How does understanding culture and power impact your teaching?
Understanding theses concepts will impact my teaching by helping me to realize that students come into the classroom with different background knowledge. So the connections between content and everyday life will be different from student to student.
The three terms from the word wall that resonated with me were, empathy, patience, and respect. These words resonated with me because I believe they are some of the most important traits a teacher can have.
I plan on teaching in a culturally responsive way by, Connecting what I teach to the town and area in which I am teaching, and asking the students how the things I’m teaching affect them.
I have learned a lot in the course about the real but invisible ways racism word in our society. The classroom is, in many ways, a microcosm of our culture that can unfortunately maintain racism by creating individual gaps, community gaps, and academic gaps. Through this course I have been able to view how racism works through many perspectives beyond my own. As Enid Lee wrote in Beyond Heros and Holidays, most white people are unaware of how racism works and is maintained in our society; I agree with that statement. Listening and discussing issues and experiences in class made me aware of how real racism is. It will be an awareness that I will now have when I enter the classroom. It will be something more real to me now that I have taken this course. I will not be “colorblind,” but I will work more intentionally in the future to close the “gaps” by being culturally responsive and aware.
As students move through the educational system a number of gaps are created between minority students and white students. The community gap is the broad gap in achievement and socioeconomic status between different cultures caused by the academic gaps and individual gaps that develop in many school setting. I chose this word, because it is a very powerful and present problem, but it is something I believe we, as teachers, have the power to change.
Critical Thinking makes knowledge relevant to the student, scaffolding questions so that the students find conclusions independently. When students think critically they go beyond “yes” and “no” questions and seek the “why”inside; subjects are explored and students discover connections between the material and themselves. As a music teacher, I want my students to be critical thinkers so that their playing reflects themselves; without critical thinking music is mechanical, not musical.
Determination is vowing to obtain a goal and doing whatever is necessary to finish. I picked this word for myself; I am determined to close the community gap, to take my class outside of the classroom, and to push all my students to think critically.
3. As a culturally responsive teacher, I want to make sure that there are no barriers that keep certain students from performing by communicating directly with parents when possible and being available for students and parents when needed. I know that being a culturally responsive teacher requires me to be a teacher beyond school hours and away from the school building. I want to use place based learning strategies by taking my students into the community, not just to perform but to learn about their community and the cultures within their community; I would like to touch some of the cultural music traditions throughout the state. I would like my students to become critical thinkers so they can find their own way to make music reflect their own cultures.
Even though I have really enjoyed these past three weeks, I feel like we really need to spend more time to learn about multicultural education in Alaska. I appreciated Angie when she mentioned that this class isn’t over after three weeks. We will have to spend some time reading and learning in order to become effective teachers. Each student is raised in a different home, and teachers need to do what it takes to make them feel welcome no matter where they come from. As Lisa Delpit noted in her book, teachers need to educate students by finding positive ways to connect to their own culture. Delpit also said that if an individual is struggling in school, appropriate instruction in school could resolve the problem. But the answer is not a “quick fix” solution. It will take a continual effort. We will have to learn who the children are, their cultures, and their interests. We will have to make our classroom like a family. We will have to make the students feel valued if they excel or made effort in doing so. It might even take building lifelong relationships in order to make a difference in their lives. The students in our classroom might never get the acknowledgement they receive in our classrooms. We will have to treat the school year as if it’s going to be the only year with our current students.
When it comes to teaching strategies, teachers need to provide a safe place for each student. Students need to be given the opportunity to learn from one another just like we learned about each other in our class here. Just like we were focused on our own personal lives, teachers need to skillfully find ways to fit the curriculum into the students’ backgrounds. It is critical to be sensitive to an individual’s background too.
Meritocracy, Eurocentric, Deconstruction
I chose the words meritocracy, Eurocentric, and deconstruction. These words resonate my experience in the village school system. My teachers cared about their students, and they thought they did what was best for each student. Since the day I entered school, much of our class time was Eurocentric as classes like social studies and geography classes often focused on how the United States became the country. We learned a lot about England and why the United States became a separate country. We also learned a lot about the Native American cultures down in the lower 48, but there was no time invested on what happened to the Natives over the past few centuries. I also had to learn about the history of my hometown through my parents and grandparents. I used the word deconstruction on here as well since there was hardly any time invested on our Yup’ik culture in school. Fortunately, I had grandparents and elders who taught me outside of school. I also used the word meritocracy because we were all promised that if we work hard to become what we want, we would get it. It’s a great way to motivate students, but it can also be a great discourager to those who aren’t getting the best grades in school. Knowing my classmates, they all had the ability to graduate in school, but they didn’t have the best environment in their homes, which would cause them to not do well in school. As a result, most dropped out before graduating.
