Teach Out Link

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Assignment B #5

Teaching at the Intersections by Monita Bell is a powerful piece of work that addresses intersectionality from multiple angles.  From the get-go, Bell addresses the importance of educators: “helping students like Nicole navigate the world—and the way the world responds to them—is fundamental responsibility as an educator.”  Like many of the other texts we have read over the course of the semester, Bell stresses that teachers are on the front lines when it comes to setting the expectation, response, and understanding for all matters of intersectionality.  Bell adds that when educators use an intersectional lens in their pedagogy, they are better able to “relate to and affirm all students—like Nicole—and to help young people understand the relationship between power and privilege through the curriculum.”  The last part of this quote is the most difficult because intersectionality is not often inherent in school curriculum;  it takes an educator to be creative and motivated to make the connections between class content and diverse student experiences.  The irony in this is that it takes experienced teachers to do this work, and as we have learned this semester, the schools with the most diverse populations that could benefit the most from this have the least experienced teachers!

When I first started teaching I thought homework was very important.  I assigned it almost every night and began to notice that one group of students always completed it while another group never did.  This made me mad!  How did MY students not understand the importance of homework? Do THEY not care about their education?  Eventually, I pulled one of the students aside after class one day and reemed him out.  I saw so much potential in him but his grade was suffering because he wasn’t doing any learning at home. After I got everything I needed to say to him out, this students told me that he was not doing his homework because his mom works the night shift and when he gets home he needs to do all the cleaning, pick up his siblings from day care, cook for them, and put them to bed. Wow. I felt like a total jerk.  Who was I demanding things from students I didn’t even know?  This has always lived with me and has helped guide my teaching (and expectations) to a place that much more values intersectionality.

Lastly, Five tips for being an ally by Chescaleigh is a high energy, informative video that I will definitely be showing my students this fall.  In it, Chescaleigh talks about how individuals don’t experience or even think about certain things, just because of who they are.  She likens this to a horse with blinders on it that the horse can see what is going on right in front of it but it is unaware of everything that is going on around it.  I think this is a powerful image because it is something we are all familiar with and it speaks about the truth of intersectionality.  I, as a white man, have never thought about the chance of getting shot when a cop pulls my car over on the road. I, as a cis gender man, have never felt uncomfortable in the bathroom or questioned if I am in the right one.  I think this video will give my students a lot to reflect on, and will hopefully generate some good conversation about intersectionality in our school community.

Assignment A #4

Argument Statement
School, and specifically teachers, play a pivotal role in shaping student's ideology of relationships and what we consider to be accepted as normal. 

Talking Point #1
"Classrooms lay the foundation for an inclusive and safe society; a just community where common interests and individual differences coexist."  A teacher that is able to accomplish this is a teacher we should look at and call successful; not a teacher that makes benchmarks but neglects to educate students about accepting and empowering differences others may have from them. 

Talking Point #2
People in power will go to very far lengths to ensure heterosexism.  This was seen when the Secretary of Education influenced funding being pulled from CBS.  When things go against their norms, they make them out as bad so that it creates a division. 

Talking Point #3
In reading through the GLSEN website, I was devastated to find out this organization was created just in Massachusetts and over 25 years ago!  Why is this not promoted as a resource in our school and utilized for teacher PD's?  This is the type of resource or students need to be exposed to in order to become whole, compassionate human beings. 

Assignment B #4

“Aria” by Rodriguez is a powerful story about a Spanish speaking family that in learning to speak English lose much about themselves.  When the narrator, Ricardo, was in school he did not speak much because he “considered Spanish to be a private language.”  This caused his teachers to get frustrated with him as he would not speak in class and caused them to demand that his family speak more English at home.  According to Ricardo, what this lead to was: “as we children learned more and more English, we shared fewer and fewer words with our parents. Sentences needed to be spoken slowly when a child addressed his mother or father.”  This lead to Ricardo having a distant relationship with his parents and a disconnection with his happy childhood.  This likely would not have happened had Ricardo’s teachers been familiar with the work of Collier.  In “Teaching Multilingual Children” Collier offers seven guidelines to teaching English learners.  One of their main arguments is that a teacher should not “teach a language in any way that seeks to eliminate the first language;” unfortunately, this is exactly what happened with Ricardo.  Collier explains that in affirming the student by using their first language when they need to, what translanguaging,  that the student can actually learn English quicker; this is because the teacher can make comparisons between “grammatical patterns, pronunciation differences, vocabulary items, varying social contexts, and so on.”  We were able to see the power of translanguaging in Episode three of Teaching Bilinguals (even if you’re not one).  Here, teacher Elyn Ballantyne-Berry teaches ESL students mainly from Asian heritages.  To empower them and help them learn English, she uses a graphic novel that has English words but Asian characters they are familiar with.  When these students go to write about the novel, they are able to translanguage and write in English what they can and their native language for everything else.

This is a strategy I have used in my classroom, and it has been very successful; I documented my efforts with one emergent bilingual student last semester when I took a TESL course as part of my final tutoring project.  By incorporating the student’s interests into their learning, empowering them with translanguaging, and stressing the importance of their home culture and heritage their English language development was more accelerated than it ever had been! More importantly, the student felt like I was not trying to get them to stop speaking Spanish in order to speak English.  They understood that both languages were important for different reasons and that English was never meant to replace their Spanish.  Throughout our time together worked on practicing my Spanish so that they could see this was a two way street and that I too was hitting some speed bumps in learning that language!

Teach Out Proposal

The topic I will be teaching out about is privilege.  Throughout this course, I have seen that privilege is a topic we have gone back to time and time again and is usually what generates our best discussions. While I came into this course feeling proficient in my understanding of what my privilege is and how it has contributed to my life, through engaging in discussions and listening to other classmates I now have a much stronger ability to express to others what privilege is and why it is important that they understand their privilege.

I am looking to teach out privilege to my school community by giving an interactive presentation, creating a handout, and providing them with some readings.  I believe that this teach out will be very eye opening to my team because privilege is not something we talk very much about or reflect on as a school community.  We teach brown and black high school students in an urban district and the majority of us are white; increasing our understanding of privilege and how it affects both us and our students will ultimately allow us to better understand where our students are coming from, how they view us, and hopefully allow us to strengthen our relationships with them.  Throughout the interactive presentation I also hope that team members are able to become closer to one another as they share personal information about their back stories.  Even though we work together every day, we never spend enough time getting to know one another and where we came from.

I believe discussing privilege will be both a learning and coming together experience for my faculty and I am thoroughly looking forward to putting together this presentation, handout, and readings to best engage them.

The articles I have chosen to write summaries for are: The Problem We All Live With and Privilege, Power, and Difference.  These articles shed light on how much privilege plays into acquiring a good education and what we as educators can do to ensure we give our minority students the best education possible.