Prompt #2: Johnson

The culturally competent teacher should be able to account for, demonstrate awareness of, and respond to the sociocultural distinctiveness of her or his students, families, and communities when planning for and delivering instruction.

Hello Again,
Today I thought I would write about the linguistic, ethnic, and sociocultural characters of the students in Mrs. Medos class. Just from looking around the classroom as I have mentioned before the students are of mostly Spanish decent. After talking with a few students it sounds as though most of them are originally from Guatemala and various other South American countries. It is easy to spot the variety of cultures, ethnicities, and languages just by spending a small amount of time with the students in the classroom.

With a little further research online I was able to determine that ninety-five percent of the students in the entire elementary school receive either free or reduced lunch. This directly correlates with the number of students living either in or very close to poverty. 71% of the student population is Hispanic, 14% African American, and 10% White. What surprised me was the number of students in the ESL program. 17% of the students in the school participate in an English Second Language program, which is nearly one fifth of the students, who can barely speak the language of their own country. In light of all these facts, bearing poverty and language barriers, only 24% of the students are proficient in mathematics, and a mere 32% in reading.

Certainly speaking different languages and practicing differing values and beliefs makes it difficult for many of the students to relate to one another. I would say that my teacher does a great job trying to facilitate the differences the students have. She seems very aware that they often find things appropriate to do with the other students and she very calmly will respond “I know that may be okay at home sweetie, but that is not how we do things here in room 118”.

Discussing the cultures, ethnicities, and languages of the class made me think of the Johnson article, “Our House is On Fire”. In that article Johnson discusses the issue of White Privilege in our society, and he proposes that we all can recognize this innate privilege. Then being more aware, we can start to adjust to a more equal society. This relates to Mrs. Medos classroom in an interesting sense, because only two of her students are white, and the two students in the ESL classroom that are white are actually some of the most shy and uninvolved students in the classroom. Now obviously a white student whose first language is not English is not what Johnson was using as his example, however the most interesting part is to see who has fallen into this privilege category in the classroom.

In the classroom, made up almost entirely of Spanish students, including a teacher of Spanish decent, the privilege interestingly falls with the Spanish students. Recognizing this has allowed me to realize that perhaps Johnson talks so much about White privilege because we originally started as a mainly white country, and it just shows that whoever is part of the majority holds the privilege. This explains why given the current demographic of the country and classroom, the privilege needs to be adjusted to a much more equal playing field.