Bringing your own personal history and characteristics to the classroom could be highly beneficial. However, a fine line must be maintained. While this could be used as an aid the teacher wants to be conscious of not pushing their personal style onto the students.
As a history major using your own history to relate is key. When teaching a lesson the teacher does not need to focus solely on their history. Instead, tapping into what the students know and have experienced can help them to connect and understand what is being taught. As I have heard many times over the years many students feel that history have no relevance to their lives. By working on the bridges between the past and now brings the past into a relevant frame of mind.
Also there will come a time when my history cannot be related with my students. Because the age gap will seperate our histories what may be clear in my mind may be a vague or nonexistent memory in theirs. For example when working with my fifth grade ELL class, the topic of 9/11 came up. The teacher and I each shared our own stories. I spoke of how my father is in the Navy and was out to sea when it happened was gone for 9 months that year to go defend our country. I spoke about the fear of the nation that day and they learned what patriotism was and how there was a surge following this tragedy. Without my personal account as well as the teachers, the students only have what the book tells them. Since there were only two years old when this happened they lack a personal relation to this event. In addition to that many were not even living in this country yet. However we noted to the class that perhaps this event may have played a role in their family life. The students were instructed to ask their family members how this connected to their home. While some came back with no connections others said how siblings joined the military or other family members felt a desire to be a United States citizen after 9/11. This activity brought an event that didn't hold relevance to students and made it a little more "real"
However, this activity was not without controversy. One student who is Muslim came back to class and said that his family got upset when he asked about 9/11. He told us that his family felt that what happened after was unfair. His family felt discriminated against. I then explained to the class that not everybody was equal after this. However I felt this was a delicate situation so I turned it over to the teacher. He explained that while 9/11 was the work of a certain group, many people generalized and discriminated against Muslims in the US. Another Muslim student in class said how her older siblings got called names and sometimes the teachers didn't say anything. This directly connects to Megan Boler and her talk on hate speech. She explains that "some hostile voices are penalized while others are tolerated" Whether the teacher who did not defend my students sibling was afraid of taking a stand or they didn't agree doesn't matter. Every ethnicity at some point has faced discrimination and that should be recognized. The teacher should look to their own past or their families past and realize that while we're not equal, and letting it continue only makes it worse for later generations.
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I agree with several of the points you made in this post. The most prominent point, however, is the importance of creating a student connection to the content that they are learning. Creating this type of atmosphere is a key technique to help prevent marginalization and the cooling out process and a logical means of promoting active participation in the classroom.
ReplyDeleteCreating a student connection can be done in a number of ways. The first of which you noted in your entry. In some cases students simply aren't going to care because they were not even alive during the time of these events. So, creating a curriculum that utilizes creative methods to promote student interest (i.e. family research projects, event comparison, etc.).
The other sense of classroom understanding that must be promoted is of the cultural sort. This was briefly addressed in your anecdote on the Muslim child who stated that his people were discriminated against as a result of 9/11.
Our goal in the lesson plan that we presented to the class was promote this sense of cross-cultural understanding. The cultural knowledge gained through such a project would hopefully help to create a classroom atmosphere that recognizes and embraces differences while decreasing the generalizations of these groups.
Such a classroom would allow all students to feel comfortable being an active participant on a subject that they possess a genuine interest for. This is the beginning of creating active participants in society and a multicultural community of understanding.
Hi Caitlyn,
ReplyDeleteYour anecdote about the aftermath of 9/11 and its effect on Muslim students was a perfect example of Boler's argument.
Nicely done,
Dr. August