One of the standards for
my teaching program is standard 8.2 – “Growing and Developing Professionally.”
Briefly put, this standard demands that students understand the many things
that can affect education, and that students learn basic tools and necessary
knowledge to put coursework and fieldwork into context during our year-long
internship in a classroom. Standard 8.2 also sets questions for students to
ponder; these cover a range of topics including the history of education in
Washington state, how education gets funded, and several other topics. But a
main focus of our Intro to Teaching course is culturally relevant teaching. According
to the article shown in the screenshot below, culturally relevant teaching is
defined by its creator, Gloria Ladson-Billings, as “a pedagogy that empowers students
intellectually, socially, emotionally, and politically by using cultural
referents to impart knowledge, skills, and attitudes” (Coffey, Fig. 1).
Fig. 1
In
other words, understanding your students and their cultural backgrounds well
enough to emphasize, understand, and use that to help motivate them to success –
both as students and as people. This definition helps me frame my own emerging
competence on culturally informed teaching.
As an educator, I think I
need to be aware of my differences – my culture and my experiences that may
lead to Dynamics of Differences between myself and my students and their families.
My students do not have easy lives. 87% of the school is of minority race, and
a surprising number of them, I have been told, are homeless, and some are
illiterate. I have no idea – can’t even begin to fathom – what it is like to be
homeless and illiterate, on top of the normal stresses of high school. I will
also have immigrant students who do not speak English. Those students have both
culture and language shock, and are in a sink-or-swim environment. I grew up in
a white privileged home. But my best friends didn’t, and I spent a lot of time
at their houses as a kid. They were the children of immigrants from China and
India, and I learned a lot about learning languages, culture shock, and
sink-or-swim situations from their families. Those lessons will be invaluable
now, as I try to understand my students’ social, cultural, emotional, and
political foundations, so that I can positively impact their learning.
In an attempt to reduce
misunderstandings, I think the most important thing I can do is get to know my
students, and let them get to know me – as a teacher, and as a human being. I’ll
have a unique place in my school – I have support from the administration to
start a karate club, assuming the risk management department doesn’t have a
conniption over the idea – so I’ll be both a teacher, and a Sensei. Sensei is
pretty different from teaching in the normal respect – you tend to get to know
your kids on a different, more personal level. It is my deep and sincere hope
that this will help me connect with students, and to better understand where
they come from – this will help me learn how to teach them better.
