II
CULTURE & INCLUSION
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Introduction to Course
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Cultural Identification
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Reflection: Ubuntu & Colorblindness
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On Parents & Students
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Culturally Relevant & Responsive Lesson Plan
Introduction to Course
Within my school site, I have observed great efforts to provide learning experiences designed for students where they are rather than where we might imagine them to be. From my experience teaching in other school environments, I can distinguish our approach as more driven from student needs and less by teacher expectations. This quality is something that I appreciate very much as an educator. Today, the culture of power is made visible, and I can relate my experiences at various school sites to this structure and the importance of our work to dismantle it.
Our team is pretty responsive to the unique composition of each class. Although the students are the same, in various combinations produced by each class roster, strengths and challenges seem to fluctuate from subject to subject as well as from class to class. Our school is not diverse so the language needs are consistently working with native Spanish speakers in the acquisition of English language. At my last school, the language and culture paradigm was diverse and so the approach was much different, perhaps more English immersive because there were many languages to consider as heritage. Here, where all English learners share a home language, we can more easily provide pre-reading and translated materials to prepare students since there is a common home language in the learners of English. I do not know if this is best and I hope to learn better approaches as alternatives to reliance on scaffolding in the home language.
Power & Equality mural by Shepard Fairey/Obey Giant at Crush Walls in Denver, CO (2018).
Academic language produces the greatest hurdle for our students, especially since we focus on the law. Even in art class there are terms which are technical and specific to the language of formal visual analysis and students who are native English speakers struggle with it. I need to better support the students learning English in my art class and it is challenging because the class is more than 30 students and online. At least when we are in person, I can see misunderstanding and correct my instruction. Online learning places activity behind a curtain and I cannot read the student response as readily.
Back to the notion of a culture of power, I would categorize academic language as the apparent gatekeeper. Students need to learn that it exists and grapple with the metacognitive strategies that are necessary to prepare to open the gate. Right now, I am instructing around the writing process and convincing students that it is a process not a one off product is more challenging that any of the parts. The notion of culture is important here because white middle class students are raised in households that are steeped in the same ideation of success where cultural diversity requires that real experience of students and their funds of knowledge are validated in their process of acquiring academic language informed by the conventions of English.
The faculty works well together, even in the time of distance learning to communicate about students as individuals, their parents, and how we can work together to produce the most constructive learning outcomes. The fact that we are a small school really helps. Further, the emphasis of the school provides a cohesive set of values to inform our teaching with social justice as a consistent attribute of every lesson.
This course provided a robust discourse on perceptions of identity, unconscious bias, and blatant racism which will serve me well as a transformative educator. Our discussions required introspection as well as the development of a lexicon for discussing difficult or sensitive topics. As a whole, the course content supported my own investigation of cultural identity and to reflect on my point of view on how society is constructed and how that frames public education.
Cultural Identification
The first clue that I am formed by white culture is the feeling of not having any culture at all. This effect is two pronged. First, I feel a longing for cultural heritage. Second, my family’s cultural heritage was erased. My upbringing in a white, middleclass, catholic household, valorized norms and focused on fitting in by observing the behaviors which were rewarded and following suit.
To begin, the sense that my personal culture is not existent is grounded in the notion that dominant culture is all pervasive, homogeneous and ubiquitous. It feels like nothing because it is that same as everything around me and flat because of that. It is hard to explain but it is like the unidealized version of the way white people are depicted in TV and film. Obviously, the portrayal of any race, gender and culture in film and television is false but it is what I internalized.
Although my parents did not graduate from college, it was assumed that I would prioritize education and go to school upon high school graduation. I am the youngest for four children and the first woman in my family to graduate from college. Growing up, I was ten years behind my siblings and watched as their adult life unfolded. My family of origin was a typical sit com prototype and as the baby, I was cast in the role of tag along observer.
Eastern-European Caucasian people in traditional costume.
For me, I did prioritize school and graduated from high school early and with honors. It was painful but here I am. Starting college at the state university before transferring across the country to a private art school. This institution to institutional flow is the main culture I have known. During adolescence, I developed a longing for cultural authenticity, researched my family genealogy, and joined a Yugoslavian folk group to learn more about the spirit of my people. As a catholic, the specter of this iconography and church experience informed the holidays and daily rituals of life. In sum, my white middle class background provided me a path to learning, and the privilege of doing what I wanted. Although not wealthy, I had the means to find funding and achieve scholarships as well as acquire loans to pursue my education.
