The first session I went to was called "Making it Personal" and discussed the importance of social-emotional relationships and schooling. It really made me think about what a kid may be going through which directly affects his or her performance in the classroom. I was able to connect it to an article that I found alone called "Teaching through trauma: how poverty affect kids' lives" giving an example of a student who was assumed to be a bad student when, in reality, he was very stressed out due to his home life. There have been studies that link the development of a child's brain to poverty, stress, and trauma. The session brought upon the topic of building a relationship with students and understanding why they may not be performing to their full potential. It made me think about my own students in service learning, and what factors contribute to their own educational experiences. I thought that the second part of this session was very helpful, but the first half was disorganized and not applicable. Needless to say this was not my favorite session but I was able to connect some parts of it to class.
The second session I went to was much more enjoyable for me. It was called "Technology in Early Elementary Classrooms" and lead by 2 teachers of Henry Barnard. Although I am not an Early Education major, I still found the session very informative and could use many of the apps and websites for older kids as well. I was instantly able to connect this session to the Christiansen reading we had a few weeks ago. Christiansen discusses the impact of t the media on youth and how it affects their daily lives and personal relationships. With this reading I was able to extended it to technology and its relevance to a child's life, mostly because technology has grown so much since that reading was published and has become more directly influential since written. Within this session, we discussed how useful technology can be for our lessons and even classroom management, showing that it has become practically a necessity in the classroom. Their students were already using technology in their houses, so using it in the classroom was exciting but nothing they were not used to. Even if the child was not exposed to much technology at home, incorporating laptops and iPads in the classroom introduces them to the basic use of each device and becomes a part of their everyday life. Not only does the technology interest the kids and allows them to connect their lessons to what they are interested in, but also helps with short attention spans of young children. The apps and websites that the teachers used were very interactive and never held the students on the same page for long, allowing them to explore the site and learn in the process. The session was very interesting and I learned of so many resources that I could use within the classroom.
The keynote speaker was my favorite part of the conference, and was the part where I was able to connect most of what we learned in class. He was very informative and made his speech easy to understand and relatable, even for someone who was not an educator yet. His main point was that we must understand our students rather than pushing them along the system and the way we educate has not changed in over 30 years, which is why we see a problem in schools today. He discussed in depth how we must avoid just filling our kids with knowledge and then pushing them off through the system, referencing the Banking Concept of Education by Friere along with the film "Changing Education Paradigms" that we watched in the beginning of the semester. Both discuss how we should not hold classrooms where we just put information into the students' brains so that they can memorize, repeat, and pass a class without truly learning anything. This is a big problem we have in the education system today and I'm glad that he addressed the issue directly. The discussion of students being pushed through the system reminded me of Esmé in "Becoming Something Different" that we read 3 weeks ago. Esmé requested to move into some remedial classes rather than taking all honors courses. However, her entire schedule changed and she was forced into all remedial courses and then pushed along the system, although the could handle some honors courses in her workload. Her teachers thought she could not handle it at all and thought that moving her down would be the easiest thing to do so that she could be pushed through the system without any trouble. The keynote speaker addressed that too many people are being pushed through the systems without actually learning anything. He also showed a video which related to the "Silenced Dialogue" where a young student was trying to answer a question, and knew the correct answer, but was not called on resulting in him lowering his hand and staying quiet. In the video I remember seeing how defeated he looked because the teacher kept focusing on certain students and did not even recognize the fact that he was holding his hand up to answer the question. It was clear that the student was not paid attention to in that class, and it makes a person not want to participate when they know their opinion is not valued. The "Silenced Dialogue" discusses discipline for specific races within the classroom and racism in general. African American students become so angry with the way they are treated that they become silent due to their continuous rejected efforts for reform. This is an excellent example of how the silenced dialogue in action. The student continued to say the right answer and was trying to get the teacher's attention but when he was not called on, he felt defeated and became silent for the rest of the class period. This made me so angry and I honestly could not believe that this actually happened in an actual classroom. This is why it is so important to hear the opinions of each student rather than focusing on a select few, because there are obviously more than 5 children in the classroom. This also made me think about why certain students are called on over others, a thought I had always wondered even since I was younger. Yes, it is important to call on some students to see if they are understanding the topic, but if multiple students are raising their hand what makes you call on one over the other? From the video, why was this student completely disregarded and others called on? It is so important to call on different students each time, because then you're able to see if the entire class is understanding a topic rather than focusing on a select few, which is also bad teaching but that is a completely different story I am not going to focus on at this time.
Another issue he addressed was that many teachers do not take the time to understand their students and learn about their culture. Instead, they are immediately written off as inferior (white power and privilege!) and not given the attention they may need. This also applies to Esmé, who was not given the help she needed from some teachers because she was an ELL student. Her teachers did not understand her background and thought that she could not handle all of the honors classes she was given and moved her down when she requested for only a few classes to become remedial. I could also connect this to "An Indian Father's Plea" with the letter being written to Windwolf's teacher because she thought that he was simply slow. She had no idea what culture Windwolf came from and thought that he was not learning anything rather than he looked at things a different way. The teacher seemed as though she was not willing to learn about Windwolf's culture and looked at him as a slower student instead of getting to know his background. The keynote suggested that we "train students to understand a student's culture" and I could not agree more. I believe that it is important to learn where a student comes from in order to know what kind of teaching methods would work best, and what they are interested in overall. It is easiest to teach something to a child when discussing something they are interested in, and their culture may play a large role in their interests and hobbies. I could also relate this to Freedom Writers, where Mrs. G was the only teacher willing to learn where her students came from. It was very obvious that white power and privilege took over the school, but Mrs. G changed that by actually talking to her students and learning where they came from. The other teachers did not care about their students, nor did they care about whether they learned anything, but cared that they passed the tests and kept their job. The Freedom Writers taught that once you learn where a person is from and what they may be going through, then you can fully understand them and, when it comes to education, teach them. Not only was this issue covered in the keynote, but was also addressed in "Making it Personal" and I'm glad that such an important topic was covered by multiple sessions throughout the conference.
When the keynote speaker was done with his speech, I noticed stickers were placed upon each table with the quote "BUILD SCHOOLS NOT PRISONS" which is a very powerful message I took in two different ways. What I initially thought of was that we should make schools more welcoming to each student and not to have the environment as a prison cell. Too many times I have heard a classroom or a school hallway compared to a prison, an extreme opposite of what a school should feel like. Upon thinking about the quote, I then began to think about how important it is that we actually educate our students and not push them along the system so that they are prepared for careers and "the real world" instead of setting them up for failure. If a student is told they are not good enough and will not amount to anything in their life, they will believe this and may never have the drive to move onto higher education and start a career of their own. They may not even have the drive to try to get a part time job, because they believe they are not good enough, or may not be able to get it in the first place because they are not "qualified" leaving them to other means such as crime to support themselves and their families. This means that we should literally build more schools to educate our students and prepare them rather than building more prisons due to drop outs and increased crime rates.
No comments:
Post a Comment