“The culturally competent teacher should be able to account for, demonstrate awareness of, and respond to the sociocultural distinctiveness of her or his students, families, and communities when planning for and delivering instruction.”
Almost all the students I work with at my service learning school are African American or Hispanic. There are actually no white children in the entire classroom. One day I stayed later then usual and had the privilege of going with the students to lunch and see how they interact and behave. As I looked around I noticed that there were actually very few white children. I could actually count the amount of white children on one hand. I decided to look deeper into this and went to infoworks. From the website I found that 54% of students in this school are Hispanic, 28% are African American, 9% are Asian and 9% are White. These percentage reports were shocking to me. I automatically thought of the theorist Jonathan Kozol. Kozol wrote about how schools are becoming resegregated and that minorities now make up the highest percentage of students in schools. His beliefs are evident in this Providence School.
The students in this school come from an array of backgrounds and each of them brings their own specific cultural capital. It is up to the teacher to identify these differences and modify their teaching ways for the student. For instance many of the students in this school come from a poor socio economic background. Many of the students do not live with their parents but are left in custody of their grandmother because their parents cannot afford to keep them. Many of these families live primarily off of well fare and it is evident when the end of the month is near. Students come to school hungry and the clean clothes they had at the beginning of the month are now dirty. Mrs. F understands this and never assumes that the children have the necessary equipment for their homework at home. One night the students were assigned a worksheet that required the students to cut out the words at the bottom of the page, paste them in the appropriate box, write the word on the dotted line and color the coordinating picture. Before the children left we together cut out and pasted the words in case the students did not have scissors or glue. The students were then sent home with a crayon or two to finish the work sheet.
From these students we can learn new things and hopefully learn a new effective way of teaching. Hopefully from the many things we can learn from these students we can change our society for the better and include these new cultures into our own. It is evident that the “minority” is now becoming the “majority”, society and democracy must recognize this an modify its ways for the upcoming generations.
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I think the teacher in that classroom has found a very effective way to mitigate the effects of socioeconomic status on learning. This teacher obviously has a very good understand of where her students come from and what hardships they face. Most teachers would assume that scissors, glue and crayons were all tools a child would have in their home. By sending the students home with crayons, and having the cutting and pasting portion of the homework already complete the students were able to demonstrate the knowledge they had without being limited by their socioeconomic status.
ReplyDeleteIt’s interesting that it is more obvious which families are on welfare by the condition of their clothing and how hungry the students are. I had never considered how being on welfare would affect a student. I had assumed that if families were on welfare their needs were being met. Apparently though, that is not the case and is definitely something that would need to be considered by a culturally competent teacher in an urban setting.