This blog will follow three teacher/graduate students on a journey to examine what it means to be an immigrant student in today's classroom and how as teachers, we can do our best for this growing group of students. Our focus text is Immigrant Students and Literacy by Gerald Campano. Our goal is to respond to the text with an eye on our own experiences, other class readings, and our growing understanding of multiple literacies and power, privilege and perspective.
Response to "Culturally Responsive Teaching" by Lauren
"Urban teachers potentially assume professional identities analogous to these fearful outsiders. We carry the freight of our educational training, focus on our objectives, and shut out anything that may threaten our sense of authority or security. Our students are often seen obliquely, as clients for the latest programs."
I think that many teachers witness opportunities for culturally responsive teaching each day in their classrooms. But because of the challenges or fears Campano describes in the quote above, many teachers view themselves as needing to help students of various backgrounds and cultures assimilate rather than distinguish, remember, and celebrate. While recognizing and responding to cultural differences and valuing life experiences of students, Campano hoped “to provide a respite for children to allow them to gain insight into their experience, and to allow opportunities for creating meaning out of potentially numbing contingencies” (p. 60).
Campano suggests that our effectiveness in teaching students depends on the teacher’s ability to learn from his/her students (p. 112). If teachers look at students as customers in their classrooms, rather than active participants creating and shaping the learning environment and curriculum, then teachers miss out on an important and vital part of culturally responsive teaching and the power it can hold.
How can teachers be culturally responsive? This is not an easy question to answer, but here are some ideas:
• Get to know the students beyond the classroom. Arrange a home visit, ask thoughtful questions to both families and students and really, truly listen. • Rather than taking on the power role within the classroom allow students and families to be part of problem solving and inquiry. • Engage in inquiry and “community building” in a non-conventional way; “formed through particular understandings of individual children, their unique experiences and cultural identities” (p. 29). • Consider the second classroom ("second because it is the work of students and teachers that remains, for the most part, invisible, both in terms of funding and recognition..."). Step outside outside the standard school discourse. • Have students write letters to family members to connect past with present and create “intergenerational storytelling” opportunities. • Think of accountability not only in terms of test results and assessments, but also in recognizing students’ experiences and identities and creating space to share and explore literacy practices through these viewpoints. • Create neighborhood maps in which students document important parts of their neighborhood. Compare/contrast this map with a “heart” or “target” map that showcases what’s most important to students on the inside and works outward to show things that are part of the students life and how they value each.
These are just ideas, but hopefully they can start to help any teacher reflect on their current ways of teaching and viewing students, especially immigrant and migrant children. The goal and end-result will be varied depending on students and their life experiences.
"...the children adapted, drawing from transcultural resources--with love, with care--to restore history, language, and culture, reassembled fragments..."
I asked teachers in my school about ways they stay informed in the field of education. Here are some suggestions they had:
ReplyDeleteMagazines/Journals:
-Education Week print subscription
-Educational Leadership
-Kappan
-Independent School Journal magazines.
-National Council of Teachers of English
-American Educational Research
-International Reading Association
-National Science Teacher Association
Watch TED talks.
Twitter:
-Diane Ravitch
-Alfie Cohn
-Janet Avery
-National Writing Project
-#edchat
-#elemchat
Suggestion for twitter: using Hoot Suite to categorize twitter feed.
Hope you find this helpful!
Zoë
Response to "Culturally Responsive Teaching" by Lauren
ReplyDelete"Urban teachers potentially assume professional identities analogous to these fearful outsiders. We carry the freight of our educational training, focus on our objectives, and shut out anything that may threaten our sense of authority or security. Our students are often seen obliquely, as clients for the latest programs."
I think that many teachers witness opportunities for culturally responsive teaching each day in their classrooms. But because of the challenges or fears Campano describes in the quote above, many teachers view themselves as needing to help students of various backgrounds and cultures assimilate rather than distinguish, remember, and celebrate. While recognizing and responding to cultural differences and valuing life experiences of students, Campano hoped “to provide a respite for children to allow them to gain insight into their experience, and to allow opportunities for creating meaning out of potentially numbing contingencies” (p. 60).
Campano suggests that our effectiveness in teaching students depends on the teacher’s ability to learn from his/her students (p. 112). If teachers look at students as customers in their classrooms, rather than active participants creating and shaping the learning environment and curriculum, then teachers miss out on an important and vital part of culturally responsive teaching and the power it can hold.
How can teachers be culturally responsive? This is not an easy question to answer, but here are some ideas:
• Get to know the students beyond the classroom. Arrange a home visit, ask thoughtful questions to both families and students and really, truly listen.
• Rather than taking on the power role within the classroom allow students and families to be part of problem solving and inquiry.
• Engage in inquiry and “community building” in a non-conventional way; “formed through particular understandings of individual children, their unique experiences and cultural identities” (p. 29).
• Consider the second classroom ("second because it is the work of students and teachers that remains, for the most part, invisible, both in terms of funding and recognition..."). Step outside outside the standard school discourse.
• Have students write letters to family members to connect past with present and create “intergenerational storytelling” opportunities.
• Think of accountability not only in terms of test results and assessments, but also in recognizing students’ experiences and identities and creating space to share and explore literacy practices through these viewpoints.
• Create neighborhood maps in which students document important parts of their neighborhood. Compare/contrast this map with a “heart” or “target” map that showcases what’s most important to students on the inside and works outward to show things that are part of the students life and how they value each.
These are just ideas, but hopefully they can start to help any teacher reflect on their current ways of teaching and viewing students, especially immigrant and migrant children. The goal and end-result will be varied depending on students and their life experiences.
"...the children adapted, drawing from transcultural resources--with love, with care--to restore history, language, and culture, reassembled fragments..."