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.
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