Prompt #6: Brown

Today was my second to last visit to my classroom. I must admit I am sad to see the time has gone by so fast, and this whole experience has certainly been one that has helped to assure me that teaching is the career choice that I would like to pursue. I absolutely commend and admire the teachers who are able to handle such high energy and diverse classrooms on a daily basis.

The culturally competent teacher communicates in ways that demonstrate sensitivity to sociocultural and linguistic differences, using a variety of verbal and non-verbal communication techniques that encourage positive social interaction and support learning in their classroom.

What has continuously astounded me is that even in a room filled with five and six year olds there exists cliques and different groups throughout the room that do not in any way pertain to race as I have discussed before. I call these cliques because they exists amongst the genders and classes, nearest I can tell there is already a population of the class considered to be the “popular” students who the other children either admire or act spitefully towards. The challenge lies in how a culturally competent teacher can handle these situations in order to demonstrate sensitivity and use a variety of techniques to encourage positive interaction and learning within a classroom.

It was not until today that I realized that subconsciously I am sure, Mrs. Medos is aiding the students in maintaining the cliques of students, which enables her students to pass judgments, and become at odds with fellow students. Today I was working with a group and while they were handling the task of writing names on the top of papers two little girls began contemplating how the other wrote their name. Within minutes it had turned into a flaming competition in Spanish to decide who had the most letters in their name. It was a pointless competition with very little academic relevance, especially when considering the hostility surrounding the situation. It took me minutes to get the girls back under controlled and focused on their workbooks from what had seemingly been their match up to assert some type of dominance over the other. Meanwhile Mrs. Medos lectured the entire class on the noise level and discussed how they would loose recess, never singling out the two girls that were clearly the cause of the entire ruckus.

The point I can make with these girls as my example is that they are seemingly the two girls in the class who the other children either admire or feel spiteful towards. These girls may later in life be classified as the “middle class” girls as Lyn Mikel Brown discusses in her piece on “In the Bad or Good of Girlhood”. These girls may not be the definition of lady like, the ones Brown discusses, however in comparison to the “working class” girls in the classroom they are separated and seem to generally more accepted. The real issue I found with this situation is the student who was reprimanded during the chaos in room 118. The very quiet girl with broken English who often seems to work on her own was walking around the classroom voluntarily picking up the other students scissors for them after she had completed her work. Mrs. Medos immediately addressed the girl, explaining she had no right to be out of her seat and surely she was part of the cause of the classroom madness.

After pointing a finger at the student who was clearly not responsible from my point of view, I began to understand that Mrs. Medos was unconsciously contributing to the cliques and class separations that exist in her classroom. As Brown explained, “The problem, in fact, seems not to be that the teachers do not care, but that there are subtle, unexamined class and cultural divides preventing shared understanding between the girls and their teachers”. Certainly Mrs. Medos would never want to create such distinctions between her students, or make assumptions based on predetermined biases, however it is something all teachers must learn to recognize and avoid. Some teachers just simply have trouble relating to every type of student or category of student who enters their classroom. This has been a valuable lesson I will hold onto, I will do my best to demonstrate a sensitivity and responsiveness to all students equally in order to be the best culturally competent teacher I can be.

ps. In almost all situations Mrs. Medos is a very fair and culturally competent teacher and I feel that she in no way intends to support the cliques throughout her classroom, it is hard to take all considerations into account 100% of the time, but overall I think she is a wonderful Kindergarten teacher.

Prompt #4: Carlson

The culturally competent teacher is aware of the diverse cultural groups represented in his/her classroom, investigates the sociocultural factors that influence student learning, and is able to integrate this knowledge into his/her teaching.

My visit this past week fell on the Tuesday immediately following Easter. It was a very hectic day all around, the children were anxious to discuss their weekend, the recent flood, and we had a fire drill almost immediately upon my arrival. Once the students were finally back inside, seated, and back under control following the drill they resumed writing the sentences they were working on. Upon sitting down with my usual group of students to help them with their writing, one little girl quickly began discussing her Easter weekend. She discussed food, family, and of course, candy. Then after I questioned her, she explained to me the pictures of eggs they had colored the previous Friday in light of the holiday. I had no idea the door I was opening simply by asking “So you had a nice visit from the Easter Bunny?”