Education was the way forward and based on the values my parents instilled in me, I always knew that this was the direction to go. My mom regretted not going to college to become a nurse. She started college but eloped with my dad. My dad also had college regrets because he was somehow screwed by the GI bill that was supposed to help cover the cost of college after he served in WWII but it fell apart. Both my parents regretted their lack of college education so this lack was negative but also a cornerstone of my upbringing.
Next, as second wave immigrants from eastern Europe at the turn of the 2oth century, they assimilated to fit it to the ideal American identity. Further, post WW1 the women in my family disallowed everyone from speaking the native language and appearing in any way separate from the white Anglo-Saxon protestant ideal. The sound of German and Slavic language was persecuted. My grandparents were embarrassed to be identified as having any connection to the nazi extremities and proactively suppressed any cultural indication that there roots extended from any place other than the American soil of Pennsylvania.
As an educator today, this experience and comparison informs my passion for cultural heritage and the avoidance of assimilation. I want to encourage students to be bi-lingual and cultivate their literacy in their home language in parallel with the English language. Dominant culture seems to require erasing the self in the pursuit of individual freedom. I want to engage a pedagogy that causes no harm and avoids making anyone feel less that they are. My choice to teach public school is political extending beyond the personal as political into the realm of civic participation though action for equity and justice.
Reflection: Ubuntu & Colorblindness
According to the African philosophy of ubuntu, we become human through each other. This idea is at the center of my approach to social life. As an educator and life-long learner and consistent with the ubuntu premise, I am inspired by reading Paulo Freire and his idea of mutual humanization and the symbiotic relationship between learners and the world. Distinguished from Descartes "I think therefore I am" which has guided Western culture to our current existential crisis.
Further, and more to the point is Racism without Racists: color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in America by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva. This writing provided a lexicon for the crazymaking that I felt when confronting discourse with and about colorblindness as a solution to racist culture. Even given this, I am uncomfortable expressing how I feel for fear of being misunderstood by people that are not white and being rejected by people who are white like me.
Perhaps white people would benefit from the experience being racialized and this is not something that people want to hear and definitely not something I can express effectively enough to be heard and understood. For example, right now in the media the word white is appearing as a descriptor. This is a good thing because it debases the notion that white is a norm or base-line or majority. Dominant and majority are very different things, too. Anyway, we need to call white people white so that white people know that they do have a race and it is white. There seems, to me, to be an assumed outside of race aura that white people can inhabit.
Malala Yousafzai the Pakistani activist in Nigeria with women fighting for their education.
A problem with establishing a lexicon to discuss race is that most of the language around whiteness is the language of supremacy. Something I do not want to study or consider. I moved from the mid-west because of these attitudes. As a child driving with my parents in the country, I was terrified when I saw burning crosses and people in scary white robes. As an artist, I was thinking outside of dominant culture and told my attitude was "unAmerican" even though I did have a sense of patriotism. As a pre-teen, I effectively acknowledged and rejected the racism behind the duplicity of American identity.
At a private high school where I taught for four years, we had a diversity and inclusivity program where the students went to events. At these events the students were separated into “Affinity Groups.” It was fascinating hearing the student response to their affinity experience. Students in the black affinity group appreciate the opportunity to share experiences in a safe environment where there were no white ears present. Students in the Filipino affinity group said basically the same thing. The white students came away without much sense of an experience. Probably because they are accustomed to being in groups of white people where they need not be aware of being white or not being part of the dominant group. This opportunity to address white students about their racial identity rests on precarious language.
Now I am teaching in a Latino community and I do not speak Spanish. I try to speak Spanish in class to demonstrate that I do not know how to pronounce the letters in the alphabet or the vowels. From the recorded sentences I have heard the students speak, I noted a need to focus on the vowels and consonants. This week we studied pronunciation of vowels in American English by using the color vowel chart and in the recordings the students’ pronunciation improved. I joked with the class that I need this study of vowels and consonants of Spanish language so I might improve my pronunciation. Students can appreciate my vulnerability and that the students can see the truth of the importance of hearing and speaking the letters to seeing improvement in pronunciation. Also, students have access to Rosetta Stone so we are taking advantage of this for class. If I spoke Spanish, it would be better. The school is not necessarily diverse but that might be semantics because the word is used to describe non-dominant populations at he same time it refers to a group with differences.
At my last school, the students had different home languages where at my current school the students share Spanish as their home language. This common heritage lends itself to culturally responsive teaching because East Los Angles has an amazing history. It might seem strange though for the white teacher to be teaching the students about the legacy of the civil rights movement and Chicano culture. At the same time I need to be aware that I am white and English speaking (Anglo) I need to be human to human, building a story about our mutual consciousness.
