Chapter 1 Reflection

Review – In reading chapter one in our text book, Developing Multicultural Educators, by Jana Noel, I learned many different things about society and about myself. The chapter taught me the definition of culture to be partly the values, beliefs, and perspectives of different customs (pg. 11).  The cultures we are brought up in help shape us and help meet out basic needs; as in giving us a sense of belonging (pg. 13). There are different components that help make up our culture. The components are categorized as: the way we communicate with each other, our organizational style, and our intellectual style. The communication style will play a part in the way the person will form their sentence structures; change their pitch/tempo of talking, and the way they participate in the conversation (pg. 15). There are some people who will always speak very fast, whereas there are other people in different cultures that will speak in a very quiet voice. The way many people communicate with each other change with their culture. There may be some people who feel very comfortable while talking closely to another person, whereas the other person may need their ‘personal space’. Some cultures will communicate in forms of verbal when other cultures will have more of a written communication. This all can be tied to their culture as they were being brought up.  

In summarizing my review of this chapter, our culture will help shape who we are, our traditions, many of our behaviors, and especially will help shape our identities. All of these will help in the way we perceive the world around us (37).

 

Reflect – This chapter meant a great deal to me, since there have been many different aspects about this that I have seen in myself, but yet some that I have never really thought about. One example I have seen in myself has to do with culture and the community where we live. When I was growing up, I lived in a town with many doctors and chemists. Many of the children that went to the schools I went to were well to do financially. There were very few African-Americans in our community, but for the ones that were in our community, they were very well off, as their parents were doctors or chemists. This always confused me when I heard any sort of derogatory comments about African-Americans, since the ones I knew were just like me, just a different color. Thus the reason when I was growing up, I felt the people that lived around me were all the same, just different colors. Then when I got to 6^th grade (still in elementary school) we had a community of Caucasian students bussed in, due to their community only having a school that went to 5^th grade. These students didn’t have the financial means that we had in our community. These students had the reputation as being “dirty” and “stupid” just because of the area they came from. Unfortunately, to this day, I couldn’t tell you if those students truly less intellectual as those that lived in my community or if it was just the preconceived notion I had. Or if the clothes they had were really dirty or if they were just hand-me downs, since they were not as financially fit as the rest of us.

This chapter made me reflect back on my life and see how much culture has affected the way I was raised, raised my children, and the way I have taught students over the years. The chapter emphasized to me how much the people around us create our culture.

 

Refine- After reading this chapter I feel that there are things that I will view differently in my classroom. Realizing that everyone doesn’t have the same cultural backgrounds, everyone should not be treated the same in all aspects. I will pay close attention to the way the students respond to my questions or the way they ask questions in the classroom. Some students might need to wait until I am completely done with my lesson before responding, while others might blurt answers out. I will make sure that I am allowing the students to be able to keep their culture intact while also functioning and fitting into the existing culture of the classroom (pg. 31). An example would be, in the past, I had an Asian student walk about five feet behind me, but yet I tried to get him to catch up. After learning more about his culture, I realized that this was out of respect for an authority figure. Although I had thought that he didn’t want to walk with his teacher. I also will pay close attention to the fact that the students don’t have to be from a different country to have the different cultures. Students could be from here in Georgia, but the family might have different cultures, which would make the students respond differently than the other students.