How does culture affect teaching and learning?
I read a couple of interesting sights but these two seemed to be focused on the importance of helping students of other cultures feel included and be engaged. One site quoted the Dean of Bank Street College making the statement that a teacher’s job is to understand why students do the things they do and how we can use that to develop better instruction for them. He also discussed that each child brings their own ideas of what is a risk and our job is also to help alleviate those risks (http://serge.ccsso.org/question_6.html). I also found a paper on line that was titled Culture Identity and Teaching. It stated that teachers bring their own culture into the classroom in the form of practices and expectations. It is important that we are conscious of this, so that we don’t alienate those students that have been raised with differing views of education (http://www.urbanschools.org/pdfculturalidentity.LETTER.pdf).
The Dean of the Bank Street College is so right. We, as educators do not teach in a vacuum. We must figure the whys of behaviors and use that information to help adjust our teaching. Our job is to lower the affective filter of students so they are willing to take risks in the classroom
ReplyDeleteCasey, we always been instructed to make our classrooms a safe learning environment to learn and take risks, good point. And as a special education teacher for children with ASD, I spend a great deal of time working on stimulating behaviors and why my students use them! Knowing my students, convsersations with parents and observation, observation, and more observation helps!
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