This article was written about the difficulties in a multicultural college classroom. The first thing that came to my mind is that the ongoing shift in college expectations is a great argument toward why we need to be teaching multicultural literature in our high school classes. Just as I stated in my previous post on the teaching of the five-paragraph essay, if we want to prepare our students for college we need to give them a large toolbox of skills and the ability to adapt in any situation. Also, if we are asking out students to be adaptable to various situations (including individual and group work, oral presentations and written assignments, and a wide array of writing formats), we need to be adaptable as teachers as well. As the article points out, “Women and working-class students might immediately benefit from a shift from individualistic, teacher-centered instruction to cooperative student-centered instruction,” and then a paragraph later states, “In some instances, a teacher-centered, competitive, hierarchical classroom may be appropriate.” (p24). Just as this article cannot give us any clear, cookie-cutter answer as to how to best reach every student, we will never be entirely sure how to do that ourselves. We can only try our best and always be willing and attentive enough to be able to change things that are not working.
Another thing that came to mind when I was reading this article was the need for teachers to be consistent. This contradicts what I just said about a teacher needing to be ready to mix things up, but I kept thinking that especially when working with students that may be having trouble with new educational and communication formats, students do need some level of consistency. If we are going to be conducing a classroom where we are using many different types of strategies for learning, one way to create more stability is by setting clear expectations and completely explaining the nature of the course from the start. I think it is important to always make students aware of what you are doing and why you are doing it. This should help students to be more motivated and hopefully relieve any stress that comes with the learning of new and unfamiliar things.
My final note on this article has to do with the degree of difficulty involved in the use of these kinds of educational strategies. An ideal classroom might be full of open debate in a comfortable learning environment, but as Goebel notes, “The tendency toward subservience, passivity, and silence are quite prevalent.” Finding that balance that will reach all students is not easy and there will never be one right answer to the question of what makes a teacher great. That will be a question that we will all just have to figure out every day that we step into a classroom.
2 comments:
I took issue with Goebel. I thought that he provoked more questioning fomr me than constructive thought. I alreayd recognize that our students all bring with them different cultural identities and with that different mdoes of learning. However, I can not change my stle for each student in the class for every interaction. One of the things we are taught in student teaching is that consistancy is how you build relationships with kids. Wouldn't I be inconsistant if I was authoritative with one kid and collaborative with another?
In light os that, I did like the idea of subservience and how this can be carried on in a student' slife. I need to be more aware of this in my classroom because I tend to file it away and try to come back to it. In the meantime, it gets lost. This to me was the most important point Goebel made.
I am glad to read that you did not seem as overwhelmed by the Goebel as some of the others. As I stated in class, I think one of the points of that article is to remind us that our way of seeing the world (and therefore the way we teach) is not always “the” way—that it is merely one person’s lens and needs to be treated as such.
What Caitlin said in class about trying to reach all students over the course of a unit or the course of a month or year or whatever seems to make this all a little more achievable.
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