was about different families and the different foods they eat, specifically rice. While reading the story, the kids kept interrupting to say things like “Oh I eat that kind of rice all the time” or “I’ve never heard of that before”. The teacher let the students talk about the differences in their families. To them, they were talking about rice. But in reality, it was a discussion about all the different socio-cultural characteristics in the classroom. After she finished reading the story, the kids wrote a couple sentences about their own families and how they eat their rice. They also got to draw a picture. It was interesting to listen to the kids communicate with each other while they were doing this assignment. Some kids would find it so interesting hearing about someone else’s family. Others were excited when they found out a friend ate rice similar to what they ate. The pictures were very different; some with their family around the kitchen table, while others were cooking in the kitchen with their mom or their dad, or both. The teacher was able to communicate with her students with respect to all the different socio-cultural differences. She knows there is diversity in the classroom, accepts it, and turns it into a way for the students to better learn about each other and different cultures.

Christopher Kliewer, in “Citizenship in School: Reconceptualizing Down Syndrome” speaks about human reciprocity, which relates very much to democracy and communication in a classroom. Human reciprocity is basically when you are in a society where everyone works and interacts with each other. Each member of the community has something different to bring to the table and every one else in the group values what they bring. Cultures are able to be brought together and the community is able to learn something from one another and help each other. The ideas that are learned through the culture contribute to the individual and their personality / how they live their own life. Kliewer also talks about Lev Semenovich Vygotsky, who was a psychologist. He believes in a higher ordered thinking, which makes us all unique in a way that we can exist in both social and cultural relationships. It is important for children in a classroom to make these relationships in order to better communicate in the classroom community.

Prompt #5 : Dewey

As a teacher, working in a diverse classroom can bring with it some challenges, many of which we have talked about throughout our semester in class. Challenges with parents of the students you are teaching may also arise. When working in this type of community, you will come across a variety of diverse parents, with many different backgrounds, linguistics, etc. This can cause the communication between teacher and parent to be a bit difficult.

I can imagine that parents in a community such as the one that my school is in may have English as their second language or some may not speak much language at all. This can cause the communication to become quite hard to keep. A teacher needs to be able to find ways to communicate to parents in a variety of ways, depending on their background or lifestyle. There are many ways to address these challenges. You could physically show the parents how their child is doing by showing them past work. Showing a parent something a child did in the beginning of the year compared to something at the end of the year could show the parents the growth the child has made while being in the classroom. No matter what the teacher does to communicate, they need to make sure they show respect for the parents. You can not let the parents think that because they are the minority and may be at a disadvantage that you believe you are better than them. That will just build the lack of communication. A teacher needs to show that they do not empower them in any way by speaking and responding effectively to the parents; talk to them as one adult to another, not as a teacher telling them what they need to do better to help their child grow and succeed.

John Dewey speaks about two desirable traits throughout society; those being having a common interest and interaction. A teacher must show the parents that they are not above them, but on the same level. Teachers and parents have many common interests, one being they both want to see the child succeed. Sometimes, however, teachers forget about this commonality between them and just see the diverse culture that is in front of them. A teacher must remember this common interest when collaborating with parents. The other desirable trait, interaction, goes right back to the communication. It is so important to a child’s growth that the parents are involved with what is happening with their schooling. It is just as important to keep ties between parents and the child’s teacher. Without some sort of interaction and a lack of communication, a wall is built up and that is when challenges arise. According to Dewey, no communication leads to no support, by the parents and by the teacher. Dewey says that learning is developmental, and we can not, as teachers, expect this to happen without communication and interaction between communities outside of our own. Education is a social function and teachers must remember that when encountering parents.

Prompt #4 : Delpit

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mr5Pgf8i2VQ

My experience in my tutoring has really been eye opening. In my high school, there was definitely a majority of white students, probably about 90%. So I’m not exactly used to being in an environment where there are Black and Hispanic as the majority. I was always aware of diversity, but I don’t think I necessarily realized how much different it could be until I started tutoring in this school. Everyone has a bias, whether they like to admit it or not. If you are brought up in a community where there are little to no non-white students, you could develop a bias towards them. It could be the other way around as well.

As a teacher in this classroom, I feel like I would have some challenges. I understand the diversity in the school. It’s just very difficult to take all these children’s different backgrounds and experiences and work them into the lessons. There will sometimes be one or two students that will be unintentionally confused, left out, etc. As a teacher in a classroom such as this one, I would need to be able to do my best to integrate every child’s diversity into whatever type of lesson plan I would be teaching.

