The American Future

In The Disuniting of America: Reflections on a Multicultural Society, Schlesinger writes "The new gospel condemns Crevecoeur’s vision of individuals of all nations melted into a new race in favor of an opposite vision: a nation of groups, differentiated in their ancestries, inviolable in their diverse identities. The contemporary ideal is shifting from assimilation to ethnicity, from integration to separatism. The ethnic upsurge has had some healthy consequences. The republic has at last begun to give long-overdue recognition to the role and achievements of groups subordinated and ignored during the high noon of male Anglo-Saxon dominance - women, Americans of the South and East European ancestry, black Americans, Indians, Hispanics, Asians. There is far better understanding today of the indispensable contributions minorities have made to American civilization." (pg. 77-78)

As I was reading this selection out of Multicultural Education, I was thinking about my own curriculum. I will always look at anything in education through the eyes of a social studies teacher; specifically a United States History and Human Geography teacher. If you look through the lenses that I see education through I have mixed feelings about this passage. Do I believe that there have been “healthy consequences” or the “ethnic upsurge?” (p. 78) Yes. The new Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS) set out by the state in 2010 have included the role and achievements of my minority groups. Specifically in the 8^th grade United States History course there was the inclusion of more African American, Hispanic and references (the addition of Crispus Attucks, first person to die in the American Revolution is a perfect example). However, with the addition of many of these new people and ethnic identities it has been at the expense of traditional American History people and events. Is this the right thing to do? Therein lies the debate. Do I think that people like James Madison, John Adams, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson’s contributions are far greater to our country than those of other women because I am white? Or because that is what my education taught me? And if so, is this something that I try and change about my own teaching as I teach these ideas to my students? In World Geography, it is easier to open up my students ideas to the contributions of other ethnic groups because that is what the class is all about. But still, I must be careful about how my own education influences the way I teach.

Later, Schlesinger goes on to say, “what students learn in schools vitally affects other arenas of American life – the way we see and treat other Americans, the way we conceive the purpose of the republic. The debate about the curriculum is a debate about what it means to be an American. What is ultimately at stake is the shape of the American future.” (pg. 78)

This increases the importance of WHAT I teach and HOW I teach it. I only see my students for 180 days a year. But what, Schlesinger says that what I teach can impact the future of America. That is a huge responsibility. One that I will consider when I begin to choose which ones of the TEKS I include and which ones I leave out.

References

Schlesinger, A. M.  (1992). The disuniting of America: Reflections on a multicultural society.  In J. Noel    (Ed.), Multicultural Education (77-80).  New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

A Single Story

As I watched Chimamanda Adichie talk about her “single story” on the video last week it really struck me. This is something I see in my classroom everyday. My students often times have a “single story” about a place, about a conflict or issue. This becomes most apparent when I begin asking them about different regions of the world as a pre-test just to get an idea of what they know. I can ask them about a specific region and they can only tell me what they have seen on TV. And last week, as I was watching this video, it struck me that if I don’t teach them another story, they will never know anything different. And that’s more harmful than teaching them nothing at all, and that is when I began to understand that perhaps more important than teaching my students the prescribed TEKS, my job is to teach them another story about every region of the world.

So, the next day, in my classroom, I showed my students another story, about a country in SW Asia (the unit I am teaching now.) It was a short video about the small country of Qatar, located on the Persian Gulf; it talks about how this country is using the oil money to develop their country. The government is paying for better health care, better education and better infrastructure. They have changed their dictatorship to a democracy. However, most important to me, they are empowering women to be educated and have a say in society, perhaps a radical way to think in this part of the world. You can see the videos here. Part 1 and Part 2.  With these videos, and the discussion after, I was able to create another story about this country for my students.

Then, on Tuesday evening of this week, as I was reading my timeline on facebook and twitter I noticed a video that was beginning to go viral. The KONY2012 video had been released on Monday and by Tuesday it was all over facebook and twitter. I had at least 6 friends who re-posted it. I watched it that night and decided to show it in my world geography classes the next day after our test. 

