EDL 7030

Am I biased? The truth is we all are. After reading Chan's article, "Teacher experiences of culture in curriculum", I have a better understanding of my limitations, as it pertains to my lack of awareness of other cultures.

Like William, a teacher in the writing, I would have tried to help my student attend, what I thought to be a very important life experience. William’s social narrative was affecting his ability to respect the thoughts and values of his multicultural students. Where William's social narrative is to travel, spend the night, and see the world as a classroom, other cultures may not embrace this concept. I, like William, would find it difficult to allow any parent to disallow their children the opportunity to learn, even if it is against the parent’s cultural narrative.

Thus, the question is. “How appropriate is it for a teacher to attempt to allow children to learn a (their) cultural perspective, regardless to the hesitant and resistant wishes of their parents?

Johnny Smith
Cohort 16

Chan's articles create the opportunity for much thought, some of it unpleasant for me.. As a visually impaired individual, I have always had much empathy for those who exhibit apparent differences as when compared to their peers. Nevertheless, Chan's ideas have caused me to think about how I have developed those emphathetic tendencies. Before I discuss the articles, perhaps a personal story will help illuminate my points to be made later in this post. As a child, my mother always stressed to me that I could do anything, even with my visual impairment. While I still appreciate the intense love of my mother, I now realize that she was wrong (to a certain extent). There are many activities in which I cannot participate, but her unbounded optimism infused me with a spirit of almost invincibility. She stressed to me that I deserved the opportunity to participate in any activity that my peers did. I suppose that she wanted me to 'fit in.'

While it is evident, based on Chan's descriptions and field notes, that many of the children from minority groups at the Canadian school want to belong and 'fit in,' in all reality they never will until they have the opportunities to make their own decisions. Once they possess the abilities to make their own decisions, they may find that they make similar choices as their parents did for them. I think that the question is this: should a sense of belonging take precedence over minority groups' cultural values, norms, and expectations? Should children strive to 'fit in' at the expense of all a family and culture hold important? I am not sure as to how my mother would answer this question, but for me as a child in the late 1960s and early 1970s, she would have answered yes.

I think that my individual example is somewhat different than those situations experienced by the minority children at the Canadian school, yet I think that an analogy does exist in that conformity is always important to children, and even some adults. I will certainly refine this answer as time passes.

Joel

It seems that educators are very much for celebrating diversity and as shown in Chan what begins as a good intentioned activity or event to do just that often has unanticipated results. As I read the articles I made notes in the margin and occasionally highlighted what I felt was an interesting or important passage. One of my notes was as follows: "We (educators) decide what & how cultural diversity is celebrated. What if we let students decide?" One of the Chan articles noted how disinterested and at times reluctant the students seemed to be in sharing their culture. Perhaps students should be given opportuntities to design an assignment or activity around their culture. This would allow students to work at a comfort level which is acceptable to them and maybe build their confidence so that future assignements/activities occur at a higher confidence level. This would result in sharing of cultural knowledge- which is sometimes a sensitive subject as we see in Chan- only sharing would occur on the student's terms rather than the instructor. So I ask the question- as the teacher, does it have to be my decision about how and when diversity is celebrated and cultures shared? Does the sharing have to occur on my terms?

Christy

Given the potential of experience to contribute to shaping a sense of ethnic
identity, school experiences that involve conflicting messages around the
value of curriculum events may further complicate the students’ developing
stories to live by. They may place them in a difficult position at the nexus of
differing and sometimes conflicting stories to live by, and contribute to shaping
their sense of ethnic identity. The curriculum may be perceived as the
intersection of school narratives and histories that differ significantly for
students, teachers, and parents. (pg 185)

My first teaching assignment was at Paschal High in Ft. Worth, Texas. It was a large 5A inner-city high school and at the eager-age of 22 I was the varsity girls soccer coach and one of several freshman honors English and 11th grade ESL English teachers. I was one of 115 faculty that year and, unlike the middle school in Chan's article, our curriculum and culture was far from celebratory of diversity. In many ways, we were a cross between crowd control and prison guards. My honors English class (and my soccer team) were largely white students and my ESL classes were multi-racial - to say the least! I had Cambodians, Bosnians, Croatians, Latinos, Vietnamese, Africans, and Chinese. The tension was so thick between many of the cultures represented that by fall break no student was allowed to wear shoe laces to school (I'm not kidding!) because of the gang activity and the various colors displayed. Looking back, I tried everything I knew to do to create an open and accepting environment. Yet, the tension still existed. Perhaps it was something deeper, like the poverty and disappointment in the American dream that perpetuated the tension rather then the school systems blundering, albeit kind-hearted, attempt to understand the significance of our students narratives.

