Literacy Blog: Chapter 3 (Getting to Know Students Developing Culturally Relevant Practices for Reading and Writing)

Chapter 3 in Literate Lives began by explaining their interpretation of the divide between the teacher’s culture and students’ cultures.  It explained tht the divide was “ever-widening” (I guess I will open this entry with a little rant).  This seems to be such a disheartening notion since all we hear about is appreciating others’ cultures and incorporating multiculturalism into the classroom.  Even with the majority presence of white, female teachers in classrooms, I wonder how racially heterogenous classrooms must be in order for students’ cultures to be represented.  The focus needs to be shifted more from focusing more on the racial composition of classrooms to the appreciation of cultures.  I am the only black person in my placement, and because of all of the readings I have done in the SOE, I almost expected to feel uncomfortable and  alienated being the only black person in the class.  I did not it surprising that the chapter opened with talk of race instead of less visible differences.

Anyway, I always appreciate the notion of capitalizing on students’ funds of knowledge, using their life experiences to cater to student needs.  The idea of a “virtual school bag” is also a nice concept.  I would love to incorporate that idea and make it an activity when I have my own classroom.  On the first day of school, it would be nice to have students place identifiers of themselves into little bags to share with the classroom.  This would be  great opportunity for students to share their ideas with others and allow the opportunity for students to appreciate the diversity of their classmates.

With the implementation of culturally releveant pedagogy, using multicultural texts, codeswitching, contextualizing through authentic literature, documenting students’ home and community literacy practices and finding ways to ensure that lessons are student-centered will certainly ensure that ther is little to no potential for the perception of cultural mismatch.  Students must be closely observed and various facets of their lives taken into account to ensure that the whole child is educated.

I thorough enjoyed the ideas of the surveys, something that my classroom teacher made sure to do during the first week of school.  It was such an easy way to know the students interests and recognize the diversity of students that is often not mentioned, such as the differences in book choices.  When students are valued for all of their differences, classrooms are a lot more efficient and diversity is recognized as more than racial differences.