My Collaborative Project

I am going to use Google Sketch Up with the students to design physical spaces. I have two different groups, a group of level 1 & 2 students who are learning basic English and a group of level 3 & 4 students who are reading a variety of texts. Upcoming are units on home & family in one group and one on a piece called "Talking Walls" about monuments. I will design a collaborative project where the students can use Google Sketch Up to design a home or a monument. For the home project the students each need to produce a room in the home of their group while collaboratively designing the home as a whole, inside and out. For the monument project, the group will design a monument to a person or event and create a rationale for their monument to present to the class community. The students in the class can then vote on the monument that they would like to erect in their community.

McKenzie: Becoming a Technoconstructivist

In terms of where I find myself on the development scale, I know that I am far from preliterate. I use technology in various ways in the classroom. I have e-mail and check it at least once a day - though I still prefer to find people for face to face conversations if I can. I have created power points and blogs but have never presented any for my students or had them use and create any of these things. I use the internet for searching for websites and have kept grades on-line, created spread sheets for a myriad of reasons, and use templates for lesson plans, and a few times a year I can take the students to the lab to use computers for word processing, research, and interactive learning sites. So I think that I am a technotraditionalist. I do not worry too much about the reliability of the technology, but I do feel as though I do not have the skills and knowledge to truly integrate what is available, for the greatest benefit of my students, into my instruction and everyday classroom activities.

Marc Prensky: Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants

I do agree with Prensky’s premise. His analogy is very fitting. After all, native culture and language feel second nature to a person and knowledge of other cultures and languages create barriers in understanding. As an ESL teacher I see this native vs. immigrant situation frequently. An African student who has offensive body odor, a Puerto Rican who has multiple absences and tardies, or a Columbian who looks down at his under-educated classmates. Then there are the teachers who yell at my ELLs as if they were deaf or make assumptions that they have unfit parents.
The division in culture and language of digital native and the digital immigrant is not very different from the cultural and language divides I see everyday. This divide exists in my home where my husband works creating web-based training tools for Staples. He talks about things that I have never heard of and when he tries to explain I feel like one of my students. Confused and frustrated, yet longing to “get it” so we can move on. I want to know and understand all of these “cool” things my husband, younger friends, and students talk about. I want to take advantage of all this technology that has simplified their lives and created opportunities to have and experience things that we did not have before. I can go immediately online to my computer and see pictures of where my student is from on Praia, Cape Verde or send a message to friend half a world away and get a response back before the end of the day. Beats the week and a half I had to wait for my best friend in seventh grade to get a letter and send one back. If we had had e-mail, would we have stayed in touch longer than a couple years?
Yet, as one who has lived in two worlds, I lement the passing of an age of tangibility. Holding an object in your hand before purchasing it, the feeling of excitement of opening a new CD, to explore the jacket as you listen to the songs, or the smell of a new book and the creak of the binding giving way in your hand are the pleasures lost on this generation of digital natives. There are experiences that cannot be duplicated – standing in the Sistine Chapel surrounded by tourists from all over the world or sitting in a darkened theatre awaiting the trills of live performance.
And what about Sarah’s letters from seventh grade? They are still in a shoe box along with many others, to be discovered and rediscovered again, but the e-mails are gone, deleted. The modern environmentalist teacher in me is eager to make use of the fast, inexpensive, and vast accessibility of technology, but the old world artist wonders, what will we lose. It is wonderful to think of the trees and space we can save in this age where a small portable device has the power to do so much more than we ever thought possible, but frightening to think that these digital natives may never be able to appreciate the peace and beauty of reading literature or walking through a museum because it is boring, slow, old fashioned.

Integrating Technology

I would like to improve and integrate my technology skills into teaching to create more interest, participation, and learning in my class. I only know about the things I can already do... so I think I want to learn about web quests (sounds exciting), digital storytelling, websites, tutorials, and web research techniques for students.
I want to create engaging, rich experiences for my students to learn language and content.