While I agree that curriculum can worsen the immigrant struggle to assimilate while trying to remain faithful to their culture of origin, I’m not sure how curriculum can make the tension any more harmonious, especially between parents and their Americanized children. For my husband and his family (immigrants from Venezuela), the acknowledgment that the tension would always exist was part of the difficult decision to leave one culture and join another. In fact, for them, and many others like them, there was a genuine desire to embrace the idea of being an American.

Tension exists in the form of angst for all of us. We give it different names and different reasons. We color it or put a price tag on it or even say it is the wrong gender. Angst is human. Maybe a celebration of angst and awkwardness during middle school would be most fitting.

Danielle

Danielle's blog is very improtant and relevant to a point I wanted to make as well. Unless the students cooperate and open themselves up to other ideas, practices, and cultures while at school, most attempts at multicultural curriculum development will fail and probably cause more resentment and increased tensions. Hatred and prejudice are deep seated emotions that educators must acknowledge and hopefully remediate when possible, but can educators really affect these attitudes and emotions? School is a place to start this process of enlightenment, but a lack of reinforcement at home and outside of school negates most efforts of educators. Parents, the community, and other societal organizations must participate as well to create any lasting and genuine change.

Why does it matter? Cultural diversity and biases have been a part of our thinking and planning. What to what extent do we really implement these ideas and are we really doing it effectively. It seems that those of us who are "Americanalized" are usually the ones planning events and curriculum. That in and of itself creates a bias. How can we fully understand and know what is best and most respectful to a certain culture if we do not "own" that culture? It seems that we think if we create a project on different cultures, have a culture fair, or culture food day... we are somehow validating these different cultures. When in reality, we may be creating more cultural biases and disrespect than we realize.
The significance of the text is that it brings these ideas and problems to our doorstep. The examples mentioned in the articles are common practices found in most communities and schools. But did we ever stop to think about the implecations of these events? I don't think we do because we are not fully able to understand the underlying cultural beliefs of a place we do not understand.
Now the complex part... I hesitate to even bring this up, but it is necessary if I am to fully communicate my point on this. What obligation do we have to different cultures here in America? Ouch... that sounds bias in itself. But if families are moving here from other countries and have a different fundamental culture, would they expect that they will be bombarded by the cultures of the country they are moving to? This is not to say that we should not promote cultural acceptance and respect for those that are different from us. But how far can we go in bringing cultural awareness to the table if we do not understand all the different culutres ourselves? What role do we have in this and can we actually give justice to cultures that are not our own?

One sentence in the Chan article stood out for me. "The curriculum may be perceived as the intersection of school narratives and histories that differ significantly for students, teachers, and parents". So whose curriculum is it? Does the state own it because it is tested? Does the teacher own it because they teach it? Does the student own it because they learn it? Does the parent own it because they pay for it? To me the sentence from the article says we all own it and we all bring our perspective to the table. What we need to do as educators is work to make sure each perspective is at the table and participating in their own way. Curriculum should not be set in stone, it should be a fluid work that allows for adaptation, extension and redesign if necessary. During my time as a Media Coordinator, my school hosted many multi-culture nights, but it was always the same. Music did a dance from a different country, foreign language did the dress of the another nation and blah, blah, blah. Not exactly exciting for the families, whose kids were not apart of the presentation. Our principal could never understand why our Hmong, and Hispanic families were not participating. My thought was we were pandering to their culture. Several teachers and I took the program over and instead of highlighting the students, we visited the parents and asked them what they wanted to see, hear, learn and share. Several Hmong parents got together and presented the Hmong story cloth. They explained the cloths depicted people's life stories, and that this was a way of preserving oral traditions for future generations. We also had a parent share the American quilt and how it related to the culture of the mountains. We had several presentations all given by the parents in some cases translated for the audience by students. The quilt and the story cloth still hang in the media center for everyone to see and share. The night was successful, I think because we ventured outside our culture safety zone to talk with parents, to be open to new ideas and to have parents be apart of the evening. This became an annual event.