My students were ready to act after having seen the video, and I encouraged it. But then I decided that I too had only a single story on this issue. During my conference period that day I began to research online about Kony and the Invisible Children organization. On a blog that I read all the time I found this post. This was where my research began. As I went through these links, reading the information they provided, I began to put together different stories about this organization and the fight against Kony. And although I have not had an opportunity to discuss this in all of my classes, it is important that I create a different story about this very issue for my students as well.

Then, my world and research came full circle, when Rachel Held Evans posted this video on her blog. And it a complete reminder that it is our job to teach our students more than a single story about a place. Perhaps my job, as a world geography teacher, more than anyone else.  

What is Culture?

I am very interested in the topic of culture. Unfortunately, the class created more questions in my mind than answers. What is culture? How do we get it? Are we born with it? Do we each have an individual culture? Is this the same as personality? What does it mean to have our own culture? Why is culture power?

I think this topic interests me more than any other because it is something that I teach in my own classroom, so it is very real to me. I define culture as everything about how you live. But I am not sure that really covers exactly what culture is, at least not according to the authors that we read. I am not sure I am really teaching culture correctly to my students, and that worries me.

So, that brings me back to my first question…what is culture?

In Edward T. Hall’s selection he says that “culture is a form of communication…culture is the study of our own lives, of our own ways of thinking and living.” (pg. 44)

This makes culture much more personal to me and my students. It is no longer surface culture such as languages, customs, religions, and traditions but it becomes more personal.  Hall goes on to say that “one of the most effective ways to learn about oneself is by taking seriously the cultures of others. It forces you to pay attention to those details in which differentiate them from you.” (pg. 45)

Hall makes an important point here. It is just as important for us to study other cultures so we can better understand our own. In the process we become more knowledgeable about other cultures, but it helps us focus on our differences and similarities and how we can relate to each other better.

I am also interested in the idea that there is power in different cultures. In her article The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in Educating Other People’s Children, Lisa Delpit says that there is a culture of power. (p. 46) Of her 5 aspects of power that she talks about the one that interested me is the 5^th and last one. “Those with power are frequently least aware of – or least willing to acknowledge – its existence. Those with less power are often most aware of its existence.” (p. 46)

This really struck me as incredibly true, especially when you work with high minority, low SES populations. I see this in my own school. I am definitely in the culture with power and many of my students are not. I sit in parent conferences where the parents just want the students to pass and learn. These are the parents in the culture that is not in power. Delpit explains the difference middle class parents what their students to critically think and the parents outside of the culture just want them to learn so they can be successful in society. (pg. 47)There is a big difference between the two. I often find myself asking the question of why? Why do some students and parents get it? And others do not? Were they let in on the unfortunate secret that is how to become part of the power culture?

So many questions. And maybe that’s the point. 

The Town, the School, and the Students

“The process of confronting and adjusting to change is a painful one.”(pg. 40)

While Jonathan Kozol’s “Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools” made me pause and think a little bit more than any of the other selections from last week’s reading, it was Guadalupe Valdes’ “The Town, the School, and the Students” that I could relate to the most. In it, I felt like she was writing about my hometown, my schools, and my students.

I grew up in Carrollton, Texas, a suburb of Dallas. I often describe it as the second phase of “White Flight.” It was a middle class community where professionals who didn’t want their kids going to Dallas ISD schools lived. Perhaps my parents actually chose Carrollton because my dad grew up there as well and the schools were good. I grew up with parents who both had college degrees, my father is an engineer and my mother is an accountant. Before they had kids, they both worked full time jobs, but once they had my sister, my dad continued to work and my mom stayed home.  I had a dream childhood. It wasn’t without its sacrifices, we never had the newest toys, or went on grand vacations, but my mother was at my school ALL THE TIME. My parents helped me do homework, went to any and all parent meetings, volunteered at school, on field trips, on weekends, and went to every activity I was ever in. And my parents knew where I was academically. My mom could recite my test scores, my IQ, and my grades. I always knew I was going to college. If wasn’t a matter of ‘if’ more a matter of ‘where.’ My friends knew they were going to college. Again, it was more a decision of ‘where’ not ‘if.’ And when the time came, I chose Texas Tech. I attended for 4 years, earned a degree in political science, attained my teacher certification and came back to Carrollton to teach. I was going to teach kids just like me. While teaching in the Carrollton-Farmers Branch public schools was not my first job out of college, it was pretty close. And I still had that ideal image of what awaited me in my home town.