Boler: All Speech is Not Free

Boler argues that due to the inequities within our society that all speech is not free. This means that it is valued differently contingent on the speaker. An utterance by one person can cause them danger while another is acknowledged, even applauded to speak the very same idea, while a third is not heard at all. These inequities apply to hostile speech as well.

Boler is concerned with the educators role in using "affirmative action pedagogy" and historicized ethics in the classroom to access and critically analyze hostile speech in a "safe space" where the marginalized voices can respond and be heard. She recognizes that this space maybe "unreal" in that it does not represent the real world experience but that this is the point. The real world is not a always a safe place for the silenced to be heard because "all speech is not free" but in the classroom those voices can be heard.

Boler gives two examples of how the marginalized can be heard in the classroom. One way is to set boundaries and rules that exclude hostile speech so that all time and preference is given to those voices that are not heard in society. The other way, seemingly contradictory, is to allow all speech, all opinions, to the end that "teaching moments" can occur where hostile speech can be confronted, examined, and criticized openly.

Boler gives two reasons for affirmative action pedagogy: that the right to free speech does not protect everyone and often protects the dominant culture's "right" to use hate speech against the minority culture and that there is a psychological affect that hate speech incurs on the target. Affirmative action pedagogy, when used appropriately has two important aspects - accountability for the speaker of hostile utterances and the opportunity for critical agency for the marginalized. In this way the target(s) can speak for themselves and openly confront the speaker instead of having the governing agent "protect the victims." In this case the speaker (who does not speak because they were disallowed from the get go) would never be held accountable or be given the opportunity to examine his/her own beliefs in view of rational discussion within the safety of the classroom with peers and scholars.

Interestingly, Boler discusses self-disclosure as a measure of leveraging power on the part of the dominant culture and to draw attention back to itself. Whereas Delpit wanted the personal experience of the disenfranchised educators of color to be able to use their personal experience to advocate for pedagogy that would work best with their students. They are not in contradiction to each other - in fact Delpit's complaint that educator's of color feel silenced and dismissed when they offer personal experience as proof is a prime example of Boler's statement that all speech is not free, in that the person from the dominant culture is more easily heard and uses their personal experience to position themselves in the driver's seat of the conversation once again. This type of self-disclosure is meant to undermine the marginalized persons and demonstrates the speaker's lack of willingness to recognize power and privilege and their place in the system.

Boler concludes with the difficulties of practicing affirmative action pedagogy in the classroom and how allies and role models are a pivotal part. Her emphasis is on how educational spaces are the place where we can put historicized ethics into use to make changes in how people view, discuss, and treat the minority cultures.

Rodriquez: Aria

In Aria, we have the theme of silence again. Nearly every text we read mentions "silence" in the discussions of how social issues are played out in educational settings. Delpit's silence was between colleagues, Carlson's was the don't ask, don't tell and marginalization of gays, Finn's is the silence of the poor.

Rodriquez talks about a silence that begins at school and invades his family life. He writes about the necessity of being immersed in English in order to learn the language that would grant him access to the public world. However there is also the sadness and loss of his family's intimacy of using the language with which they were most comfortable in favor of assimilation. It seems that there is a choice - be successful in one world or stay tied to the other. Something is lost when another is gained.

Rodriquez seems to think that this is a necessary part of an English language learner's experience if they are to become competent in the English world. I hope not. I think that in some ways his experience does not truly reflect all... but at the same time I know that many teachers attempt to help their students by suggesting that the parents speak English with them. I do not do this. Personally (and because I am a secondary ESL teacher) I believe it is best if the parents not only speak to the children in the first language, but to speak to them on topics of depth, abstract ideas, and the things that the students may not be ready to understand in English, but are ready to talk about in order to broaden their thoughts and give them transferable ideas. I try to let the parents know that this is good for them to share with their children the richness of their first language and that with patience, time, and study English will be learned at school. They can also practice English if they too want to improve it. It is nice for parents and children to learn together. This idea Rodriquez describes when his family is attempting to communicate with English, laughing and in a new way bonding. They enjoyed going through it together.

