Entry # 4 3-2-1 on Principles and Frameworks

3 Ideas to Ponder

As someone with little classroom experience as an educator, I am wondering how much room is there in the curriculum in school today to apply the ideas we are learning in graduate school? Is there opportunity to put our own stamp on our teaching and on the school communities or are there pre-determined curriculums and methods that are required?

How do we overcome the deficit language in education when students are required to meet standards?  I have heard teachers refer to students as "low." In Chapter 2 of "Cultivating Genuis," Gholdy Muhammad (2020) discusses the danger of using labels. How do we meet standards and school expectations and avoid negative labeling?

After reading Chapter 1 of Tompkins' "Literacy for the 21st Century," (2017) along with "Cultivating Genius,"(Muhammad, 2020)  I am questioning how we can take all nine principles, the various education theories, and Gholdy's framework and combine that into one way of teaching.  I imagine for experienced teachers a system develops over time but as an education student it seems overwhelming.  

  2 Quotes of Inspiration

Culturally responsive teaching acknowledges the legitimacy of all children's cultures and social customs and teaches children to appreciate classmates' diverse heritages." (Tompkins, 2017, p.8) I found this quote to be relevant because culturally responsive teaching has been a part of every course that I have taken in graduate school and has risen to the top as one of the most important ideas to focus on as a future teacher. As humans we all want to be validated and for a student whose culture and primary language are different than the mainstream at school, demonstrating that they are valued must be the first step for them to be able to learn. I think that this also applies to any student who isn't part of the majority weather they are Black or Latinx and attend a majority White school or have mostly White teachers.  I have learned that as a White teacher, I have to recognize the privilege that comes with being White and be sure that I am making the effort to seek out the differences in all of my students and recognize the strengths that they bring to the classroom community.  In addition, as Dr. Ladson-Billings (2013) discusses in her lecture regarding culturally relevant pedagogy, for the students who are part of the majority, it is just as important that they learn cultural competence as well. 

"Nothing about cultural competence speaks to eradicating, replacing, or denigrating students' home culture." (Ladson-Billings, 2013)  After listening to Dr. Ladson-Billings and Gholdy Muhammad, I recognized the important nuanced difference between teaching everyone according to mainstream standards and teaching students how to be successful in both their family and home community culture and the mainstream world of school and business. Teaching a class of diverse students by seeing the value that each student brings and encouraging them to share who they are will improve the education and self-worth of every student as well as equipping them with the tools they need to thrive in a multicultural world. 

1 Commitment for the Future 

The most important commitment I can make to my future students and to myself is to be open to learning.  If I am able to recognize and be honest about what I don't know, then I will have the opportunity to learn from my students and other members of the school community and I will have the confidence to seek out those who can provide me with what I need to be a supportive and effective teacher of English Language Learners.  I have learned a lot over the past couple of years both from the awakening in our community about racism and from the engaging discussions in my education classes.  Once I am in a school environment on a regular basis, I hope that what I have come to recognize will be enhanced by my experiences in the classroom.  As I learned about how important it is for students to have teachers who look like them and are able to speak their language, I questioned if my becoming an ESOL teacher was the best thing for my students.  In talking with one of my professors who also works as an ESOL teacher, I came to recognize that a student who walks into a school where they have a teacher who cares about them, recognizes their value, and is open to learning more about them, is walking into a school where they can grow to feel safe and be successful.