activity 3

Michael Robinson 9/13/12 In Victoria Purcell-Gates’ Essay, “As Soon as She Opened Her Mouth…” she builds a scenario on which to further illustrate her point. It includes a middle-eastern foreign exchange student, Phil, in driver’s education class in America. The boy speaks very good English, so language is not a problem. He is having trouble in the classroom because he has never experienced automobiles in his country. He has never needed to use them and so he doesn’t see the point in them. He has rarely witnessed a car ride nor heard the language associated with driving a car. His trouble lies in his lack of experience in automobiles in general, not in his language, or his intelligence. All of the class requirements depend on his background with driving. She makes a good point and drives that point home with the final paragraph of this section of the essay: “Are we going to interpret this as a flaw, a deficit, in Phil? Or are we going to interpret it as a lack of crucial experience, a difference in the experiential backgrounds between Phil and the other members of the driver’s education class? (Purcell-Gates, 129)” Most people would assume the child is some kind of “back desert dunebilly,” or something; not knowing anything about cars. A concerned teacher, on the other hand, would take this as a chance to change this boy’s life, to give him the experiences he needs to succeed in this class. I really like this situation Purcell-Gates uses, because it is a great thing to think about to keep ourselves from judging our own students. Using this principal, I learned that we cannot judge our students because of their language. If they speak some way, it is because of their experiences in their lives, and if they can’t do something, it is not because they are dumb, or ignorant, it is because they have NOT experienced that concept. Not having experience in a concept, as a teacher, can sometimes be rewarding for the students. In Luis Moll’s research article, he mentions one teacher who had great success in culturally responsive teaching. Hilda Angiulo, a bilingual sixth grade teacher who used basal readers and novels and other media outlets to teach, decided to become more culturally responsive in her classroom of construction kids. “She took a big risk, since construction was a topic she knew almost nothing about.” This ended up helping her not only learn more about construction from her students, as well as guest speakers, but also to get her students to begin understanding the English language, especially in writing. So, how can teachers overcome cultural deficits perspectives on their students? By opening their mind and learning. There isn’t only one way to do everything, and many teachers believe that the way they teach is the best way for students to learn, and many times this is not at all the case. By allowing the local culture to be integrated into the classroom, and allowing the students to embrace it, the classroom can become a more successful place for us all. Still, some schools and teachers contribute to poor literacy instruction. This is because they write students off as ignorant, or lazy, just because they are having trouble learning material. Rather than adjust and work to teach the troubled students, the schools are content to “pass them along,” setting these kids up for failure. This is known as a cultural deficit idea of education. “Cultural deficit theory… the belief that certain groups were intelligently inferior to others, particularly the group in charge. (Bolima)” This pertains to education and the culture in which poor testing individuals are pushed into. Schools and teachers follow this “deficit” theory by thinking that students have a problem because they cannot learn a concept, rather than thinking they learn it in a different way, or they do things in a different way. This is called the cultural difference theory. This theory explains that students are all different and have all different experiences from one another. This makes them learn more difficultly in things they haven’t been exposed to as much. It is a theory of “everyone can learn the information, only in different ways,” and “everyone has had different experiences with these concepts, and that is okay.” As stated, many schools and teachers adopt the close-minded “cultural deficit theory,” which can be very bad for the students who need the extra help, or have had the lack of experience needed to properly learn. This can be helped by adopting a better, more open-minded variation to that theory. The “cultural difference theory,” where all students are different and need different guidance and have had different backgrounds, needs to be the overall function of the schools or teachers. One way the “Where I’m From…” project helped me shape my culturally responsive teaching strategies was by showing me that many people come from many different backgrounds that are very different, as well as very similar. I learned that many other students in my class love the outdoors, as do I. I also learned that many of my classmates are very close to their family, where as I am not as close to my family. As a teacher, I need to learn how to pick up on much of this from my students, and embrace it. I can ask students to show and tell about a family member, or I can ask students to write about experiences they have had in the outdoors. I also learned ways to make the rift between home-life and school-life, more meaningful, and how to encourage students to learn from their parents, whether it is what to do, or what not to do. I have always believed that a wealth of knowledge is learned outside of the classroom, and that many people can and will learn concepts with or without help, outside of the classroom. Another thing I learned was that I need to appreciate others’ love of different things, like family. Letting students show their love of their family can be a great way to help tie the knots between school and home, and in turn, begin learning in the ways THEY want to learn.