Honestly, I don’t have any specific plans on how I am going to teach in a cultural responsive way. My main goal is to make each student feel valued. I will apply what I have learned here into the classroom. Students’ cultural background is important, and I feel obligated to do what it takes to teach students about the roots of their culture. I have come to learn that group projects are an excellent way to go deep. If we are using the culturally responsive curriculum standards in class, I might have to back off the lecture and basically allow the students to learn from each other through projects. But I’d need to clarify the purpose of the project so the students can see the purpose of the project. If an individual is struggling to fit in to the group, I believe there are ways to get him/her involved. When the students are in the middle of the project, I can meet with the individual personally if that’s what he/she prefers. If some things aren’t working in class, I can possibly talk with a few coworkers or classmates and discuss the classroom environment.
680 has been a deep and interesting experience. Looking back on the three weeks, there have been many valuable lessons on the interplay of culture and power in relation to teaching. I think perhaps the most revealing was the final day of class when we group edited sections of the Alaska iBook we had written. It was a chance for us to work as a team to analyze, discuss, and question the way things were worded and presented in the section of the book our peers had written. There were some great conversations about how a word, even when used correctly can be re-read to shift the narrative of written text. Because of their context these words easily twist the intended meaning.
In my group, I felt there was a concerted effort to be positive about these readings. We had no desire to meticulously pick apart the writings for every misinterpretation possible. Rather, we collaborated to arrive at a clear, effective, and fair text. It was really awesome to come together with the group that had written the section, and discuss our findings. I felt we had a good synergy passing on our edits. We got to discuss how language, page design, tense, and nouns shifted the narrative. It was revealing, and caused some moans and laughs (both powered by stress!), but it led to a more robust body of literature.
Receiving our edits was a powerful experience – it was a place of vulnerability. I was not afraid, but more of disappointed that I had missed things that could be so easily misconstrued or non-representative of the whole truth. Our editors showed so much courage in helping us find a way to balance our writing.
Over that hour we came together and made the space for a better text to exist. This is something I’m grateful for, because our group had reached a wall where we couldn’t find the way to balance our writing and present something we were really proud to have written. It was a sinking frustration that pushed us to produce a new section of the book which gave the writing a far more dour tone that we had ever desired. In our desire to correct the balance in the narrative, we had dug a deeper hole.
This was important. Really important. It helped me realize through my own writing and the writing of my peers how we perceive, present, and understand culture with words. Written language is one of the easiest and most common ways to share and consume information – but the value of the words used can dramatically change the meaning when read by other eyes. Those words are able to establish control and power, or they are able to support all voices fairly. It cannot be both at once. We had to learn how to shift our writing to the latter. I am still amazed that what I had written was misleading of the living dynamic culture I had studied, because it had come from predominantly Alaska Native sources and documents. My writing had accidentally treated them as past, disappearing, and fragmented when they are a resilient, proud, and growing culture.
I believe this is what I’m taking away from 680 and 600 – a different lens. There is so much that can be done to shift the way we talk about cultures. We can approach every subject taught in schools with critical thinking and creative engagement of our minds, and the sense of ownership we achieve is much greater for that dedication. It is not the easiest path, but it is the most beautiful. We have to draw the bias and power out of the materials we teach, and discuss those ideas. Otherwise, true change will never happen.
Words from the Word Wall
People connect in the deepest ways when they tell stories. I experienced the joy of stories in the classroom when I taught at a youth orchestra in Edmonton, AB, one year ago. We had a rough start in my class – some of the students were misbehaving regularly, and some of the students were ostracized for being different. It was a diverse classroom – every student had roots from a different ethnicity.
I made sure that every day we had circle time. We started our day together, everyone equal. One of our rules was everyone got their chance to speak, and everyone got their chance to share. It wasn’t always easy, but it helped so much. The students got the chance to develop their own rules, speak about their feelings, and work through things together. For young students just learning how to express themselves, this environment was important. They learned so much about telling their story and getting the chance to have their input! It really built our team.
