After reading the article I was again posed with the question of cultural diversity. How important is it for a teacher to be comfortable with this type of setting? Does the cultural background of a teacher influence the way they teach? In class we had discussions involving stereotypes and whether or not they are bad: some students said they were good while others countered the argument. While both sides had valid ideas it was evident that stereotypes do affect us to a certain degree.
This raises the question of whether or not stereotypes affect a teacher and to what extent; and by the same token, does a teacher attain these stereotypes due to interactions with different people, or better yet, from their own background? The article mentions on page 86 that “this involves acknowledging cultural biases and changing perceptions about diversity and teaching students who are culturally and linguistically different from the vast majority of teacher education candidates.” What this tells us is that contrary to what people like to do, which is go in with a “clean slate” per se, this is not the case. The article brings to point that people do hold biases and, especially from a teacher’s perspective, they must be removed to efficiently teach our students. If this is not resolved then we may, consciously or subconsciously, lower the standards for a student.
The article also mentions that many teachers are not necessarily comfortable with teaching students different than themselves, a theme all too common with many programs. The article says “she asserted that schools of education should offer teachers and prospective teacher’s courses and other experiences that focus on questions of equity and diversity that will challenge deficit notions about the capabilities of students of diverse backgrounds.” As many of you can clearly tell I am a proponent for bilingual inclusion and a multicultural classroom and have proclaimed this stance in many of my posts. Again I have to wave the hand of insecurities when it comes to our current curricula in the school of Ed with regards to diversity. To think we have had to go through so many classes that many people, myself included, considered a waste and now, after 3 years, we are offered classes on multiculturalism, it just blows me away. How relevant were the observations that we initially had to do? Would it not have been a better decision to observe say 2-3 classes but integrate multicultural facets of learning instead of just watching teachers teach; this way, at least, many people would be a little more comfortable to teach diverse students.
The article says that we should prepare teachers not for the monoculture, mythical, culturally homogeneous aggregation of students, but for real multicultural, heterogeneous classrooms. This is probably the best statement I have heard in an incredibly long time. In my current placement, contrary to this notion, it is almost the first of the two. I personally find it bland and uninteresting as each student is almost a copy of the other. Some teachers would love a setting such as this, but me, I prefer the diversity I have encountered in previous years. As teachers we need to be fully capable of teaching both scenarios, which means more training in multicultural settings as well as homogenous settings.
After completion of the article, again as with the other ones on multicultural diversity, I felt relieved to see other people with the same views. As I previously have said in my posts, we need to be prepared for everything aspect of teacher. Although this is a big goal it can be attained. The more we learn now the less we have to regret in the future, this is why myself and a few others have been loading up on multicultural classes this year, again considering we only had it offered at the end of our journey, sad but true.
Monday, November 17, 2008
Monday, November 3, 2008
Language has nothing to do with it
After completion of this article I was somewhat pleased with the content in the article but at the same time I had some bitterness in me. I was pleased because the article provided an actual outline of how a science lesson occurred in an English Language room. However, I was displeased because the article helps to show how much emphasis is actually placed on language. Before reading the rest of this response please bear in mind that this will sound more like an argument for pro-bilingual classrooms rather than a typical response…and let me just emphasize that just because someone cannot express themselves verablly does not mean they are incompetent!
“As the student population in the US schools becomes increasingly culturally and linguistically diverse, the body of knowledge and skills required to be an effective teacher is changing.” These were the opening lines of the article that immediately stuck a chord with me. In one of our previous classes we had a discussion about our preparation for an ELL classroom. The common consensus appeared to be that we were displeased with our current abilities to teach ELL students. This line helps to show that this is not something we can avoid. As a future teacher of California it is required that teachers be certified to teach ELL students, this means that you HAVE to be accredited to teach ELL students, less you don’t want a job. California recently instilled this regulation and I am sure other states will soon implement the same, if not a similar one.
The second quote that caught my eye was that “scientists do not simply organize things… they are also concerned with processes.” This hits home with the science ideology. We are always told to make sure that our data is correct and to do this it requires experiment, after experiment, after experiment. I am sure everyone has some memory of a science class, some good and some bad. How many of us can actually say we remember learning the process skills? It is there in writing but do we know that we were learning them? Granted they may have been called other things (such as hypothesis, observation, procedure, conclusion…) but I am sure some of you, myself included, just wanted the lab to end because we felt we were not learning anything, just replicating an experiment. We do tend to organize things, but we tend to overlook the steps involved in the organization (one such being taxonomy). We can all classify something, but rarely are we metacognitive about the academics involved in the actual classification.
