Category: 680Final

Having already gone through my year of student teaching, I have come out with a different lens on how to approach my students, my school, and my community. I recognize that being culturally responsive is not just about lesson differentiation, but is at the core of every student. There was a quote from a video we watched in class that I believe represents culture well. Someone put culture as “the filter through which people see the world.”   Being a culturally responsive teacher is not just making the educational components of lessons fit all students. It is making the institution fit all students, how you approach them fit all students, and many other things we a citizens need to recognize in being culturally responsive. It is a lifestyle, not just teaching “differentiation.”

Privilege: Recognizing our Euro-centric system as well as the hierarchical system of class, race, sex, and culture is vital to understanding our students. We need to meet students at their comfort zone, which means we need to come out of ours, in order for them to apply their knowledge, connect to their peers, and learn to the best of their abilities.

Uncomfortable: We should never be comfortable as teachers and always push for equity. This means being an active teacher outside of our classrooms and in the community. The minute we are comfortable, more students feel discomfort. Also, each year we have a different pool of students, indicating different cultures and we must always be adapting as a teacher.

Institutional Racism: This word coexists with “uncomfortable” because it is part of the reason we should be uncomfortable. We are active teachers who help break down institutional racism by educating our kids. I think it is really important to work at a school who has the same ideals as myself-works to be active in breaking down these walls of racism and is in the best interest to those students in the school.

How does understanding culture and power impact your teaching?

It will impact my teaching more strongly than anything. We are about to join a deeply unjust, unequal system, where wealthy students have access to every advantage and marginalized students face innumerable obstacles. Everything a teacher says comes from a position of power and thus carries enormous weight. To paraphrase Ernestine Hayes, the decisions we make will either combat this injustice or perpetuate it. If we find ourselves making choices in our classrooms that further advantage the advantaged and further set back the disadvantaged, then we need to be able to realize that we are doing something wrong. It’s our job to ensure each student is given opportunities to be successful in school. If a student seems to be falling behind, then that’s on the teacher.

Pick three terms that resonate with you from the Multicultural Education word wall. Define the terms and discuss why you chose them.

Barriers– Barriers can be obvious, or they can be mostly invisible. Everyone faces them, but some face more than others. Education in this country is structured in a way that sets many students up for failure. In many cases, quality of education and access to resources depends entirely on the neighborhood in which a student lives. Those with money and advantaged home lives have access to resources that most kids don’t. Race, gender, class and sexual orientation each bring their own barriers, and in many cases schools do nothing to address them. I think that it is incredibly important for teachers to be aware of the barriers each student faces in school and to structure their classrooms in ways that tear down these walls rather than bolstering them. To do this, a teacher must be cognizant and informed, which brings me to the next term:

Naiveté– Overcoming this is especially important for teachers like me. I am ignorant. I faced very few barriers growing up, being from a privileged race, class, gender, and orientation. Many teachers like me might go into a classroom completely blind to the obstacles our students face. We might label students “slow,” or “poorly-behaved,” or “distracting,” simply because we’re teaching to the strengths of students whose backgrounds mirror our own. This is dangerous. This is destructive. We as teachers can’t afford to be naive. Our naiveté can harm students and exacerbate the injustice of the system in which we work.

Institutional racism– Most people don’t consider themselves racist, but denying the racism present in every aspect of society can be as harmful as outward racism. I’ve written about class above, but the fact is that class isn’t always the determining factor in a student’s education. Students from similar class backgrounds face different systematic racial barriers. Teachers often have different expectations for students based on skin color, which can either be the result of blatant or subconscious racism. Around the country resources are allotted, school zones are drawn, and instruction is given in a way that perpetuates an imbalance in academic achievement.

I chose these three terms because they are interrelated, but each must be addressed in order to create a fairer multicultural classroom environment.

Describe your plan to teach in a culturally responsive way in the coming year. Include teaching strategies you might employ as well as content/units you will implement.

This is a difficult prompt. I can’t say in honesty that I have a firm strategy in mind going into my student teaching assignment. Frankly, I worry about this all the time. I have serious doubt about my ability to address the above problems and to create a safe, equitable environment for my students.

