Where I am From

Jonathan Fansler

02-12-13

Inclusive Classroom Practices

Culturally Responsive Teaching

Being a Culturally Responsive Teacher takes a lot of work to achieve, and has many different angles to do so. As teachers we have to be aware of everything that can affect the classroom and its students, and one of these things is language. Language is a powerful tool and those who use it the most affective are the ones that succeed. Purcell-Gates points out that people from lower economic status, whether it is from impoverished countries or other places tend to have more trouble with literacy than those from higher economic status.

Many teachers today that have students who don’t succeed at the rate at which the teachers believe they should get frustrated with the child. The teacher then begins to stereotype the children and say that the reason they can’t succeed as well as they should is because of where they are from or because of their socioeconomic status. These stereotypes are known the Cultural Deficit Model where the teacher sells the child short. The way to remedy this is to try harder to find or create ways to better relate to the child and then to also get the parents or guardians of the child involved because it will be hard for the child to learn at a successful rate without the help of people at home.

It can be difficult to overcome Cultural deficit problems in a classroom, but there are some ways to do so. Perhaps and approach could be like Hilda’s approach from the Moll study and build units around what the students interest are because students learn better when they are interested in something. Therefore the key concept that jumps out at me is making the students interested. When they are interested they are more engaging.

The Where I am From project was a very meaningful and helpful project. It allowed each person to see where people come from and get a general idea of what the person is like and therefore provides a reference of how to relate to them. Therefore if we as teachers were to use this in the classroom it would provide a good resource for community building in the classroom. Perhaps divide into small groups and play the videos in that group and allow the activity to be an icebreaker so that students can learn about each other. Also as teachers we can use these videos as a way to know where the student is coming from and can learn enough about them to be able to better relate to them in the classroom and provide a more meaningful learning experience.

I believe that in the classroom Standard English should be the standard. However, I don’t believe we should dismiss students who don’t. We should work with them and bring them along until they can write Standard English proficiently. Students will not learn properly until they can write and speak the language proficiently and it is our job as educators to make sure they can do this.