Culturally Responsive Teachers - Non Negotiable
If I were to pick out a passage from these two readings that resonated with me, I would likely start with the one that reads as follows: “One likely reason for the paucity of critical material on this large and compelling subject is that, in matters of race, silence and evasion have historically ruled literary discourse.” This passage comes after the author talks about the “ideals” that are typically expressed within classic American literature, a genre that is dominated by white male authors. Specifically, this chapter talks about the omission of African literature and ideals from the common American culture and focus - these perspectives have been silenced and evaded. This, while perhaps common knowledge for those of us who have been extensively studying educational theory for the past six months straight, is important to reiterate as we work towards creating an inclusive and diverse multimodal curriculum for our students moving forward. We must talk about these values and many of the issues regarding race itself and authors that perpetuate these racist tendencies (i.e. Edgar Allan Poe).
This quote from the Villegas article also stands to be favorable, as it reads: “Teachers also benefit from knowing about their students’ experiences outside school with reading, writing, mathematics, science, music, art, and other school subjects. Such insight enables teachers to draw on those experiences to represent school knowledge to their students meaningfully and embed learning activities in contexts that are familiar to them.” This puts into words one of my most important beliefs regarding my teaching philosophy, and that is having a wealth of lived experiences outside of the traditional “teacher” mindset and pedagogy. These will allow me to connect with my students on many deep levels, and these will only bolster the arsenal of vessels through which I can articulate my teaching points.
At this point, I find it hard to determine a point of “contention” within these two articles - diverse subject areas and a culturally diverse selection of authors go hand in hand with culturally relevant pedagogy and create culturally responsive teachers. This point certainly is not arguable, as we NEED more culturally responsive teachers within society. We’ve been taught that teaching cannot be a non-political position, and these readings go hand in hand with that ideal.
Hi, Troy.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing your thoughts on this week's readings. I especially enjoyed your commentary on bringing students' prior knowledge and cultural frameworks into the classroom. It's too easy for us to get wrapped up in our own ideas, especially in graduate school. At the end of the day, what really matters is our students and what they bring to the table. We need to remember that we're not really that smart. Our students know what's best for themselves. We just need to help them bring these goals into reality. I also think that it is important to maintain a diverse variety of authors in our classroom. At the same time, I think our conversations about diverse literature often dip into tokenism. Especially in this program, we spend lots of time talking about bringing diverse voices into the classroom, but we don't pay attention to what those voices actually have to say. We'll read The Hate U Give, but won't spend any real time talking about how it represents casual and violent racism in our society. Simply having these texts in our curricula does not automatically make us culturally relevant teachers. What matters most is what we do with these texts.