What I find interesting is that Rodriquez feels that as a young child he could not feel a sense of ownership of English - that it was not his to use until Spanish was taken from him. Is there a better way for ESL teachers to communicate that English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, etc. are all public languages and that anyone can "have" them and use them and enjoy them? I have no first hand knowledge of bilingual programs except that the few students who have come to me from such schools, have great difficulty using English. So, I do feel that Rodriquez's opening paragraphs resonate with my limited experience. I wonder if bilingual education postpones the student's learning of English. Does bilingual education create a "crutch" that the student is always seeking or are researchers correct that the students need to develop both languages in order to develop fully and make true progress?

Delpit would say that Rodriquez's experience is valid and he knows what he is talking about because he lived it. I agree, but also recognize that it is limited by his personality (shy) and schooling situation (Catholic school in 19??) and family situation. There are ways to help our students build their English language and bring with them a richness of identity. I tell my students that they have twice as much (some three times or four) culture because they have the cultures of their first country and language, and the cultures of their new country and language. They need not choose to be successful, but to use all that they have to feel that strength and pride in who they are and where their families come from while being proud of all that they are learning and accomplishing.

Carlson: Gayness, Multicultural Education, and Community

Carlson discusses the marginalization of homosexuality in society and therefore within the school system. As the “normalizing community” promotes a dominant and limited idea of “normal” there is a silencing of the “other” or any person or idea that does not fit into the concept of what is normal. One way is through abuse. Since Matthew Shepherd, www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Shepard, people are becoming increasingly aware of gay bashing as a hate crime. However, do we as a society step in to stop this form of hate? www.abcnews.go.com/WhatWouldYouDo/Story?id=7152579&page=1
What about at school? Do teachers speak up and defend students’ rights? Is it addressed? Many teachers are uncomfortable with talking about sexuality with students. Students use “gay”, “homo”, “fag”, etc. as everyday slurs without a thought.
Additionally, silencing is employed – we are familiar with “don’t ask, don’t tell” as a military practice. www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1707545,00.html This is not the only environment where people are asked not to reveal their true selves as a means of silencing gays. Silencing may be the most powerful tool of marginalization because it denies not only voice but humanity. In the film Milk, there is a powerful scene where Harvey Milk asks the gay men and women to come out to their families so that all people could feel that connection to the movement for gay rights. Once it they became vocal, they became empowered.
We also need to remember that separate is not equal in multicultural education - www.usnews.com/blogs/on-education/2008/10/24/a-third-high-school-for-gay-students.html
I could not believe this article when I discovered it… Creating schools for gay students, for me, addresses Carlson’s argument that there is some idea that “the normals” have to be separated from “the gays” for fear of contamination. Homosexuality as a contagion or disease furthers the hostility. After all we refer to people who are against homosexuals as “homophobic”, phobic meaning fear.
Therefore, as teachers, we must address the issue by opening discussions around sexual orientation and that hate, violence, and discrimination are not tolerable. As I have found in my classroom, many students have gay relatives in their lives and once the silence is broken, the slurs and hate subside. We have a powerful obligation to see multicultural education not only in terms of color and religion, but in terms of gender, sexual orientation, and other communities.
For more reading on this subject and to find out what you can do as a teacher in your school:
www.ncrel.org/sdrs/areas/issues/educatrs/leadrshp/le0gay.htm
www.members.tripod.com/~twood/guide.html
www.glsen.org/

Finn: Literacy With An Attitude

Questions for discussion...