On Parents & Students
The learning community I serve largely shares a common heritage and the students have similar funds of knowledge which I try to leverage in the learning experiences I provide in the classroom to be responsive to the whole-student. Within in each class, the range of cultural, religious, and educational backgrounds presents with great variety and makes the case for intersectional identity.
In terms of what the facts are: I teach English Language Development, English Language Arts, and Art at a Title I high school which is 98% Latino where 71.3% of students with English as a second language and 18% are English Language Learners. In Available neighborhood data from LA Times Mapping LA describes a high-density population urban community where the percentage of residents with less than a high school diploma is high for the county. Households are larger and only one third are homeowners. Also, here is a high incidence of both veterans and single parent families. In terms of ancestry and immigration, most common ancestry is Mexican, less than half of the residents are foreign born with Mexico and El Salvador being the most common birth places.
Importantly, the reality of each individual student flows from a unique family dynamic of expectation and tradition and I have learned this by inviting the students to consider their personal identity within the framework of the assignments. Then there is the added layer that the students are adolescents and finding their voice with a point of view that is distinct from their parents. The students I work with are developing their standpoint so there are whole universes of relevant details that I cannot know. What I can do is create learning experiences that involve student choice and present opportunities for growth.
What we do have in common is our location and I can build on this sense of place by showing students pieces of local history and suggesting their lineage in local legacy. Just because students live in East L.A. does not mean that they know about the legacy of Civil Rights activism in the community. As I show documentaries and provide articles from L.A. news sources, students are impressed that what we are looking at happened “here.” This sense of place and belonging seems to encourage the students to view themselves as part of a greater whole. In English Language Arts class this looks like a research paper inspired by learning about La Raza Newspaper. In Art class this looks like contrasting Day of the Dead in Mexico and Los Angeles. In English Language Development (ELD) class, it looks a little bit different.
In the ELD class the students share a common home language of Spanish. This is a great thing because it allows me as the teacher to utilize Spanish language at strategic points during instruction while providing and English immersive environment. This is especially useful when rolling out new assignments or providing specific direction for assignments and tests. For example, when the textbook introduced Shakespeare, I thought it was an unusual choice. That said, Romeo and Juliet is an English classic about teenagers having dialogue that most ninth grade students encounter so on many levels it was appropriate. We prepared for the lesson in the textbook by listening to an audiobook of a dramatic read of the balcony scene in Spanish language. This was a pre-reading activity to prepare the students for the study of dialogue in the text book. A rose by any other name … the balcony scene turned out to be something students enjoyed. I learned that they enjoyed it because in another assignment where students learned how to write an email, they elected Romeo and Juliet as an item to share in their emails.
My point here is that the students share their location and age and home language so I can use this as a framework to flesh out with details including grammar, vocabulary, speaking, writing, while allowing for student choice. Most homes are Spanish language speaking only and I want to encourage English development in a way to parallel the home language and heritage as well as to build a foundation for bilingual success. When parents know this, I believe they are more likely to participate because they know what they bring is essential to the learning experience and success of the student.
At the school site where I teach, our involvement with parents and the home environment is an ongoing topic of interest. We understand that the best teachers encourage parents to continue enriching the students’ lives with stories and speaking in the home language and are reminded that many parents do not have a positive experience interacting with school. Further, the transformation of urban schools looks to the parents social capital, funds of knowledge, and invites educators to address educational issues in concert with a broad array of social issues including poverty and lack of public services. As a whole, I think the point is to explicitly validate the value of parent/guardian and community involvement by allowing them to determine their role in their own involvement. This will invite participation without creating a feeling of not meeting expectations or requiring any type of conformance to their mode of participation. This sounds tricky to balance but in practice, my sense is that most parents want the same things for their students, schools, and community.
Since we are not meeting people in person, this year is different than prior years but not altogether dissimilar. We held our parent conference night via zoom and one parent and student came to talk with me. I did have support from the school office manager during this event. She was there to translate but most important was her ability to relate and talk with the parent. Eventually my Spanish will be comprehensive enough to converse but her ability to connect and relate is something my Spanish will not be able to achieve. I think it went great in terms of meeting the student and parent needs. It was affirming and descriptive. The low attendance was part of other factors like timing and other events scheduled for the same time. It is school in the time of Covid and it is complicated because it is also work in the time of Covid and life in general in the time of Covid.
Importantly, we need to remember that for many parents, school is a looming institution where people feel judged for their grammar or whatever, they feel judged and self-conscious as they wonder if they might make the grade. I remember when my own kids started school and the feeling of having invited this institution into my home. I relate to the feeling of being judged by the school administrators and teachers for our differences. Importantly, it was with the teachers who made a point to address us as valued participants are where our kids learned the most.
Culturally Relevant, Responsive, & Sustaining Lesson Plan
