My name is Kevin Gravier. I was born and raised in a white semi-rural community surrounded by little farms growing corn, or that have cows, llamas, horses, donkeys, or sheep. I never really ventured out of my Coventry/ West Greenwich area until I entered college. In fact I had never been to downtown providence or South Providence until last year. I grew up surrounded by my mémère’s and pépère’s French-Canadian-American culture and that was about it. When I went to high school my parents wouldn’t let me take French for the language requirement which got me extremely upset. I knew a little here and there, like swears and my numbers, but I wanted to continue and learn more. They wouldn’t budge. So my first year in Spanish went spectacularly. I was able to pick up amazing amounts of Spanish vocabulary and grammatical structure. I even went above and beyond the class by teaching myself third year concepts and vocabulary because languages and cultures just seemed to get absorbed into my mind so easily. The second year of high school I skipped Spanish two since I took the final exam on the third day of class and received an 88% on it. I continued to grow and absorb more Spanish as the years went by. This past summer I lived in Costa Rica for a month in order to get my 114 credits for Spanish. This experience greatly changed my life in so many ways. It allowed me to absorb Latina culture while experiencing what it was like to live in the third world. Walking to the center of town to take a bus ride to this church to walk along the train tracks to school was a totally different experience than going to school in Coventry. Being constantly surrounded by barbed-wire, razor-wire, and electrified barbed wire on every building (including my own house) was at first very intimidating but later turned into something normal and non-threatening. The first ride from the airport to my house made me want to break down just thinking about the culture change, but I would have to say it was the best thing to ever happen to me.
All of this, my history, is carried around with me everywhere I go. The conservative-slightly-racist-dominating-white-male persona in Coventry is mixed with the outsider-minority-Spanish speaking-Latina culture of when I was in Costa Rica even further mixed with my homosexuality and liberal-affirmative action-diversity supporting college education. This all makes me into, what I believe I am now; a gay white lower middle class Spanish speaking liberal male with a favoritism towards Latinos and Latina culture (even above white culture) and an open mind still not exposed to enough African American students to dispel ALL of the subconscious racism that has been instilled in me from growing up. The last part is what is scariest to me, but I have made many improvements into my subconscious feelings towards African Americans. I wouldn’t by ANY means call myself racist, since it is ONLY subconscious and easily dispelled, but the truth is that it is still there and it would be wrong denying that it’s there.
Being able to speak Spanish is an obvious advantage to my ESL classroom since the majority of the students only speak Spanish. Of course I speak English to the ones who can handle it, but even they don’t speak or ask questions in English to the teacher who has only a basic understanding of the language. One disadvantage that I have is that I am placed with two students from Central Africa who speak French. It has been a long time since I have spoken French, but I am managing to get by. The black-bias that I mentioned ago has been slightly modified after understanding that Africans have a completely different culture than African Americans. I knew this before, but this only brought it even further home for me. I am struggling to remember words, but I still have the advantage of knowing French well enough to teach in it for two hours. One misconception that I thought I would come across would be about Latin-Americans being very loud people, but the truth is that this is actually true in my classroom. They are very loud and rambunctious and cheerful just as I expected them to be.
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You have an extreme edge over so many other upcoming teachers in our era, because our modern generation now requires leaders who can meet the expectations of schooling curriculums, which is ultimately the capability to make students successful. I say you have an edge because in order for teachers to meet those expectations we must, essentially, be able to fully communicate with all of our students. Not just communication verbally, but mentally, intellectually, socioculturally, politically, and academically. Your language diversity and cultural experience allows you to incorporate those aspects from the student’s linguistic and cultural understanding, because you have "experienced" it. That attribute is pedagogical empowering in so many ways.
ReplyDeleteI stress communication within your blog, because I can relate to the linguistic and cultural diversity. I myself am bilingual and share a diverse cultural background and implement these factors within my service-learning environment and with the students I work with outside of my service learning experience. I am a Teacher Assistant for a Behavioral Disorder school where all of my students are culturally and linguistically diverse. Through my own personal experience, with such students, I know yours will have an extreme positive outcome, because these skills allow me to reach students in a way that could not be possible without those kinds of skills. These skills will allow you to expose to your students an experiential learning that will open the door to transforming your students’ individual values and beliefs, which will involuntarily pushed them away from the continuous status quo.
I believe communication is the most important aspect to an authentic learning experience between teacher and student. Your capacity to speak so many different languages automatically makes you a pedagogical threat within the schooling environment. These talents of yours will help diminish the spatial indifference between yourself and your students. Your talents and your experience will open many doors of empowering relationships with your students, which is key for the teacher-student success in the classroom.
Good Luck with your VIPS experience...
I feel that you have what every upcoming teacher needs: experience with very different cultures. This allows you to not only to see two different lifestyles and environments but it gives you a greater perspective for the differences that do exist within the classroom. Being bilingual will allow you to connect with more students, specially in an ESL classroom. In her article Lisa Delpit talks about promoting diversity in the classroom. This relates to you because being able to speak two languages will allow your students to see how you have experienced and embraced other cultures outside of the world you were used to. I feel that as you gain expereience with more students you will quickly get over you subconcious racism that still exists. You will learn to first deal with it in the classroom until it completely dissappears due to good experiences with African American students. Your experiences with diverse cultures will definately be a great help to you in the classroom.
ReplyDeleteHi Kevin,
ReplyDeleteI love the paragraph in which you "unpack" your multiple perspectives/experiences. I also appreciate your distinguishing between overt racism and subconscious (implicit) bias. One question: How easy IS the dispelling of this subconscious bias? I'm not sure that ridding ourselves of this is simple. I'm convinced that you are deeply committed to the process.
Your partner in the good fight,
Dr. August