Prompt 4: Johnson

When you live in your own world, a lot of the time you do not understand or know the world around you. I felt the movie, The Blind Side, was a perfect example of Allan Johnson's articles: Our House is on Fire and Who, Me? What It Means to Be Involved in Privilege and Oppression. It's, also, a good example of my own personal history/sociocultural characteristics that I had when I first entered the classroom.

Granted my lifestyle isn't as grand and elaborate as Sandra Bullock's character, but it's similar. I have grown up in a community that is 99% white. I have a house, a bed, clothes, and food on the table. I never found myself to be racist or one to discriminate. It was never an issue that had to be addressed. Which, according to Johnson is making the issue of privilege and oppression worse. If you are not trying to find a solution, then you are part of the problem. Johnson says that "difference is not the problem and diversity is not the solution." Let me define the term privilege: "Privilege," according to Johnson, "is a social advantage that is both unearned and comes to people simply because they happen to belong to a particular social category."

This can create challenges within the classroom if you are a teacher. If there is a system of privilege and oppression in a classroom, then the following will result: the teacher will see the white students as able and competent to do the work until they prove they cannot, and "students of color are assumed to be incompetent until they prove themselves." As a teacher, you must be free of social bias and treat the students the same and give them equal opportunities. If you come from any background, you must rid yourself of the ignorance of stereotypes. Everyone has their own life story to tell and no 2 are the same. The teacher must try to get rid of his/her ignorance to privilege and oppression, racism, discrimination, and the like, and the teacher must have an open mind in order to do his/her students any good.

When I took the race IAT online for class I became really nervous about volunteering in a school because my result was that I prefer European Americans. I didn't think I preferred anyone over someone else. I always thought that I was pretty openminded. Nonetheless, I was afraid this was going to pour over into the classroom. It did not. I have no preference over the children. They're all adorable and VERY sweet. However, from stories I heard from my friends, I did expect the class to be rambunctious. Fortunately, my teacher is amazing, and the kids really look up to her and respect her. My teacher told me she makes it look easy, and that the background of a lot of the kids is really sad. They have to worry about who has food on the table, who's uncle has been shot--a lot of issues privileged students would not have to worry about.

Johnson asks us to recognize the problem of privilege and oppression. He doesn't give us a clear process on how to do this because there really isn't one. If you're a teacher in a class with many different students, you cannot be ignorant to the issue of privilege and oppression if you want to make a difference and create fairness within the classroom.

Prompt 2: Kliewer

In Christopher Kliewer's article, Citizenship in School: Reconceptualizing Down Syndrome, he discusses the difference between utilitarian individualism and human reciprocity, Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences, and Vygotsky's theory of higher order thought processes.

At the school I volunteer at, 39% of children with disabilities are proficient in math and 33% are proficient in reading (according to infoworks). Even though there are no students that have down syndrome in the classroom that I volunteer in, there are still a couple of students that have attention deficit disorder (ADD). I want to make the point that there is cultural capital brought in by everyone, not only brought in by ethnic cultures, but by students with disabilities and behavioral disorders as well.

I didn't know any of the students had ADD until a few weeks ago. I did notice that there was one little boy who would fiddle around in his desk during a lesson. Usually he was cutting paper in his desk, and the teacher had to constantly ask him to put them away. I could understand her frustration, but I couldn't understand why she was not aggravated that he wasn't paying attention to, or taking part in, the lesson.

One day I stood near him during a science lesson and asked if he could take out his science notebook to write the vocabulary words in. In short, the teacher explained to me that he usually goes with a teacher aid during the science lesson. This was when she told me the boy had ADD and that the school does not have the resources to help children who have ADD or other behavioral issues. However, Kliewer would argue that the set up that lacks the resource of isolating children with disabilities is a better.

Kliewer's article focus' on people with disabilities and the role they play in society. He argues against utilitarian individualism which is when the individual comes before society. He disagrees with this notion that society exists in order to fulfill an individuals needs. As a result of Utilitarian Individualism, the people "who appear to lack the potential to accrue privileges, are systematically devalued as less than full citizens." Even though the boy in my class doesn't have down syndrome, I made the connection to Kliewer because the boy is singled out due to behavioral issues. This concerned me mostly because this little boy is extremely intelligent. When the class was learning about seeds, he came up to show me the seed. I asked him if he knew the different parts of the seed. Not only did he know all of the parts--he explained what the jobs of those parts were. I was extremely impressed, especially since he doesn't have a notebook. He just knew it. The same instance occurred when the class was learning about crayfish. He explained to me what the different parts of the body do to help the crayfish live.