As a teacher, we need to be able to recognize the diverse cultural groups that are present in our classroom. Everyone has had different experiences and grown up in different environments. It’s important as a teacher to not only be aware of the diversity in your classroom, but to integrate that and the knowledge you have into what you teach day by day. Lisa Delpit in “The Silenced Dialogue” talks about the culture of power. Basically, she gives five aspects of power then can connect to the role of a teacher and also, the role of the students. As a teacher, Delpit says that you need to be aware of this power to be able to positively integrate other aspects of that into the classroom. There is a “culture of power” in almost every classroom. These are basically codes and rules that go along with this power. Many challenges can arise if a student does not know or understand the culture of power. So if you have a student with a diverse background, they could become lost without knowing the rules or codes, and basically give up all together. The teacher needs to make sure that all the students in the classroom participate in the culture of power so that every student can progress to the best of their ability. If you have a student that does become unaware of the rules, then it’s best to tell the student exactly what the rules are. You can’t expect a student to understand the culture of power if you do not tell them the rules and codes first. It is our job as teachers to take those challenges that come up in the classroom and turn them around into advantages for the students.

Prompt #3: Goldenburg

There are many distinct differences with the students in my classroom that affect their learning process. The teacher uses many different techniques in her lessons to help the students who have those linguistic, ethnic, and sociocultural characteristics understand what they are learning a lot easier. She is very responsive during assessments in the classroom, especially with linguistic and sociocultural characteristics.

The only tests that I have observed the students take are weekly spelling tests. The way that the teacher sets this up is that she gives each student a piece of loose leaf and has them number it one to twelve. Then she goes through each spelling word out loud, one by one. She says the word once, uses it in a sentence, then repeats the word one more time. I noticed after a while that she walked around the room as she went through this process with each of the twelve words. On some of the harder words, like conjunctions, she would say the word slower; making sure the students could hear the two parts of that particular word. Two or three students in the class always have a lot of difficulty with the spelling tests, and spelling in general. So as the teacher is going through the words, she sometimes stops at those kids’ desks and will quietly point out mistakes or give them a hint as to how to start off the word. Some of these students are bilingual, that is, they also speak Spanish when they are at home. I know this because I have observed a couple students speaking Spanish to each other. At one point, when one of the girls in my class was coming back from lunch, she answered her cell phone because her dad was calling and had to drop something off at the school. She had a conversation with him in Spanish; there was no English said at all. So English does not come first hand to them. So it takes a little bit longer for these students to grasp things like spelling and speaking in English.

The teacher notices that there are different sociocultural characteristics for each student and they all respond differently to assessments in the classroom. She responds to these characteristics in different ways, depending on the type of assessment; like for the spelling tests that I described above, she responds to the different linguistic characteristics in her classroom. This goes along with ethnic and sociocultural characteristics as well. The teacher is very good with recognizing these characteristics and coordinating her lessons and assessments around the differences in the classroom.

I connected this to Goldenburg because although none of the students are specified as English Language Learners, there are still some boundaries between these students and where they “should be”, according to certain standards. If a teacher ignores these boundaries and the different characteristics in his or her students, they are just holding them back from their full potential. Goldenburg says that teachers need to teach the students at a young age and give them support in order to break those boundaries and be looked at on the same level as students without this linguistic difference. The teacher in my classroom is giving her students the support they need by doing things such as giving a little extra help during assessments to those students who need it. The students need more attention by their teacher, in areas like language and spelling, instead of just getting ignored because of the label put on them and the culture they were brought up in.

Prompt #2 : Shor

http://www.infoworks.ride.uri.edu/2009/pdf/usinginfo/28158E-info.pdf

My classroom is pretty diverse. The students are mostly Hispanic and African American, but there are two or three White and Asian students as well. There are about sixteen students in the classroom, with twelve of them being boys. According to info works, ninety percent of the school is eligible for free or reduced price lunch. Knowing this data and going off looks, I am guessing that most of the children’s families are in the lower class range. None of the students in the school are receiving English as a second language, but twenty five percent are bilingual. This is interesting to me because I have heard two of the students in my classroom speaking Spanish to each other. The entire school is just as diverse as my classroom. Info works says that the school is 59% Hispanic, 31% African American, 6% White, 3% Asian, and 1% Native American. This is very different than the school system I grew up in, this school being much more diverse with all different races.