• What does Finn mean by "literacy with an attitude"?
• What are the four mechanisms contributing to the status quo?
• What is the "pretend-school model" vs. "real-school model"?
• How does Delpit's theories compare or contrast with Finn's?
• Would Kozol agree or disagree with Finn, and in what ways?
• In what ways would the Freirean model be possible in your classroom? Impossible?
• Delpit calls the breakdown in communication "the silenced dialogue"... what silences does Finn talk about, what causes it?
• Have you encountered "oppositional identity" in your classroom and how will you "deal with it" in the future having read Finn?
• Using Anyon's schools ( or the teachers in chapter 14) as models - which type of school did you attend, which do you teach in, which style do you think your own most closely relates to, and which is your goal now?
• Do you feel prepared to or how will you try to use dialogue (vs. antidialogue) in your classroom in the future? Would you consider using negotiations, culture circles, cultural journalism, read-around, and /or collective texts.
• Next January/February, how will you address the topics of civil rights history?

Kozol: Still Separate, Still Unequal

I have chosen three quotes to focus on. The first focuses on how we use language to disguise the problem in our segregated schools - "Visitors to schools like these discover quickly the eviscerated meaning of the word [diverse], which is no longer a proper adjective but a euphemism for a plainer word that has apparently become unspeakable." Just as Johnson pointed out that we must use the words, here Kozol is addressing the same issue. If we don't call it what it is, then how can we recognize the problem? However, I think Kozol is putting more onus on society than Johnson, in that it is a purposeful misleading or cover-up going on. After all, the last time people recognized segregation as a societal evil there was civil unrest, protests, marches, and violence. It is like a dirty little family secret that everyone refers to with a code phrase. Our dirty secret? Our schools are not actually integrated. In fact, they are quite segregated with fewer than 10% white students attending public urban schools in the countries largest cities and not in the South - in the North, too - Chicago, Hartford, Seattle, etc.

"This...would not happen to white children." These are the words of a principal of such a school, in reference to the disrepair of the building. This quote has great meaning because Kozol is again pointing a finger. We have allowed segregation to continue and for the inequalities to arise again. If the schools were integrated white parents, politicians, journalists would be ensuring that their children would not go to school under such deplorable conditions. Indeed, they don't. But they also don't try to stop it from going on. Additionally, excuses are made and stalling around issues of economics. Both ideas of there isn't money and money wouldn't help are used to withhold from these "diverse" urban schools. These are lies to cover up the dirties secret of all. That in fifty years we have not gone away from that leaky one room shack school house in the woods, but rather we are moving towards it again. And it begins at two years old with "Baby Ivies" and moves up to elementary schools run like Nazi camps for minimum wage workers, lacking in recess, art, music, and many other programs, where students are prepared for a high school that does not prepare for college, where nearly half of the students will not even graduate.

My last quote is from a student in reference to another student who is upset that she is forced to take remedial/home ec courses instead of having the opportunity to take AP courses. He says, "You're ghetto, so we send you to the factory. You're ghetto - so you sew!" This student much like Kozol is pointing to a conspiracy to keep the powerful and wealthy at the top and the poor and disadvantaged at the bottom. It is difficult not to see it this way when so much evidence is presented. How could "we" not see what is going on? Why are we not taking to the streets? Are we conspirators or do we live in some foggy dreamworld where we believe "The Dream" is real because we aren't forced to look at the problem because we go to different schools and use words like diverse? And we have a Black president - evidence of all our great progress...

Delpit: The Silenced Dialogue

As I was reading Delpit, I came to the section on the five aspects of power. The fifth one is "Those with the power are frequently least aware of - or least willing to acknowledge - its existence. Those with the least power are often most aware of its existence." I immediately thought of the "luxury of oblivion" in Johnson's book.

This connection is important because it reduces the deniability of the idea, which is what those people who have the power would want to be able to do so as to go on being oblivious and remove themselves from the uncomfortable ideas that they participate in the culture of power and even that they themselves are part of the dominant, powerful, and therefore oppressive culture. Delpit uses a great example when she refers back to the vignettes that open the chapter. That the white people would refer to research to validate their own arguments and would not accept personal experience as valid support from the person of color's side of the argument. That was a cultural code that they would access to "win the argument" but in effect they were invalidating the other person completely and silencing them.

