(Just a reminder, I teach high school students)
When it
comes to our students, we need to help them find a safe
and enlightening
education. We need to help burst the “bubble” that often isolates our students
from the very real world. Life is filled with some hard lessons. Sadly, we only make those lessons harder by
ignoring them and leaving it to “after high school” or “at home” to figure out.
Both of the
overall issues —the idea of multicultural learning as well as the gay community
and culture—are lessons we need to teach. As stated in the reading by.
Thornton, there is something called “ethnic content” and it “should be used to
help students learn that all human beings have common needs and
characteristics, although the way in which these traits are manifested
frequently differ cross-culturally” (362).
The key phrase here is “all human beings”— gay, straight, black, white,
male, female, and so on—all have “common needs and characteristics” and every
one of American’s students deserves respect and support because every child in
our classroom is a human being.
Not to get
side track here, but it burns me to hear the ways people judge and try to deem
one type of humanity as being superior over another, especially when it comes
at the devastating price of a child’s life because there are people who feel
that being gay or being Hispanic is not part of the true human condition.
When it
comes to what we teach, the ultimate lessons need to be focused on ways to
promote student safety and help students see outside of their sometimes overly
remote bubble (I love the idea of lessons of citizenship here).
Thus, enlightenment
is crucial here. After reading about Arizona,
I could help but reflect back on my own school district. I work in a district
that is mostly white, mostly suburban/rural, and mostly Christian. I have noticed that the minorities in our
school are as limited as the curriculum we teach. We read mostly “white European dead guys” and
I am afraid that the bubble my students live in is only exacerbated more by the
“bubbled literature” we are teaching. We
do read books that show some of the racial issues of the past with civil rights,
but we are lacking deeply—what about Native American literature? Or Hispanic? And
the real hot question—what about homosexual writers or issues?
The stereotypes
that we see our students use can only be fixed if we enlighten them, and help
them see there is much more out there, but it needs to start at a younger age
and the lessons need to be fully supported and encouraged in every
classroom. Now, I know, just thinking
about my own school district, that there would be parent outrage, but can those
parents look the school in the eye and say it is okay to let a 13 year old hang
himself because of our currently limited curriculum?
It proves that the only way to
break these bubbles (especially, if the parents won’t) is for the schools to...because with enlightenment
hopefully we can create a safer school
environment.
Resources:
So I went more in the direction of good resources we could use to teach some of this controversial curriculum and I just taught this very intense, but very awe-inspiring slam poem called "To This Day," to my English IV students. The poem deals with some tough issues with bullying:
I also added the name of an author that could help us break away from that "bubble literature" and move towards more multicultural learning. His name is Sherman Alexie and I love his writing as short mentor text lessons. I have only shared his work with my creative writing students, but I think every student should read him at least once before leaving high school.
Sherman Alexie Biography
Resources:
So I went more in the direction of good resources we could use to teach some of this controversial curriculum and I just taught this very intense, but very awe-inspiring slam poem called "To This Day," to my English IV students. The poem deals with some tough issues with bullying:
I also added the name of an author that could help us break away from that "bubble literature" and move towards more multicultural learning. His name is Sherman Alexie and I love his writing as short mentor text lessons. I have only shared his work with my creative writing students, but I think every student should read him at least once before leaving high school.
Sherman Alexie Biography
When I first started to read your post I was not sure where you were really going with it - I was afraid at first that you were in agreement with the concept of banning books and “sheltering” our students something like you I am not in favor of. The part about your post that struck me the most was when you talked about students reading mostly about “European dead guys” something I have seen some English departments fight over the past few years. What service are we really doing our students if the classics are the extent of the literature they are reading? This is just something I can’t get past. We force our students to read literature that means nothing to them and does nothing to create an interest in reading either. In fact it turns them off to reading. Does reading these old literary classics really help them be better prepared for life outside of high school? Students need to be deep thinkers and problem solvers and this is not coming from the literature they are reading. Society is full of all different types of people and controversies and yet we try to shelter them in school, for what reason? It is the same thing I hear about social media, block twitter and facebook and all those sites at school. Who so they can use them irresponsibly outside of school. Maybe if we put it on the table and talked about it and taught them social media responsibility it wouldn't be the problem it is. Maybe if we talked about controversial topics and read controversial material inside of school and taught them lessons about how to handle those topics responsible it wouldn’t be a problem outside of school.
ReplyDeleteAmber,
ReplyDeleteI think that you did a nice job of laying out the central reason that this theme is a concern of education: people judging certain cultures, lifestyles, or ideas to be more important or more worthy of study. Whether due to subtle ethnocentrism or downright racism, I fear that many schools have aspects of this type of thinking built into their curriculum; often it is part of the “hidden curriculum”. Hopefully, the students learn the curriculum that is taught in a school, but students also learn from the curriculum that is not taught in the classroom. (If nothing else, students get an idea about which ideas, cultures, or people are “valued”.) Like you, I feel like much of our curriculum, regardless of specific content area, is based around “dead, white, European men”. I took all of the classes that were offered by the social studies department at my high school, and all of the classes were dominated by American or Western European history, with little to no perspective offered for any other cultures. It was only in my undergraduate studies that I had any meaningful exposure to Far East or African history.
In my own content area (high school biology), I make a special effort to recognize women in science, especially Rosalind Franklin. She contributed data that was essential to the discovery of DNA’s structure, but was left off of the Nobel Prize (She is also commonly left out of textbooks as well). While most biology students would be able to identify Watson and Crick as the scientists responsible for establishing DNA’s structure, fewer would be able to recognize Franklin.
It seems to me that it would be an impossible task to create a curriculum that is completely uncontroversial because someone will always be upset: either by inclusion of a particular topic or by exclusion of a particular topic. Ultimately, I do believe that one of the purposes of schools is to create free thinking individuals that are able to make decisions for themselves based on information and data gathered by the individual, and I wonder about the message that is being sent to our students by censoring curriculum.
Amber,
ReplyDeleteI appreciate the way that you work through the motif of "bubbles" here...I think it is very effective. Especially in light of your current teaching context, I can see the ways in which the narrowing of perspectives can be seen as creating such bubbles. I wonder what you think this might be about? Who is interested in creating and maintaining such bubbles? What do they believe is gained from the bubbles? What are they afraid to lose if the bubbles are broken? Once we can answer these questions then, I think, we might have some place to move in our attempts to break through "bubble thinking".
It seems to me as if you have made some curricular moves to expand what you see as a narrowing in your ELA curriculum through the introduction of Alexie (he's great!) and the poem you share here. Do you feel as if these steps have been helpful to your students? How have they been received by parents/administration? Do your teaching peers do similar things with their students?
I find your argument reminding me of Martha Nussbaum's article from last week and Nell Noddings work from earlier in the semester. It seems like you are asking the foundational question invoked in the Thornton piece about who counts as a human being and what value school does(n't) place on everyone. How do we move towards curriculum that is inclusive and helps us to "cultivate humanity" in our students as suggested by Nussbaum?
Lots to think about!
amanda
Also...that POEM. So evocative, haunting, and powerful. I'm glad you shared it.
ReplyDelete