Unlike many in this class, I will be teaching honors courses in a predominantly wealthy, predominantly white school. I don’t know exactly what my classes will look like, but it is likely that most of my students will carry with them a certain set of systematic advantages. I think it is vital that I don’t ignore the lessons we’ve learned just because of this. This happens all too often in these schools, and students graduate blind to other cultures and to injustice and nothing changes. I will treat this class as I would any other; I will include culturally-relevant material, I will encourage students to think globally and multi-culturally, and I will attempt to create an environment that addresses whichever barriers they might face. These barriers might include the naïveté of privilege, but they will also likely include other barriers or race, class, gender, and identity. I hope that I can start to play my small part in combating injustice. I will try my hardest not to perpetuate it.

(1) At the heart of multicultural learning is the realization/understanding that everyone comes to a learning environment with a different background that has not only shaped all of their past experiences, but that continues to inform their understanding of the world. Background is everything – it creates your context and in a very real way, this subjective experience actually creates its own world.

Most humans default mode is powered under the assumption that their interpretation of events is just the way it is and most people probably don’t even think about their reality as actually BEING a subjective viewpoint.  Teachers however cannot do this and be effective with their minority students. Though it is the dominant culture’s privilege of power to not have to worry about how minority cultures perceive the same events, teachers cannot avail themselves of this privilege.

This blindness and assumption is exactly what happens within the American cultural tapestry, all the time. All of our threads, our subcultures, are interwoven, but many, maybe most of us can’t feel very far beyond our own individual cultural strand. We only become aware of other cultural strands in our grand tapestry when our lives wind around them.  Most times, we just run along the texture of our own thread.

It’s at these moments of interfacing, (which as teachers we will have every day) we must try to see the world as it is through our students eyes. My goal as a teacher is to try and introduce critical thinking and effective communication skills by reaching these students through my own embracing/understanding their own cultural backgrounds.  I will try to find their “nodes” of experience and use those to transmit these general skills and abilities.  To paraphrase the rapper 50 Cent, I’m going to get multicultural or die trying.

(2) Tolerance, Synthesis and Transformation:  this is more than one term, but it is one process.  I think that this is a good intellectual map to use to check up on oneself when interacting with student cultures that are outside of my own; Concrete, Behavioral, Symbolic:  this is kind of the Architecture of Cultural Consciousness and is a very good schematic to think about how deep one is going when interacting with another culture. Ex. Are you “just” having students draw their own totem poles, or are you talking about how those values embedded in the totem pole speak to Tlingit culture?  The symbolic level of understanding will be beyond most cultural outsiders (like myself) but is still a good descriptor to help understand the different levels of cultural depth; Background:  I talked about this above, but background is always key.  If someones background changes their perception about a given situation drastically enough, all of your assumptions about how to teach someone will be in error.

(3)  The techniques that I will use to teach effectively beyond my culture will come down to strategies like I outline in my lesson plan for the ibook.  My passions in life have been Alaska and foreign cultures, particularly in Asia.  Wherever I teach in Alaska I will try and find works of local culture (not always Native Alaskan necessarily, but quite often I’m sure) and compare/contrast those works with complementary cultures from abroad.  I hope that by showing my students how local culture and other further flung, but still somewhat similar cultures, are related/not related, that they will then be able to see the metes and bounds of their own local cultures much more clearly. I believe that we truly only learn about the depths of our own cultures by holding them up to Another Culture/Another World, to paraphrase the title of the book that started this class.

I will be in Sitka in the coming year.  Hopefully I will be able to access Tlingit myths and history (including hopefully have an Elder come in) and compare those to other stories and history in the Pacific Rim.  After all, Sitka fronts the Pacific and faces Asia.  I think it would be fascinating for the students to compare the history of Sitka (especially from European contact on) with Commander Perry’s opening of Japan to trade withe U.S. with “gunboat diplomacy.”  Likewise Britain’s exploitation of China for the tea and opium trade, the incredibly bloody seizing of the Phillipines by the U.S. navy, the betrayal of the Korean emperor/people by the progressive President’s Roosevelt and Taft by giving the green light for the Japanese seizure of Manchuria.  It goes on and on really.  I want to show students that their local stories, their local history and even their art is not isolated, but that’s its part of a greater Pacific international human experience.

