Write a paper about when you were growing up that presents family dinners as a metaphor for analyzing how those family dinners represent the implicit and explicit cultural behaviors, values, and beliefs you carry into your classroom teaching. Your paper will have three parts:
I. Family Dinners - Describe, in as much detail as possible, family dinners in your family. Consider these questions and organize this section so that it clearly evokes the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and emotions of your family’s dinners.
• Who bought the food? Prepared it?
• Who set the table? Cleared the table? Took out the trash?
• What were some foods/dishes your family regularly had? Why?
• Where did people sit? Regular places? How and when did these change?
• What did the table look like (dishes, utensils, tablecloth, etc.)?
• How was the food distributed? What happened first? Next?
• What was the conversation like? Were any topics off limits?
• How were holiday dinners similar? Different?
II. Analysis of Cultural Themes - Analyze the implicit and explicit cultural themes your family dinners displayed. Consider these questions:
• What practices indicated ethnic influences? Religious influences?
• What values were conveyed through family dinner practices?
• What gender roles were evident? How did the social class backgrounds of your parents impact your meals and dining practices?
• What values/practices do you continue from these early family influences? Why?
• What values/practices have you discarded? Why?
III. Implications for My Teaching - Identify the cultural influences, values and practices you have identified that you will carry into your teaching. How will these themes enlarge/enrich your teaching? How will they restrict/inhibit your teaching? Consider these questions:
• How do my background perspectives shape my views of curricula, educational access, and the purposes of education?
• How do my values/beliefs shape my assumptions about institutions, power/oppression, individual rights?
• How does my family status (social class, language group, ethnicity, etc.) and my status in my family (gender, birth order, sexual orientation, sibling roles, abilities/disabilities) allow/disallow me to critique the educational status quo or align with transformative practices?
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