On info works, it says that eighty four percent of the students in the school do not receive special education services. The other sixteen percent is self contained special education and special education students with support. In the classroom that I am in now, there are no special education students. But I was in a different classroom the first week where there were two special education students and there was one aid in the room to help.

With all these differences throughout the classroom, I can tell that sometimes the teacher has a difficult time getting through to all the students. They are all at different levels of reading, writing, math, etc and you can see this when observing the classroom. The teacher really has to use different methods and take the extra time to make sure each student is able understand the lesson. Each child comes from a different background and different family life, so you never know, as a teacher, how the students are going to respond. The first or second time that I was in the classroom that I am currently tutoring in, the teacher was just beginning a new science unit on weather. She gathered everyone at the rug and went through all the different tools they would be using for the next month or so in this unit. There were about fifteen or twenty tools she wanted to show them; things like thermometers and how to measure rain water. Going over these things would seem like a quick and easy task, but it actually took her about 45 minutes to an hour to finish. This was because for each tool, every child had something to say about it and each had a different way of looking at it. I found this to be very interesting because it shows that each child has something different to bring to the classroom environment.

This goes along with what theorist Ira Shor said about participatory classrooms. Participation in a classroom is very important because it uses interaction between students and the teacher, and the flow of ideas. Shor says that this is the type of classroom that we need, unlike a passive curriculum, which instead will prepare a student to follow, not lead. My classroom is quite interactive. Discussions like the one I mentioned above have happened almost every time I have been there so far, and I can tell the teacher truly tries to have them as often as possible. It is important to get that participation in the classroom, as it connects with a democratic point of view, having both students and teachers working together on certain tasks. Shor argues that participation can work against the endullment of students’ minds. The teacher in my classroom is doing just that; working against endullment and helping the students to have a voice in their classroom.

Prompt #1

On the way to the school, I couldn’t help but notice how much different this neighborhood is compared to what I am used to. All the buildings looked a bit run-down and there weren’t a lot of yards or area for kids to play around. As I was driving down the different streets, I must have hit at least five huge potholes. You could say I was a bit out of my element.

When I arrived at the school, I was very confused as to where to park and where the front door was. There were no signs anywhere and the school kind of sat at a random location between two side streets. At first, I was even contemplating whether or not I was at the right place because to be honest, the building looked nothing like a school. But after finding a place to park, my friend and I got out and started walking around the building to find the front door. This took us about five minutes. The door was at the corner of the building with a little sign next to it with an arrow that said “Main Office”. Not exactly helpful for first time visitors like us.

The first two or three weeks, I was not assigned to a specific classroom. But then I got assigned to a second grade room, and I must say, I really love it. The classroom is a bit cluttered, but not in a bad way. The room is separated into specific areas: the students’ desks, the teacher’s desk and the rug area. The desks for the students are put into groups of four. This works out well because when they do their work, they always ask each other for help, like how to spell something. It is very colorful and as soon as I walked in for the first time, I relaxed a little. There are posters covering almost every space on the walls. Some talk about writing skills, some about math, and some I recognized having to do with different reading skills that we learned about in our class in the beginning of the semester.

The first time I met the teacher, I loved her. She was extremely welcoming and truly excited that I was there. You can tell just by talking to her and watching her teach, that she loves what she does. She always takes the time to go over directions or help a student when they ask. The students are very sweet. Every time when I leave, they always give me a hug and make sure I’m coming back next week.

In the classroom, there is a very good feeling. The students act out once in a while, but the teacher knows how to take control when needed. I can tell the teacher actually values the students and wants them to learn everything they can. Her passion for teaching is very noticeable.

The school, however, has more of an uneasy feeling. Many of the other people I have met, some of the other teachers and the secretaries, don’t have the best attitudes. Just by looking at them or having a small conversation with them, I can just tell they don’t want to be there. But the school does have some good values overall. Like the classroom I am in, they all value the students and the hard work that they do. Students get rewarded for good work and there is some motivation to help them get to that point.

first blog

I finallyyy got this working, so I'll tell you a little bit about myself. My names Samantha, but basically everyone calls me Sam. I'm a freshman at RIC and I'm really enjoying it so far. I live at home, but I don't mind because I kind of get homesick after being away for a while anyways. So far this semester is going alright, a little more stressful than last semester but hopefully that'll pass. When I'm not at school I coach cheerleading at my old highschool, which takes up a lot of time. I also like to hang out with my friends and my boyfriend of about 2 years. Well that's about it, talk to you later! :)