Melanie

In the first Chan article Chan writes:

These cultural histories are never merely formal categories. Knowing that a child is ‘first-generation mainland Chinese’ is insufficient for curriculum planning and for research. It is necessary to understand in some depth the particular narrative histories of each child in order to identify both his or her cultural group and his or her specific history.

I think that I understand the narrative inquiry approach, but I have questions. Do we have the time in schools to really embrace this approach? Also is the average teacher well-trained enough in the process of inquiry in general to facilitate this?

I believe that short of this laudable goal perhaps striving for multicultural competence may be the best thing to do. If we spend time on teacher-preparation programs examining development theory as it relates to gender, socio-economic status, ability differences, ethnic background, sexuality and religious diversity we will accomplish several things. First of all, teachers will get a cursory understanding of the largest several groups in each of these categories and challenges they generally face. Secondly through this study teachers would likely develop an appreciation for tentative assumptions. If a teacher studies African-American identity theory and then studies lesbian identity theory and has read about the impact of socio-economic status on students, then s/he may feel equipped to teach an African-American lesbian from an upper-class socio-economic background. Where ‘tentative assumptions’ come into play is that the teacher may not realize to what degree these factors have inter-mingled in her or his student’s development, and also what other unknown factors may have played a role. By becoming educated on different developmental trajectories, and then realizing their limitations, I feel educators can begin humble deduction. Use the literature to which s/he has been exposed to enter a loose or tentative frame of the student and approach with the humility of one who knows that we are all different. After all, developmental theorists who go about the business of studying the lesbian experience or the African-American experience or any other experience are typically not trying to put people in boxes, rather they are trying to familiarize practitioners with trends. These theories don’t provide an address, just a zip code.

Alan

In reading these articles, I've been thinking about my mom and the stories she's told me about growing up in Tampa, FL. Her last name was Gomez, and my grandfather was Spanish, but my mom and her three sisters did not learn a word of the Spanish language (except when my grandfather cursed at them!) My grandmother was a country girl from rural Georgia, spoke no Spanish, and felt that Spanish-speakers were cliquish (because they were having conversations she couldn't understand.) She would not allow Spanish to be spoken in her home. At school, all the white kids thought my mom was Hispanic based on her last name and olive complexion, so they avoided her. The Hispanic kids tried to speak Spanish to her, but she didn't understand, so to them she was white. She was caught in between two cultures, not "belonging" to either. I doubt either of my grandparents were any help to her in processing the situation.

It's clearly important to be culturally-sensitive to those who have a well-defined sense of identity, especially if it conflicts with or is marginalized by the dominant culture. But how do we also help the castaway kids -- the ones who don't fall squarely in any group -- find their place?

marisa

Johnny, I remember when I first started teaching, I had to do home visits before school started each year. Although I muttered along the way as I drove up and down streets, I always left the homes of my students grateful for this opportunity. In my last year of working with the Catawba County school system as a itinerant preschool teacher (filling a maternity leave position) I, again, traveled to student's homes to do my work with the child. I cannot tell you how much I learned about the families of my students; from the smell of oriental cooking oil to photos of ancesters on the walls. How I wish every teacher had the opportuniy I have had with home visits throughout my years of teaching. I realize that is impossible today. However, like you said, taking the time to "invest" in the student's life narrative is an investment in the relationship which will foster learning interest and relational attitude between student and teacher. Perhaps, the author could have invested student narratives by "weaving" students' stories into and throughout the curriculum, thus accomplishing a multi-faceted inquiry into diversity, standard curriculum, relationship building and new ways of knowing.
Diane