This is where Kliewer's idea of human reciprocity can come into effect. Human reciprocity is when people work together and need to work together. By working together, everyone brings value to each other, and everyone is joined together. That is what makes up a society. Students with disabilities, behavioral problems, down syndrom--etc-- all bring a cultural capital into the classroom. We shouldn't look at these students as a problem, but as an asset to our society. Kliewer discusses Gardner's multiple intelligences idea. There are 7 intelligences in which Gardner came up with but says there are hundreds more: 1. Logical mathematical thinking; 2. linguistic capacities; 3. spatial-representation; 4. musical intelligence; 5. kinesthetic intelligence; 6. interpersonal intelligence; and 7. intrapersonal intelligence. Basically, everyone learns differently. Some people can sit and do their work by themselves, others need to be moving around and working within a group.

Finally, Kliewer talks about Vygotsky: "Vygotsky believed that the higher-order thought processes that make us uniquely human exist first and foremost in the social and cultural relationships between a child and the collective." In other words, don't isolate the child. The child will learn better through interacting with other children.

By not isolating children with disabilities and keeping them in the classroom can help strengthen society through human reciprocity. Everyone has their own cultural capital to bring into the classroom--and society as a whole. By giving everyone the same opportunities everyone, even non-disabled children, are able to learn and grow and thus contribute more to society.

Prompt 3: Goldenburg

While the students were taking a math test when I was at the school, the teacher asked me if I wouldn't mind grading the students' vocabulary tests so that she would be able to organize and prepare for the next lesson. Of coarse I didn't mind. I felt it would be a great opportunity to view scenes from the field and get an idea of how the students are assessed.
When I finished grading the vocabulary tests, I was surprised at how low some of the scores were because all of the children are very intelligent and active in class. Giving the tests back to the teacher, I made sure to let her know about the lower scores. She put those scores aside so she could figure out how to approach it later. She explained to me how those students were mostly English Language Learners (ELLs). Immediately I made a connection to Goldenburg. The class had been tested on "academic English." This is "a term that refers to more abstract, complex, and challenging language that will eventually permit you to participate successfully in mainstream classroom instruction." If Goldenburg could give the teacher I work with advice on how to respond and assess the situation of low academic English vocabulary scores, he would say that she should try to figure out what level each student is at in academic English vocabulary and to modify the test the ELL students take based on the level that they are on. Goldenburg would encourage the students to read and learn in their first language because it helps promote higher reading achievement levels in English. Goldenburg says, "There is no way to know whether ELLs tested in English score low because of lagging content knowledge and skills, or because of limited English proficiency."
Once a person has an understanding and some sort of support system within a given language, it will be much easier for that person to relate and transfer information from their dominant language to their second language. Goldenburg supports this notion by providing evidence for a meta-analysis conducted by the Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP): "The analysis concluded that teaching ELLs to read in their first language and then in their second language, or in their first and second language simultaneously, compared with teaching them to read in their second language only, boosts their reading achievement in the second language."
Going back to the low academic vocabulary scores in the class that I volunteer in, Goldenburg would, also, suggest that the teacher should work with the students on "phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary, comprehension, and writing." These components would have to be structured and directly taught. "other types of instruction that the NLP review found to be promising with ELLs...include cooperative learning [students working together on tasks in a group], encouraging reading in English, discussions to promote comprehension, and mastery learning [a students must show proficiency in their current learning objective before they can move on to the next learning objective]."
In a nutshell, the problem being discussed is that there are non-English learners in the classroom. This is important to know and understand because there are students in classrooms that do not know what is going on because the students are not all learning on the same level. Some students are learning science and some students are trying to understand the English first and foremost before they are able to understand the science. In order to help these students succeed, we need to realize that there is a problem, know individual students' strengths, teach students using the components listed above (such as phonics and vocabulary), and to create modifications. The students need to be able to learn in their dominant language because that will better society as well as help the student to learn academic English.