A third quote that grabbed my attention was “teachers may interpret EL student’s lack of familiarity with the linguistic properties of scientific “reasoning.” I feel so much emphasis is always placed on scientific language that sometimes we may lose sight of our students learning. I am someone in the science field, but at the same time I am someone in the bilingual field. With each bilingual class I take I gain a greater and greater understanding of what it means to teach a bilingual student. We always hear that science is a language of its own, and if this is the case then ELL students are not only learning 1 language, but multiple languages concurrently (which is usually the case anyways). I firmly believe less emphasis should be placed on the students ability to explain in English what they know, rather more emphasis should be placed on showing what they know. Granted this setting was in an EL science room but I can see many teachers performing subtractive bilingualism in their classroom environment in order to circumvent certain teaching strategies.
What I am getting at is this: it is inevitable that we will be seeing some from of an ELL student in our classroom. We need to be prepared to teach them and adapt to them, not try to assimilate them. I mentioned earlier that some teachers teach on the premise of subtractive bilingualism. This should not be the case! We should be showing support to additive bilingualism and help our students and ourselves. We can introduce them to the language of science while retaining their native language! It is a proven fact that a student whose knowledge and linguistics are developed in their first language will have a much easier time to cross over those fundamentals into another language, hence ADDITIVE BILINGUALISM!
“As the student population in the US schools becomes increasingly culturally and linguistically diverse, the body of knowledge and skills required to be an effective teacher is changing.” These were the opening lines of the article that immediately stuck a chord with me. In one of our previous classes we had a discussion about our preparation for an ELL classroom. The common consensus appeared to be that we were displeased with our current abilities to teach ELL students. This line helps to show that this is not something we can avoid. As a future teacher of California it is required that teachers be certified to teach ELL students, this means that you HAVE to be accredited to teach ELL students, less you don’t want a job. California recently instilled this regulation and I am sure other states will soon implement the same, if not a similar one.
The second quote that caught my eye was that “scientists do not simply organize things… they are also concerned with processes.” This hits home with the science ideology. We are always told to make sure that our data is correct and to do this it requires experiment, after experiment, after experiment. I am sure everyone has some memory of a science class, some good and some bad. How many of us can actually say we remember learning the process skills? It is there in writing but do we know that we were learning them? Granted they may have been called other things (such as hypothesis, observation, procedure, conclusion…) but I am sure some of you, myself included, just wanted the lab to end because we felt we were not learning anything, just replicating an experiment. We do tend to organize things, but we tend to overlook the steps involved in the organization (one such being taxonomy). We can all classify something, but rarely are we metacognitive about the academics involved in the actual classification.
A third quote that grabbed my attention was “teachers may interpret EL student’s lack of familiarity with the linguistic properties of scientific “reasoning.” I feel so much emphasis is always placed on scientific language that sometimes we may lose sight of our students learning. I am someone in the science field, but at the same time I am someone in the bilingual field. With each bilingual class I take I gain a greater and greater understanding of what it means to teach a bilingual student. We always hear that science is a language of its own, and if this is the case then ELL students are not only learning 1 language, but multiple languages concurrently (which is usually the case anyways). I firmly believe less emphasis should be placed on the students ability to explain in English what they know, rather more emphasis should be placed on showing what they know. Granted this setting was in an EL science room but I can see many teachers performing subtractive bilingualism in their classroom environment in order to circumvent certain teaching strategies.
What I am getting at is this: it is inevitable that we will be seeing some from of an ELL student in our classroom. We need to be prepared to teach them and adapt to them, not try to assimilate them. I mentioned earlier that some teachers teach on the premise of subtractive bilingualism. This should not be the case! We should be showing support to additive bilingualism and help our students and ourselves. We can introduce them to the language of science while retaining their native language! It is a proven fact that a student whose knowledge and linguistics are developed in their first language will have a much easier time to cross over those fundamentals into another language, hence ADDITIVE BILINGUALISM!
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