Learning Outcome Twelve
Learning Outcome Twelve: Foster respect for individual's abilities and disabilities and an understanding and appreciation of ethnicity, culture, language, gender, age, class and sexual orientation.
Fostering respect for individual’s abilities and disabilities and an understanding and appreciation of ethnicity, culture, language, gender, age, class and sexual orientation is incredibly important and something that I consistently strive to do. I will show that I have fulfilled this outcome through thank you notes my students wrote to a guest speaker, a sample of African praise poems written by students, and pictures from a culture lesson.
One of the wonderful aspects of teaching English is the freedom to use reading, writing, listening, and speaking to teach children about almost any topic. When teaching at Grant Middle School, a high needs school that contains children of many different ethnicities, including numerous ESL children, I felt that learning about respecting other cultures would be an invaluable experience for them both to take pride in their own culture as well as to learn to respect people whose cultures differed from their own. I therefore decided to devote an entire week to reading, writing, listening, and speaking about different cultures, deeming it our “Culture Week.” Students read about various cultures throughout the week and even had a chance to write their own African praise poems after having read about that genre.
During this week, students spent a lesson moving from different stations that each contained a text that taught about specific cultures. They worked with maps, videos, pictures, country mottos, and folklores in order to gain some knowledge about the cultures of different places such as Australia, Denmark, India, Japan, France, and more. Pictures from the day show me helping students to match countries with their mottos and students working on the computer to learn about the cultures of Japan and Hawaii. This lesson fulfilled the second dimension of Dr. James A. Banks’ “Five Dimensions of Multicultural Education” which includes knowledge construction. Rather than giving students information, I set up this lesson so that students could construct their own knowledge and draw their own conclusions based on the texts provided. Students were therefore able to use their own thinking and intelligence to learn about other cultures.
One of the highlights of our “Culture Week” was a visit from a Peace Corps volunteer who had recently served two years in the Western Africa country, Burkina Faso. She showed the students many pictures of her experiences and even shared some artifacts that she had brought back with her. Students were able to see what school was like in Burkina Faso and compared the education there to the education that they received at Grant. She also taught students how to speak a few phrases in one of the local languages of Burkina Faso, Jula. Students wrote thank you letters to our guest and expressed great appreciation for having learned about another culture. Some students even wrote about the importance of helping people and said that they were considering joining the Peace Corps so that they too could help those who need it. Spending a week focused on culture proved to be worthwhile because it promoted a tolerance in the classroom that had been lacking before and gave students a new appreciation of ethnicity, culture, and language.
Fostering respect for individual’s abilities and disabilities and an understanding and appreciation of ethnicity, culture, language, gender, age, class and sexual orientation is incredibly important and something that I consistently strive to do. I will show that I have fulfilled this outcome through thank you notes my students wrote to a guest speaker, a sample of African praise poems written by students, and pictures from a culture lesson.
One of the wonderful aspects of teaching English is the freedom to use reading, writing, listening, and speaking to teach children about almost any topic. When teaching at Grant Middle School, a high needs school that contains children of many different ethnicities, including numerous ESL children, I felt that learning about respecting other cultures would be an invaluable experience for them both to take pride in their own culture as well as to learn to respect people whose cultures differed from their own. I therefore decided to devote an entire week to reading, writing, listening, and speaking about different cultures, deeming it our “Culture Week.” Students read about various cultures throughout the week and even had a chance to write their own African praise poems after having read about that genre.
During this week, students spent a lesson moving from different stations that each contained a text that taught about specific cultures. They worked with maps, videos, pictures, country mottos, and folklores in order to gain some knowledge about the cultures of different places such as Australia, Denmark, India, Japan, France, and more. Pictures from the day show me helping students to match countries with their mottos and students working on the computer to learn about the cultures of Japan and Hawaii. This lesson fulfilled the second dimension of Dr. James A. Banks’ “Five Dimensions of Multicultural Education” which includes knowledge construction. Rather than giving students information, I set up this lesson so that students could construct their own knowledge and draw their own conclusions based on the texts provided. Students were therefore able to use their own thinking and intelligence to learn about other cultures.
One of the highlights of our “Culture Week” was a visit from a Peace Corps volunteer who had recently served two years in the Western Africa country, Burkina Faso. She showed the students many pictures of her experiences and even shared some artifacts that she had brought back with her. Students were able to see what school was like in Burkina Faso and compared the education there to the education that they received at Grant. She also taught students how to speak a few phrases in one of the local languages of Burkina Faso, Jula. Students wrote thank you letters to our guest and expressed great appreciation for having learned about another culture. Some students even wrote about the importance of helping people and said that they were considering joining the Peace Corps so that they too could help those who need it. Spending a week focused on culture proved to be worthwhile because it promoted a tolerance in the classroom that had been lacking before and gave students a new appreciation of ethnicity, culture, and language.