1) Having an awareness of culture and power dynamics is essential to creating a healthy, safe environment where students can learn and thrive. Students come to every classroom from a variety of backgrounds. Some of them may walk in the door with the feeling that they can’t learn or having already made a choice to “not-learn” (to use Kohl’s terminology). It in an instructor’s responsibility, to the best of his or her ability, to try to recognize the character of each student and have an awareness of the cultural circumstances from which the student comes. Using this knowledge, the teacher can then attempt to meet the student “in the middle” and sway them to understand that they can learn and that (hopefully) they should desire to.

Often, students will come from backgrounds which cause them to distrust their teacher. For instance, an African-American student may have an ingrained distrust of “white” teachers. Or in another example, a Muslim student may have made the decision not to learn from non-Muslim instructors. It is important to recognize that both of these communities in the US have been the targets of large scale (and often systemic) hatred and discrimination, and so the student’s feelings of mistrust very well may come from a very understandable and reasonable place. The important thing for the teacher is that he or she work to create a feeling of a safe space, a feeling like the student can really trust him/her and really be actually heard and listened to. The student needs to know that his or her viewpoint matters and is important to the teacher, regardless of what that viewpoint is. Friendships absolutely can be formed across racial, socioeconomic, religious, etc. lines, and positive, uplifting teacher-student relationships can too. However, the onus is on the teacher, as the adult and the trained professional, to pro-actively seek the student’s success.

2) The first word I would choose from our word-wall is “fairness.” I think some people think that “fairness” means treating everyone the same or treating everyone equally. However, I do not agree with this definition. Although it is difficult to define, I think treating everyone fairly is treating them justly, and to treat them justly means that the broad picture of their life needs to be taken into account. It is not fair, for instance, to expect the same level of writing from a semi-fluent high school student who immigrated last year from Ukraine as one might from a student who had been born in an English-only household and had 11 years of English classes and constant English-language stimulation in nearly all facets of life. Setting more basic goals for the Ukrianian student is not unfair, it’s realistic. The long-term goal of instruction will be to help the student become an excellent writer and speaker of English, but the short-term goals must be more limited and evaluation not as strict. To do otherwise is, in fact, unfair. It’s not a matter of patronizing the student, and certainly not a matter of having lower long-term expectations. A teacher must also realize that his or her class is only one of many classes that a student will have in the “school of life.”

A second phrase I would choose from the word-wall is “internalized aggression.” Internalized aggression is when a person takes things said about them by others (or about people of their culture, race, religion, etc) and internalizes them. A really good example of this can be found with Alaska Natives who refer to themselves as “dumb Indians.” Clearly, this was something that other people said to them (or their parents, etc) at some point in the past and it kind of stuck. Many were told that because they struggled to learn English in the boarding schools, they were stupid or incapable of learning. For some in Native culture, this has become truly internalized into a form of what might be called self-hatred. It also acts as an excuse for failure or for failure to even try.

I chose this term because I am quite sure that I will encounter the phrase “I’m just a dumb Indian” at some point or other in my teaching career, and I emphatically reject it. I know my fiancee has encountered it in her teaching career.

A third phrase that I would choose is “critical thinking.” Critical thinking is a higher order cognitive skill that involves seeing and being able to express the connections between things. It is much more advanced that the mere memorization of facts.

I chose this phrase because I see it as the goal of education. It must be carefully cultivated, but it is the goal. It is much harder for a teacher to bring about than the mere repetition of facts and data, but it is so much more valuable to the students as individuals and to society, as well.

3) I cannot really fully answer the part of this question that is about content and units. I am not even sure what subjects I will be student teaching in. My fiancee is the social studies teacher at my placement, so I won’t be student teaching under her. But village schools demand a lot from teachers (e.g. my fiancee also teaches math, computer programming, and music), so I expect I will probably be teaching in more than one content area. My best guess is that they’ll use me primarily in English, but in a very real way, I won’t know what they want me to do until I get there.