And then reality hit.

And I soon realized the middle school I walked into as a somewhat idealistic 24 year old was NOT the middle school I walked out of as a naïve 14 year old. It was different. Valdes’ words are much more accurate at explaining what I walked back into.

“In the face of rapid population shift, the entire character of both the community ad the schools change. “New” children are unlike the “old” children. Expectations that teachers have about study habits, background knowledge, language and discipline are found to be inaccurate. Assumptions about children’s futures must be questioned. Views about curriculum and standards, as well as opportunities to learn, cannot be taken for granted. Some teachers feel angry. They feel cheated at not having the “good” students they once had. They join together to complain to the principal. The solution, they argue, is to hire more new teachers to handle students who are not up to their standards. Principals, however, do not have easy solutions. Sometime they, too, wish that the new children would simply go away.” (pg. 40)

So many questions ran through my mind. Was I prepared to teach these “new” students? Could I ignore all the negativity about them from the other teachers? What is the district doing to help me teach these students, and help them learn?

What I found out surprised me. While I was living a dream childhood, naïve to any shifting population surrounding me, the district was putting in place steps to help these “new” students. I go to know my students; their culture, stories, home life, and goals. I very rarely met their parents but I was able to meet their needs while they were in my class.

Valdes’ does a good job of describing where these students are coming from. But she is short on solutions. As a teacher, I want to fix things. I want solutions, and ethnographic studies provide little solutions. Stories are good, but I want to know about the next step. What can we do for these students that are sitting in my classroom right now.

My district is still changing. There are still people who feel the same way the teacher’s that Valdes’ described. There are still students that I will never reach or understand. But my district is trying; I am trying; Together we are trying to change and evolve in education. But like Valdes’ says “The process of confronting and adjusting to change is a painful one.”(pg. 40)

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Valdes, G. (1989). The Town, the School, and the Students, Learning and Not Learning English: Latino Students in American Schools. In J.  Noel (Ed.), Classic Edition Sources: Multicultural Education (pp. 34-38). New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

Where we have been and where we are going...

7 years ago I was a post-baccalaureate student working on my teaching certification at Texas Tech University. Everyone has to take a multicultural class as part of the curriculum to become a teacher. I took mine in the summer before my student teaching from a professor name Dr. Anderson. I don’t remember much about the class, but I do remember liking it, liking Dr. Anderson and learning that you should not judge a student based on the name on the roll, even if you want to. So, in short, I didn’t learn much.

In one session of this class, my interest has already been piqued. I am a current world geography teacher, a former US History teacher, and I have a political science degree. So, last class was very interesting to me.

As a world geography teacher we talk a lot about what is culture? What does it look like? What does it sound like? How can you define it? How is it diffused? What part of it is diffused? It is a major part of my curriculum. As a culminating culture unit project, my students must bring in a cultural artifact and share it with the class, not unlike what we did last week in our own class. It is always surprising to me what my students choose to bring in as a class and last week was no less interesting. You learn a lot about someone, rather quickly, by simply listening to them talk about a cultural item they have chosen as the most important artifact in their culture. It is fascinating to learn where people come from and where they are now.

I think that is history; learning about the past so we can understand the future. I believe that is what we talked about in class last week. We must learn about the past so we can understand where we are in multicultural education and where we are going in multicultural education.

Beginning with Brown v. Board of Education, our country has a rich, and troubling, history of multi-cultural education. As a history person, it is important that we start with the facts of what happened and discuss those first.

In the first selection of chapter 1 Joel Spring goes through all the different forms of school segregation and cultural and linguistic genocide that were central issues in the civil rights movement. (pg. 1) Through this writing, we were able to begin to piece together the history of the civil rights movements and the pieces of information that goes with them and remind ourselves, or re-learn some key pieces of information that will help us understand where we are going.

I am excited to get into more dialogue on the history of multicultural education and where we are going in multicultural education. 

Multicultural Education

Welcome to my blog! I will use this space to post reflections, thoughts, opinions, and interesting information based on the multicultural education class I am taking at UNT this semester.

-Cynthia