Prompt #3: Goldenberg

The culturally competent teacher should be able to use a variety of assessment techniques appropriate to diverse learners and accomodate sociocultural differences that affect learning.

A few weeks ago, after I finished reading with my reading buddies, my assigned teacher was giving a spelling test to the class. All the words were grouped around the letters "-eam" and "-ean". One of the words on the list was "stream". There was silence throughout the classroom [quite a rare occasion] after the teacher had announced the word and I saw confusion on a couple of students' faces. Then one boy called out, "What's a stream?" Several other students questioned likewise. The teacher replied by saying, "Like a river... you know, a small body of flowing water." Some nodded their heads while others clearly did not understand but were too focused on spelling the word correctly. As for myself, I stood there, slightly shocked that a second grader did not know what a stream was. And then I remembered I was in a Providence school, and the chances of one of these students seeing a stream in their everyday life was most likely small. Growing up in a small, rural town, by elementary school I was well aware of rural-like terms, such as stream. I had never thought that certain words may not be as frequently used in an urban setting until that spelling test day.

In FNED, we are learning that, as teachers, we will have to take into account many factors and positions that makes up a student in our classroom. Whether these factors are lingual, ethnic, sociocultural or setting, they each shape the student and affect their performance on different assessments. For example, a student who lives in the city and has never heard the word "stream" before might have a difficult time spelling it correctly. On another level, a student who primarily speaks Spanish may have a difficult time on a spelling test in English. That is why teachers should use a variety of assessment techniques appropriate to the diversity in the classroom. On a future spelling test, my teacher may decide to use words that are oriented around the city, such as: sidewalk, block, taxi, etc. Or a teacher in a classroom with Spanish speaking students may use spelling words that are found in their culture. Each are examples of a culturally competent teacher who is paying attention to the differences that make up a student body.

I believe this prompt and lesson on culturally competent teachers strongly connects to the theorist Claude Goldenberg, who wrote an article entitled, "Teaching English Language Learners". In this article, Goldenberg discusses different techniques on how to teach children who are in the process of learning English because it is a second language. He specifically wrote about "transferring", a process by which, if a student has learned something in one native language, it can be easily learned in another language, because the knowledge is already present in some form.

Personally, as a VIPS tutor I work with two students who primarily speak English, and I have not had much of an opportunity to work with any students in the class who do not. So I am going to apply Goldenberg's lesson on transferring to my example. Think of rural and urban settings as two different "languages". If a student from the city knows the widely-used word "river", a teacher could transfer the knowledge of what a "river" is to the lesser-used word "stream"- stream being something found in a rural language. Goldenberg also dissused a process of "scaffolding", in which a teacher gradually introduces something to a student. A teacher in a city school might gradually introduce words found in other settings into a city-set curriculum, in order to introduce their students to a variety of spelling words.

Literal language barriers do not always have to be the factor that sets students apart; students may also be diverse in their ethnic "language" or cultural "language". It all depends on certain techniques a teacher uses to take these factors into account.

Prompt #2: Lisa Delpit

The culturally competent teacher should be able to account for, demonstrate awareness of, and resond to the sociocultural distinctiveness of her or his students, families, and communities when planning for and delivering instruction.

During the past few weeks of my service learning, I have noted the linguistic, ethnic and sociocultural characteristics of the students in the classroom in which I am tutoring. As I mentioned in my first post, a little more than half of the students in my assigned classroom are African American, with 4 white students, 5 Hispanic students and about 2 Asian students, as well. I have not had an opportunity to speak with all the children, but those that I have spoken with primarily speak English. I further researched student characteristics for my particular school on Infoworks and found that 35% of all the students are white, 33% are Hispanic, 26% are African American, 5% Asian and 2% Native American. According to the site, 68% of the school's children are eligible for free or reduced-price lunches, which coincides with the ethnicity statistics. A whopping 100% of the students do not receive bilingual educational services.

The children in my assigned classroom are obviously coming from a wide variety of backgrounds. They each have their own set of ideas about family, behavior, attitude towards school and even what to wear to school. I noticed [and I am not sure if this was done on purpose or not] that the teacher has set up groups of desks in the classroom, in which students from each racial and ethnic group can be found. I feel this is a great way to get the students to share their ideas and ways of thinking with eachother. On another level, the set up of the classroom may be an important lesson: when students from all different backgrounds are together in a group, one background isn't pushed to the side and ignored. Instead, everyone is given an equal opportunity to work together and get to know one another.

Although my service learning time slot ends at 3:00, I walk out with the students and the teacher, after one day when a reading buddy asked me to say hi to her mom. While out in the parking lot surrounded by a sea of parents and students, I noticed that many of the parents do not speak English. My teacher reports behavior to parents at the end of the day, and takes this language barrier into account by bringing along with her the color slots she uses to represent good and bad behavior in the classroom. When telling one parent, who only spoke Spanish, the particularly bad behavior of her son that day, my teacher held up the red slot and the mother got the idea [unfortunately for her son].

That moment in the parking lot reminded me of theorist Lisa Delpit, who discussed in her article, "The Silenced Dialogue", the importance of explicitly teaching the rules and codes of a particular society in order for an individual to gain power. By reporting to a parent the good or bad behavior of her students, my teacher is allowing the parents an opportunity to discuss with their children what is and what is not expected in the classroom society. Therefore, the children can learn from their behavior what is acceptable, so they may have good behavior in the future and do well in class. When the students do well in class after class, furthering their education, they are gaining power in the education society. And when all students in a class understand what behavior is acceptable, the society will be strengthened in a positive way. Obviously, good behavior means uninterrupted, smoother lessons during the day, which everyone, including the teacher, can benefit from.