As for methods or strategies I intend to use, my first strategy is that I intend to learn as much about Yup’ik culture as I can, especially the culture of the village. I also hope to begin to study and work in the Yup’ik language, so that I can address issues and questions with words that might make more sense to students. Also, as I learn some of the different word associations that happen in Yup’ik (vs. American English), I expect that my teaching might become more sensitive and appropriate. Beyond this, I plan on attempting to build lessons based on observations of life or on elements of Yup’ik history and culture. Asking students questions at the beginning of lessons is a good idea, since it will help me try to figure out where they are coming from and also to tailor my lesson to the knowledge base they are bringing to class with them.

How does understanding culture and power impact your teaching? Describe your plans to teach in culturally responsive ways… 

“One of the common reasons to for becoming a teacher is to pursue a power-giving vocation.” (Kohl, I Won’t Learn From You, pg. 76)

When I enter the room as a white, middle-class teacher, able-bodied, straight teacher… I carry with me a lot of privilege. While I cannot give my own privilege away, I can acknowledge it, I can be an ally, and I can work through my own barriers to ensure that every student has a place in my classroom. Like Kohl suggests, a good teacher is one who empowers her students, not one who judges or shames them. I have taken many classes in the past where the topics the topic of oppression and power have been discussed, but many of these past discussions have remained academic and theoretical, not practical. I truly appreciate the many practical tools we learned about to incorporate multi-cultural education into our classroom. I can help students who do not usually talk in class gain confidence, by giving longer wait times, encouraging group discussions, teaching active listening skills, and doing reflections through sharing partners (dyads). I can help students gain common background knowledge by creating word-walls, doing pre-tests to evaluate knowledge, and differentiating instruction. I can help myself be the best teacher possible by continuing to learn about the students I’m teaching and about the cultures within our classrooms, communities and world.

This year, I will have the opportunity to teach in an inter-disciplinary classroom teaching social studies and language arts. In the first semester my host teacher wants to look at the process of elections in the United States. Throughout this course, I have thought about  how I can overcome my own personal challenge of teaching about “democracy” when I feel that so many people are failed by the system. I am really looking forward to creating a multi-cultural lesson on the elections by examining the tough questions of: Who is served by the US government? Who is included? Who is excluded? What does political engagement look like? And not just who has been elected, but who has been politically engaged in issues throughout history?  I have thought a lot about how I always learned about white men in my social studies classes and how today, of course we have seen positive shifts to more inclusive representation in government, there are still many gaps that exist. I want to look not just at the history of the United States and how democracy functions as a whole, but look within our own state too. For instance: How do tribal organization come to decisions? What is the political purpose of large gatherings like Alaska Federation of Natives Convention? What impact do decisions made by the federal government have on our own state? I also want to teach students how they can be active participants in democracy in order to create change within their own communities. I am excited to take everything I have learned from this course to teach more dynamic, engaging and culturally relevant lessons for my students.

Word Wall:  There are a couple of words that I think we missed on our word wall, but all the words in bold are ones we worked to define together in class.

Equity didn’t make it onto our word wall, but I think it should have. Whenever I think of equity, I think of this image. Creating an equitable classroom does not mean that we give the same instruction to each students… instead it means we differentiate our instruction to meet the needs of ALL our students. It means that each student should be given the tools and instruction they need to be successful. It means we compare our students less to one another, and challenge them individually instead. When we are teaching, we should present information differently for students with different learning styles, for students from different cultures, or for students with different sets of background knowledge.

Transformation: Herbert Kohl wrote “teachers are transformers, that can help people transform their lives in decent ways and in that manner contribute to the transformation of society.” (I Won’t Learn From You, pg. 76) I really liked that we focused so much on the positive ways in which we can influence our students. We examined tough topics like inter-generational trauma, institutional racism, gaps and disparities… but at the end of each discussion I was always able to come back to hope. To me transformation is the ability to work backwards, to allow our students to shape our schools, to disrupt oppression, to build creative curriculum, and above all, to build positive relationships and learning environments for our students.

Image credit: http://interactioninstitute.org/illustrating-equality-vs-equity/