Review-What did
you learn?
Chapter four talks about a very important factor
in our society “the dominant culture” although we live in this diverse nation
where people come from different cultural background we all have to follow the
dominant culture. This is very important because it affect the
way we teach and interact with our students.
When students enter our classroom we make a lot of presumption base on
race, gender, and income level. This has
affected the students that come from different background as the teacher because
they don’t follow the dominant culture and they all come with different
learning styles. As Noel mentioned, “These
differences in learning styles are some of the main reasons for
misunderstandings and for the mislabeling of students achievements. When the teacher rigidly adheres to only one
style of pattern, many students are left out, unable to achieve or to develop a
positive sense of accomplishment and self-esteem”. (P. 126) In the 1960 it became very popular to
identify students with different deficiencies and sometimes a lot of the
foundations of this identification was because the students were very different
from the teacher and the teacher saw it as
a deficiency. As we moved forward
in this globalized world, teachers should be more aware of their students’
backgrounds, they should take the time to get to know their students’ learning
style and not assume that the student has a deficiency just because they come
from different background. This is
particular important if we want to close the student achievement gap that we
are facing in education in the United States.
Reflect-What did it mean to
you?
I have connected a lot with this chapter because I firmly
believe that we as teacher must put the effort to get to know our students,
their background, their learning style and we should plan our lesson with our
student learning styles in mind. The example
that the chapter gives when is talking about Bing, resonated a lot on me because
I am bilingual, English being my second language and I must admit that learning
a foreign language is very hard, especially when you learned English as an
adult. When Bing did not received any
acknowledgement of his language abilities reminded me a lot of how I feel when
I have encountered people that have told me that I have a strong accent and I
must admit that is very discoursing.
This chapter have being very beneficial to me, I teach Spanish for
native speakers where I have students from different Spanish speaking countries
such as El Salvador, Mexico, Peru, Ecuador, etc. All this students come into my classroom with
different abilities in the Spanish language and they have different accents in
the Spanish language. Although I am Hispanic
as well as my students I am not an expert on the 22 Spanish speaking countries. Therefore, when my students come into my
classroom I tried to get to know them, we compared my Dominican culture with
their culture we find similarity and differences and I tried to make a positive
environment were students are encouraged to feel proud of their heritage and
that give me the chance to get to find out their learning style.
Refine-How will you use the information in your classroom?
A lot
of the information that I read in this chapter is very useful for my classroom,
because the best way to raise student’s achievement is by getting to know the
student background and learning their learning style. I would continue to get to know the student
background as well as their learning style.
To do this I will try to create lesson that are relevant to them and
that are a representation of their culture for example: when selecting reading
I will try to select a reading that are written by authors from the countries of
origin of my students. Another aspect
that I will like to improve in my classes is not focusing so much on the
behavior, especially in the Spanish for native classes I feel that those
students feel very comfortable because they shared a lot with their fellow classmate,
a lot of them are from the same countries of origin therefore the classes tend
to be chattier. Last but not least, the incorporation of music and cultural
aspects such comic strips from authentic source is very important, I will
continue to use this resources to help me find connections with my
students. In the Spanish speaking
countries there is large variety of music genre I will try to select songs that
student can relate to, to facilitate the learning and success of the
students.
References
Noel, J. (2008). Developing
Multicultural Educators (2nd edition).
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