I also learned through collaborative work with Katie Kroko the value of collecting stories to gain a deep understanding of culture. We visited Nebraska two summers in a row – 2014, and 2015 – for an artistic residency. We spent almost three months there between the two residencies. We arrived at our first residency fearful that Nebraska would be strange, unfamiliar, and uninviting. Our presumptions were wrong. We were openly embraced by the local communities and swiftly developed valuable friendships. We were asking people to express themselves in their own words – some people warmed up to this idea, and others didn’t. When our interviewees did, we often got moving raw emotion. Those are some of the most amazing musical experiences shared with anyone. I feel we often neglect the musical nature of speech and story, and we focus too much on the Western Classical ideals of harmony and rhythm. Tell your story. Its a beautiful one.
Dynamic, not Static
Moving, flowing, changing…
When we let ourselves, we can achieve a different way of acting and thinking. This is true in creative practice, but also in the classroom. When everything is a series of yes or no questions and menial tasks, it is hard to really express yourself or think deeply. By offering students group, pair, and discussion activities we can generate opportunities to promote critical thinking and excite discussion. I feel this connects to the idea of stories – stories are interesting because everyone has their own way of telling a story.
I remember when Joe sat down with us after our visit to the Culture Camp and told us his version of a story about Porcupines, and how a hunter learned their stomachs contained healing properties. Surely it wasn’t the voice of an elder telling the story, but there was still a dynamic magic. His story engaged us visually and aurally, for a few minutes time was suspended and we were all able to enter deep thought. So, too, was the reading of “Secret of the Dance” such an un-static state. It drew us visually, aurally, and mentally into thinking. We were predicting, remembering, and active in the now.
We cannot expect to keep trying the same thing over and over again and get different results. That’s commonly attributed to madness. If a student fails, we don’t push them harder down the same road. We step back, and ask ourselves “What does this student need?” or “What can I change about my lessons, my classroom, my approach?” – always hoping that there’s a way. When we make walls and barriers, students are sure to fail. To be static, unchanging, and unwilling to connect is to structure a classroom and a social norm that breaks humans.
I want to provide a variety of ways to learn in my classroom – I love moving, singing, reading, listening, and making art to engage my students.
Place
Connecting knowledge to the world around us.
I have found the idea of Place Based Education to be one of my favorite ideas from this course. I already felt a strong connection to dynamic learning methods it brings into the classroom. Yet, the idea of educating about a place is new to me. Too often have I taken courses or taught with an educational lens focused so far way from the world around me that I can’t even conceive of what I am not learning. When Scott Christian had us write down facts about our ‘home’ a few weeks ago, I was flabbergasted as I realized I knew nothing about the place I grew up – a place I called home for 20 years – a place I still have a hard time not calling home. How can public education miss something so important?
Place obviously has value – the places I have connected with and learned about through field recording, interviews, and researching on-line are the ones I remember best. I feel like those places are a part of my identity and my intelligence. The places I didn’t bond with through learning and discovery don’t hold that same weight or importance.
I desire to bring this idea into the classroom – connecting students to the community. I feel it solves a challenge I have wondered about with multicultural education. How do you connect with a truly multicultural classroom? One or two cultures in the classroom is hard enough, but what about an area where every student has a different background? It would be impossible to know enough about each student to bring their own heritage into the classroom. Yet, I feel placed based education provides a way. By connecting students to their community, you can help nourish connections where the class develops its own ideas about the place they live, and also interact with the people and stories from that community. It is something to explore – I love Scott’s idea about interviewing community members, and I feel there are other great projects that can connect students to the place they live.
Looking Forward
I really want to find ways to engage my music classrooms with culture. I’d be glad to invite Elder’s to teach songs or visit to share stories. I also really love the idea of using picture books. I love reading, and I love making character voices, so its perfect for the upcoming work I’ll do in primary classrooms. I’m itching to do some place-baced learning, and as many of you know I’d love to do a listening log, recording project, or something of the likes. We often forget our ears for our eyes and words. All power to the cochlea!
Thanks Angie and Peter for awesome classes. I wish they were continuing next week.
“Pulling oneself up by their boot straps”, has a whole new meaning to me now, as well as, “Meritocracy”.
Andrew Stanton, a storyteller and film director for PIXAR, once said in a Ted Talk, “there isn’t anyone you couldn’t learn to love after hearing their story”. That is something that has stuck with me for a while now. It was brought up again in our class in discussion, and David spoke to us of it as well. “Love your students,” David said, and I think he is right. We have to rise above our own biases and learn the stories of all our students. They are not blank slates. They come to us full of knowledge, and it is our job, our responsibility to tap into their reserves and help guide them on a path of learning that will transcend school and navigate them throughout their lives.
