Here are five terms that I have come to understand in my multicultural Ed. class
Culture is specific to a person or a group of people. It is
the activities you do,how you celebrate, how you are together, how you do daily
chores, activities, how you are with strangers, with your family... it is
essentially how people outwardly interpret their experiences and how they
create things and reactions to things. I often think of a certain type of music
as representative of a culture. One thing I learned from class was that
cultures are conservative, they want to maintain the norms of the culture, you
don't really see huge shift in culture because it is such a big part of who we
are. In our classrooms we can notice how our kids are perceiving each other.
There are a lot of different perspectives on just one culture and getting the
kids to talk about this will help there to be more understanding of others.
Funds of Knowledge is what the kids come to the classroom
already knowing. I think of it as your savings account of knowledge. We can
always add to it and it just keeps getting bigger. So kids come to school with
a set of values, a set of codes of conduct on how to behave, and a way of
learning and acquiring new information. They come with bias just like we do and
they come with interests. As a teacher it is important to tap into their funds
of knowledge in order to reach them and expand their horizons. What they
already know can be a starting point to build of off and a million points to
compare new experiences to. This is why getting to know your students is so
important. You, know besides being inherently important.
Inclusive Learning Teaching to reach all students regardless of their background or culture.
Kids are differently advantaged. Maybe there capitol doesn’t serve them well in
school. We have to take into consideration what they do know and then we can
teach them what they need to know to be successful in this society. Part of
teaching inclusively is questioning the canon and going out and finding what is
missing or what needs to be changed. Often the kids in the school you work at
live near each other and they share some specific cultural present. I think
incorporating this reality into the classroom can be a powerful tool and way to
teach in an inclusive way. As teachers we have to be able to adapt to what we
learn from our students but also be able to use the resources we have to help
those same students realize there are answers to questions that they have right
now. If they want to learn about something they can learn it from someone. This
to me is the most exciting piece of inclusive learning. We get to show these
kids that they can learn from everyone.
Race is the physical appearance of a particular group of
people and Ethnicity is the cultural traits of the group. So someone’s race is
determined by their skin-tone and many other things that are typical of that race,
certain hair, eyes, facial features, body types etc.
Ethnicity is determined by
things other than how you look. Your ethnicity is most often determined by
where your ancestors came from and from your language, religion, and culture.
This brings up the problem again, of defining people by making assumptions. One
of the big problems in classrooms is that we assume we know things about a
certain race or ethnicity and we start acting like we know who some one is by
what they look like or where they are from. A kid can be a good student and not
be asian and an asian can not be hardworking. We learn these stereotypes and
they factor into our teaching and how our kids learn to treat each other. This
can't happen, so we institute inclusive learning.
All of these terms are interrelated and not solely related to the classroom setting. They are good for all people to understand and appreciate.
No comments:
Post a Comment