Saturday, April 18, 2009
Race and/or Ethnicity
I believe as an educator, it is very important to educate yourself about the community that you plan to teach in. By community, I mean the school community and the neighborhood community because it informs you about who you will be working with and educating. If I do not make myself aware of this then it makes it very difficult to address the societal roles and issues that will impact me and my community (school and neighborhood). In many ways my awareness of the background of my students greatly impacts how I plan out my lesson plans because it is important for me to find a way to draw my students into the issues that they are faced with as young people who have layers upon layers of identities. I have found that race and/or ethnicity has been an important aspect of identity. It shapes the student experience in all aspects of his/her life and to ignore it or not address it does not help the student at all. I have also found that it is very difficult to keep biases and xenophobia out of the conversation. So my question is how do we facilitate conversations that address student concerns without turning the classroom into a scary or hostile place?
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I don't know if I can really answer your question, but I think when addressing student concerns, there should be a very open dialogue/discussion occurring among the students. Then, as teachers, we should assure that we won't allow the conversation to get too out of hand. I think we would be able to tell if it started getting heated, and then we could step in and steer the conversation in another direction that still focuses on the student concerns.
ReplyDeleteI also liked how you pointed out the importance of educating yourself about the community we will be teaching in. I plan on basing a lot of my lesson plans on what my students are experiencing, and I can take a lot of that from their community. Otherwise, if we kept the community separate from our curriculum, we might have a harder time reaching out to our students, which will probably make it that much more difficult for them to get anything out of the class.
Just before Spring Break, my seniors were assigned to read *The Bluest Eye*. I only had two classes before break to establish the foundations needed to read such a book with a critical eye. The first conversation we had was simply about their own experiences with race. I asked them, the day before, to start thinking about when they realized what "race" is; their experience with it, etc. When they entered the classroom, we established classroom rules: I explained to them that sometimes talking about race and racism can be difficult and that I've personally been in a lot of group-conversations in which the groups became hostile/angry which often lead to people leaving with more hurt feelings than anything else.
ReplyDeleteI then asked the students to set ground rules for the discussion. They did (which I won't get into here) and it worked quite well. I applauded them after our amazing conversation for being absolutely respectful and, to be honest, more mature and open than any other group I've had such discussions with (i.e. college classes I've taken, activist groups I've been a part, etc).
I think you, as the teacher, need to let your students know that a) this is going to be a difficult conversation, but it's necessary and b) they are in charge of how such a conversation will be conducted (ground rules).
I hope this helps.
I agree that it is extremely important to be educated about the community in which one teaches. I think that UWM is on the right track as far as its urban focus, but I think it could be doing alot more in terms of acheiving this goal. A lot of the people that I have talked to in the education program think that the classes are a bit too repetitive. Some of this repitition in the material can be attributed to trying to "drive the point home", but I think there are better ways. Maybe the education program could get rid of a couple of classes, and require that students fulfill x amount of hours of community service. I think this would go a long way in helping prospective teachers create a positive and productive learning environment.
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