Within seconds one of the students in my group got very defensive and yelled quite loudly, “There is no such thing as the Easter Bunny”. I instantly realized the trouble I had gotten myself into as the other students in my group began to argue with him and got rather upset. I realized I made that statement based on my history of believing strongly in the Easter Bunny at their ages. However, I was forgetting to recognize the diverse cultures the class is made up of, and I had not realized that many of the students did not share such beliefs. After clarifying with the teacher, her egg coloring was in no way associated with the Easter Bunny, she just explained to the students it was a coloring activity associated with the Holiday of Easter.

This lesson is one I can relate do Dennis Carlson’s article, “Gayness, Multicultural Education, and Community”. Although this situation does not deal with gayness, it very directly relates to his discussion of the “normalizing community”. For the classroom I am volunteering in, the normalizing community includes the celebration of Easter. Although in all cases it does not include the Easter Bunny, it is assumed and practiced in the class to celebrate Easter, and those who choose not to are separated from the normalized community of the classroom. The same little boy who did not believe in the Easter Bunny also explained his family did not do anything to celebrate the previous Sunday, this made the other students very frustrated with him and they alienated him from the conversation.

All in all, this week provided me with a number of revelations. First and foremost, it is important for a teacher to know the sociocultural makeup of a classroom before they create a lesson plan. In general the normalizing community of America includes the celebration of Easter. Very similar to the situation of gays, this practice creates a gap between students who do and do not celebrate. Obviously, just by making assumptions based on my own personal history got me into a very uncomfortable situation in the classroom this week. My misconception about the students various cultures beliefs have allowed me to recognize I need to be much more careful and considerate before discussing anything with the students. Hopefully in the future I will be able to set aside my own history and biases, and do my best to integrate based on my student’s backgrounds, rather than my own.

Check back Soon :-)

Prompt #3: Goldenberg

The culturally competent teacher should be able to use a variety of assessment techniques appropriate to diverse learners and accommodate sociocultural differences that affect learning.

This week was a high energy day in the classroom. I assume it was the weather that was keeping the kids locked inside, which made their energy levels go through the roof. High energy is not a bad thing though, it was just a day to be on my toes and try to harness their energy and use it towards their academic tasks. I noticed Mrs. Medos was doing just the same thing, while she assessed the students in a variety of ways today.

Other than energy, there is another large issue when it comes to testing the children of room 118. As I have discussed in past blogs, the children come from very different backgrounds considering linguistics, ethnicities, and sociocultural characteristics. Although they make the classroom very diverse, which undoubtedly benefits the students, it makes assessing them fairly a difficult task. Throughout my time in the room today the students were assessed in three different ways.

Firstly the students were assessed as a group verbally, Mrs. Medos asked them to sound out a number of words and took notes of which they struggled with. Their second assessment was to work on their own and write/illustrate a story. This task allowed her to observe how well the children can sound out words individually, and it was a written exam rather then oral. The final assessment was pulling the children out one at a time and asking them to sound out the words individually, to note which ones they had difficulty with on their own. Each of these three assessments showed tremendous flexibility to best incorporate the students, which I believe allowed Mrs. Medos to accommodate testing the strengths of each student.

This accommodation was never ending, not only did she provide a range of oral, written, group and individual assessment techniques, Mrs. Medos never punished the children for having difficulties with any task, and did her best to accommodate their needs in order to achieve success. I found this to be a connection with the teaching methods of Claude Goldenberg. Goldenberg suggested that you allow students to learn in their first language, and then they will be able to become more successful when they transfer that knowledge over to their second language.

One of the accommodations Mrs. Medos makes in her ESL classroom is allowing the children to converse with each other during both the group and individual assessments in order to help the struggling children understand the task at hand. Since her curriculum suggests that she does not teach the children in their native language, she simply allows the children to assist each other in their first language, during certain assessment situations. This is following the advice of Goldenberg. He explained how children often times struggle with their grades because they cannot understand the task, or they cannot communicate well enough to fulfill the requirements. “Imagine you don’t speak English very well. Your job is to learn what everyone else is learning, plus learn English”. I feel that Mrs. Medos is showing sensitivity to those issues, and is being very considerate when planning and executing her assessment practices.

That’s all for this week, check back again soon :-)