The Where I am From project has helped me to understand why it is important to be a culturally responsive educator, as well as teaching me how a culturally responsive educator can support inclusive practices. Before completing this project, I was aware of the importance of getting to know your students, but I was not aware of the actual impact that knowledge can have on the students and the planning of instruction. Students learn better and more deeply when they learn about their own cultures, the cultures of others, and through their own cultural lenses.
There is a strong relationship between language, literacy, and power. We as teachers are more likely to have a cultural deficit perspective a student that comes from poverty, speaks in a nonstandard dialect, and has uneducated parents (Purcell-Gates, 130). Seeing these characteristics as a deficit rather than a lack of experiences or cultural difference is basically saying that this child cannot learn when, in fact, the child may simply need to be exposed to reading and writing and have those emergent literacy experiences. Purcell-Gates discusses how mountain people are often viewed as poor, uneducated, and unfit parents. Stereotyping such as this leads to students feeling “unworthy” and falling through the cracks in school. In the research, it seems as if the schools see this as an “expected pattern” from a low-income family. Educators who plan to teach in Appalachia need to understand this relationship and cultivate a cultural difference perspective because falling into the belief that low income means unfit parents, uneducated, and unworthy is the death trap for schools and teachers when it comes to literacy instruction. "We must begin to comprehend and deal with the real issues involved in the failure of the schools to teach, to their fullest potential, the millions of children and adults from minority and low-socioeconomic communities." (Purcell-Gates, 140).
Teachers can overcome cultural deficit perspectives of their students by implementing “social and intellectual resource[s]” (funds of knowledge) into the classroom (Gonzalez, Greenberg & Velez, 2). Luis Moll suggests several changes that teachers should make to implement these funds of knowledge into the classroom. Teachers must help students “find meaning rather than learn isolated facts and rules”. Teachers must “use activities that involve students as thoughtful learners in socially meaningful tasks.” This approach allows bilingual students to break through the limits of using English as a second language. Moll also suggests that teachers should treat children as “active learners using and applying literacy as a tool for communication and for thinking” (Moll, 1992). Moll’s research urges teachers to create “social networks of assistance” in their own classrooms and take advantage of community resources. “As material resources become scarce, the mutual reliance among teachers must grow, just as it does in poor communities and households.” (Gonzalez, Greenberg & Velez, 4). No matter what you have in the classroom, getting to know your students, discovering their cultural capital, incorporating what they enjoy into lessons, and utilizing the community will all help create a sense of community and in the classroom and help students engage and succeed.
Some teachers and schools definitely contribute to poor literacy instruction. Purcell-Gates uses the phrase “As if she had never appeared before them,” which speaks about the experience of a mother desperately trying to ensure her son gets a better education than she received or that she could provide for him (Purcell-Gates, 131). Schools often turn a blind eye to lower-income families and children who have these “deficits” in reading and writing. Instead of providing rich experiences for them in school, they are “identified” and placed in remedial classes and passed on to the next grade. This is an example of cultural deficit perspective being practiced instead of cultural difference perspective or cultural capital. “Most cultural deficit studies blamed the child's social, cultural or economic environment as being 'depraved and deprived' of the elements necessary to ‘achieve the behavior rules (role requirements)’ needed to academically succeed.” (Bolima, n.d). Instead, teachers and schools should be focused on providing those rich experiences for all students to help them all succeed. Our job as educators is to reach and teach ALL students by whatever means necessary.
There are many strategies that can improve literacy instruction for speakers of non-standard English. Epstein and Herring-Harris speak about how a big part of their success was letting the students use their “informal speech” in the classroom in a positive way that does not get corrected and is not wrong. This use of students’ cultural capital is a great example of how we as teachers can build bridges of meaningfulness between home and school experience. In using this strategy, students do not feel as if how they were taught to speak and how their family communicates is wrong or bad. Another strategy discussed in the article is learning about the culture of the students. The classroom displays maps and charts on the wall that track dialect patterns “by county road and even family.” Activities like these collect social and intellectual resources, or “funds of knowledge”, for the classroom. This is an example of both using a wide variety of instructional strategies that are connected to different learning styles and incorporating multicultural information, resources, and materials in all the subjects and skills routinely taught in schools (Epstein & Herring-Harris, 2011).
The Where I am From project supports culturally responsive teaching in numerous ways. First of all, watching videos that other students in the class created will help build bridges of meaningfulness between home and school experiences, encourage students to share their varied perspectives and experiences, as well as create a supportive environment in which this can occur. I feel as if watching the videos of my peers and allowing them to watch mine has created a bond between us all. We know each other on a deeper level which will allow us to trust a little more and work better in cooperative groups. Secondly, the Where I am From project has allowed the class to acknowledge the legitimacy of our varied cultural heritages as worthy content to be taught in the formal curriculum. We have also learned to know and praise our own and each other’s cultural heritages. Appreciating where we are from as individuals, as a class, as a school, and as a community will aid in us knowing and listening to each other. Next, the Where I am From project exemplifies using a wide variety of instructional strategies that are connected to different learning styles. Linguistic learners were provided the opportunity to write their poem, kinesthetic learners actually created their photo story. In addition, visual learners gathered photos for their story and viewed others visually-pleasing videos, while aural learners connected with the music implemented into the videos. Finally, the Where I am From project incorporates multicultural information, resources, and materials into a normal classroom setting. I was able to learn about several different cultures and many different discourse communities from watching my classmates’ work.
There are various ways that I plan on implementing culturally responsive teaching practices in my future classroom. One strategy I will use to support literacy learning for all learners is to allow students to choose (to some extent) what they would like to read and write about. Providing a choice of writing prompts and books for reports allows students to explore their interests and read and write about subjects that are meaningful to them. “Effective teachers understand the importance of adolescents finding enjoyable texts and don’t always try to shift students to 'better' books” (NCTE, 2008).
References:
Bolima, D. (n.d.). Contexts for understanding educational learning theories. Retrieved from http://staff.washington.edu/saki/strategies/101/new_page_5.htm
Epstein, P., & Herring-Harris, L. (2011). Honoring dialect and increasing student performance in standard english. National Writing Project, Retrieved from http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/resource/3655
Gonzalez, N., Greenberg, J., & Velez, C. (n.d.). Funds of knowledge: A look at luis moll's research into hidden family resources. Retrieved from https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B38BSV_Zo7aHSGVoMWEtOFRGMVE/edit
Moll, L. (1992). Funds of Knowledge for teaching: Using a qualitative approach to connect homes and classrooms. (1992). Theory into Practice, 312, 132-41.
National Council of Teachers of English. (2008). Adolescent literacy. Retrieved from http://www.ncte.org/library/NCTEFiles/Resources/Positions/
Chron0907ResearchBrief.pdf
Purcell-Gates, V. (2002). “...As soon as she opened her mouth!”. In L. Delpit & J.K. Dowdy (Eds.), The skin that we speak: An anthology of essays on language, culture and power.
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