I grew up believing there were boot straps and an equal meritocracy for those who worked hard. I see now how wrong that is. While for some it might be true, it is more often than not the case. Someone’s culture can greatly determine their access to those powers.
Recognizing and respecting that everyone has a story will be the way I implement CRT within my classroom and life. This course touched the tip of the iceberg, but my learning will have to be continuous and my reflections will have to continue in order to be the most effective and responsive teacher I can be.
1)My understanding of culture and power have undoubtedly changed over the course of the past three weeks. I am undergoing an awakening of sorts, an awakening to some previously unnoticed deficiencies and/or outright injustices in how the ‘rules of the game’ impact people from cultures that are not aligned with those of the mainstream. I have also become aware of my own misconceptions, and prejudices that have been instilled in me. I acknowledge my responsibility to actively remedy these and to insist that others do the same. I understand that we are products of our environment, the sum of our experiences and the experiences of those which influence us. This is in total is culture. I have always known that words used by great speakers could be powerful, but I was not aware of the profound power of simple words from seemingly less influential people. I will need to be diligent, cautious, and caring in how I use my words with others as the can significant downstream effects.
2)Initially seven words came to mind and I’m not sure they were all on the wall but they were spoken several times over the course of the last few weeks. My list: Hope, Power, Advocate, Be’Ing, Appreciate, Love, Determination. Picking three:
Hope: To want something to happen or be true and think that it could happen or be true (Merriam-Webster) simple definition.
I believe change is needed and I believe it is possible.
Determination: A quality that makes you continue trying to do or achieve something that is difficult (Merriam-Webster)
I’m going to need this to help bring about that positive change to occur.
Be’Ing: The most important or basic part of a person’s mind or self. (Merriam-Webster) The act of being present in mind and spirit. (as I interpret it)
Will need to be present to help prepare children to make a better world.
3) I plan to do my best to include culturally relevant materials whenever possible. I can see the connections between the disciplines of earth science and the knowledge need to function outside of the classroom in the natural world. I will continue to actively educate myself so that I am better able to assist in other’s education. The strategies I will employ will include hands on activities using common and or familiar materials to better illustrate the objectives of the lessons at hand. Lessons I could put forth to meet cultural and state science standards would include discussions related to natural phenomena like volcanoes, glaciers, earthquakes, rock and mineral formation/ identification, streams/ groundwater, erosion, weather, seasons, evolution of life, ecosystems, fish, birds, mammals, and the list continues. We can tackle whatever time and tide allow.
Micheal Oleksa hit the nail on the head with his quote defining how culture is more of a view than a thing. Culture is the “the way we see our world” but our own culture is invisible to us in so many ways. He states, “Like a car’s headlight, our cultural view does not shine back on itself, but illuminates what is in front of it. He goes on to say looking at our own culture becomes possible only when we leave it.
I have always thought traveling is perhaps the best education anyone can have. I have been blessed to have had the opportunity to travel to Europe, Africa, Mexico, Cuba and live in many different places across throughout the US. It was the only way, I thought, that one could actually see the biases, bigotry, falsehoods and genius of one’s own culture. This class didn’t just shed light on back on to my own culture but was more like shinning my headlights into a mirror. This class reinforced and added to my understanding of Indigenous cultures of Alaska.
As far as how an understanding of culture and power will impact my teaching I realize, as I did before, that some cultures hold power and influence over others. I want students to know, as David puts it, they are all noble, precious, unique and intelligent. I will do what I can to build them up starting from their strengths, and to create a safe place to learn. Place-based learning is another key to building a culturally responsive plan.
Privilege: One culture’s opportunity in regards to another’s. As soon as people understand that we can start to find ways to break down the barriers to opportunities. Boot straps: How many times have I heard so many white people say, “I made my way through hard work and effort; they should be able to do it too.” when talking about other minorities. This illustrates the “invisibility” domineering cultures have on others. The problem doesn’t lie in hard work or effort but accessibility of opportunity and education. Transformation: In order to fully understand multi-cultural education one needs to transform their self to think critically about the things that shaped their cultural views and to be an advocate for social change.
Some of the techniques I will use to teach in a culturally responsive way are: being involved with the community, bringing in community members and elders to speak, lifting students up by their strengths, place-based learning, creating safe spaces with in-class discussions regarding that and letting everyone in class they are noble, intelligent “be-ings”.