In Johnson, the oblivion is part of denial altogether. In Delpit, this lack of awareness leads to communication breakdowns where by indirect communications are meant to deemphasize power between teachers and students (or colleagues or anyone) instead contributes to the student's confusion and alienation by the teacher who is using codes (whether they realize it or not). Therefore, the power is not actually being reduced at all, only veiled (as the power is there whether or not we admit it) and the student is never taught the rules that they are being subjected to. By not being explicit in teaching and in communication, teachers are neglecting to help students succeed in a world where there is a culture of power.

I am glad that Delpit explains that teaching the cultural codes and being explicit in language teaching of the culture of power does not mean negating the other, but that teachers need to do both - teach the culture of power and be explicit enough to also point to the beauty and validity and value of other cultures and languages. By this I think she is saying that we need not admit to the culture of power in a way that means we are hanging our heads in shame but in a way that says it is true that this exists, but it is only one section of a rich and varied quilt of colors and styles that we can draw from and examine and discuss. In this way we elevate the conversation and our society to a new level.

Johnson: Privilege, Power, and Difference

Johnson argues that the problems of difference belong to everyone, and that the social grouping that a person belongs to and the power associated with that group does not necessarily reflect on that person as an individual. He is explaining the role of societal values and how they endow some with power and privilege while others are denied. These advantages or disadvantages can be bestowed based on factors such as race, gender, sexuality, and economic status, as well as a number of other attributes.

What I found most clever and interesting is his attempt to disarm the defensiveness of those who have the power and privilege and through denial and defensiveness hold back our society's opportunities to move toward what Johnson thinks of as the ultimate goal - to change the world and eliminate these difference based troubles that we share.

For example, I have always wondered why the "family values" people think that allowing two people in love to get married somehow takes away from "family values". But this is a prevalent argument against gay marriage. Why do they feel so threatened? Johnson also addresses this "fear of the other" and dismantles the belief that it is an inborn part of our nature but rather a learned idea. I can see this because I grew up curious about people who are different from me and have an affinity to seek out and discover what I have not yet experienced in my social exchanges.

I also connected with Johnson's examples of "Mama's Boy" vs. "Daddy's Girl" because I experienced it with my own children... It was so cute and sweet that my daughter was a daddy's girl, but then after my son was born when I would snuggle him (same as I did my daughter) I was accused of turning him into a mama's boy.

Lastly, I smirked about the "diversity training" which I have heard about and was spoofed on "The Office" an so was surprised to find that they have any affect. But then, at the heart of this section on unearned advantage vs. conferred dominance was a kernel of the secret of "the threat". What if there isn't enough to go around? Why should one person give up the power and privilege and risk not having all that they want? It is easier to believe that they deserve it or earned it, rather than that it was given to them. This is what I fear will hold us back from Johnson's goal... that the people we need most to enact change are the people who least want it, those with the most power and privilege, those with the most "to lose". Or at least that is how they see things through their "pane".

IAT

I thought it was a very interesting test. Incredibly simple yet telling I suppose... but then I had little to no preference for my own race. So I feel pretty good about that. If I had come out with a strong preference for my own race I suppose I would be considering all the missteps that the test could cause. That I had trouble remembering which topics were on which side when all four were up, etc. Then again I am married to a Black man and have two gorgeous bi-racial children with him. However, as a white person I am also privy to the things that whites say to each other about affirmative action, black names like Jaquan, and even more blatant biases. When whites say ignorant things about other races and cultures I feel embarrassed for them and a little for myself even though I know that one person cannot speak for a whole race, i wish people could be ... smarter (if that is the right word) about understanding others.

I really liked the piece on Date Line about how whites are embarrassed to have a preference towards their own race but blacks are proud of it, that they have overcome societal biases that influence them against their own race. On the flip side, is a white person prejudiced if the test reveals a strong preference for white? This difference of interpretation demonstrates the level of discomfort many people still feel about race in this country. I wonder if "white guilt" can ever be washed away entirely...

To begin...

I am Jennifer Walker: Teacher, Wife, Mother, M.Ed TESL candidate & therefore also sleep deprived zombie. So far so good. A new marathon begins...