Myth Busters

This article was great. It was a combination of my recently researched effective multicultural literacy and the women’s studies classes that I took in undergrad.  Much like the author I too was astonished at how prevalent the secret education is and how hard it is dismember its hold on oneself and society.  I hope to be able to take a similar approach in my classrooms.  I want to create literacy invitation that has students look at different multicultural books and allow the room to see where the stereotypes are prevalent. 

This article was a great example on how to go about the investigation.  Although it would need to be modified for 5^th graders, the intention is still the same.  To seek out racism and sexism so that we can create a world that is empowering to all!

Choice and Freedom... is it fair to the rest?

I loved chapter 1 and 2 from The Inner World of the Immigrant Child. It is no secret that my passion lies with working with immigrants and English Language Learners.  These articles game me practical ideas on how to set up my ESL classroom and activities to help them learn.  THe film strip, the rug or island, group rooms and an ART TABLE! I haven't gotten this excited about my possible own classroom all semester! It also showed how a teacher that is forced to use the "pull-out", whereas the kids are removed from the classroom for a period or more a day, can work.  I liked that she allowed the kids to choose if they needed more or less and that she set up her room like a sanctuary.
However, there are some quintessential parts to the set-up that are IDEAL, and therefore will not always work.  First her obvious support of the administration and the school as a whole.  She was able to allow kids to virtually come and go when they needed with a maximum of 3 visits. This is wonderful for the needs of the immigrant student, but how difficult would that be to manage as a school or a classroom? You can't let every kid decide so how do you explain that THESE kids get to? How do you convince a mainstream teacher that an immigrant child gets to decide if they stay in their classroom? Is it fair to the teacher or their other students?
Which brings me to my next point. I loved that the first student Dennis wasn't graded until he asked to be graded.  This makes sense.  While a student is dealing with the emotional distress of their recent immigration and the stress of learning a new language it doesn't makes sense to grade them.  However, is that realistic in this standards and test driven curriculum that we are working with? Is it fair not to test Dennis but test other students that are going through difficult time? Are they even allowed NOT to test them?
I hope I am as lucky to get that kind of support and freedom.

MGRP - Just say YES!

After working on at Multi Genre Research Paper I can say with certainty that it is something that I would use in my classroom.  I found that since I was able to select the topic and research it on my terms, I was engaged and excited about every nugget of information I discovered about my topic.  One of the most freeing parts of the paper was the encouragement of finding more questions that I could answer.  Without the pressure of answering every point I discovered, I was able to broaden the scope of my inquiry and questions became exciting, instead of drudgery.

The genre pieces became a creative way in which to express all the exciting nuggets of information that I discovered.  It also reinforced the idea that literacy goes beyond the restriction of books.  While working with the different genres I found that I started looking for literacy everywhere.  Although I wasn’t able to use all my ideas do to time, technology restraints and personal ability, I still came up with at least twenty different genres.  From seasoning salts to obituaries, from candy wrappers to crayon boxes, every trip to the grocery story or walk to class became an exercise in different genre spotting.   What an innovative way to get students looking at their world around them through the eyes of a “literacy spy”.