The Subconscious Change Model of K&W (7)

As mentioned in one of my previous blogs, I said that the school looks pretty new and not as bad as I was expecting, but there was one thing that took me be surprise that I just couldn’t understand. This past tutoring experience, I needed to pick some things up from CVS and some tamarind juice and something to bring for work later that day. By the time I was all done and at the school I was a good 15 minutes early, so I buzzed in and signed the visitor’s book and decided to explore the school. I walked around and found a bathroom, so I walked inside to find two urinals, three toilets, and some sinks. This may seem normal, but there were no doors on the stalls to the toilets and no mirrors above the sinks. I think that this was the biggest shock of all my teaching experiences and let me see another difference to what seemed like, from the outside, a pretty nice school. Now, of course, this school is not a bad school, but I’m just beginning to find some of the more obscure problems with it. This whole experience has lessened the gap between me and students who came from urban schools as a result of seeing these little differences and problems that are as mundane as bathroom use or as obvious as what an average class could be like.
Kahne and Westheimer in their article “In the Service of What? The Politics of Service Learning” stress the difference between charity and change. Where charity is still an important act that helps the lives of others, the change model that they mention incorporates this charity and pairs it with deeper investigation that leads to a transformative experience, social reconstruction and a different level of caring. Even though I don’t think I have done this full version of the change model, this experience was something a little bit more than just charity. This past time that I went in I was greeted with hello’s, warm smiles, and for the first time a warm “how are you” from the student that I am always teaching. I think that by teaching the full two hours in French and lowering myself to a level of LFP (Limited French Proficient) my main tutoree can see that I know how it feels to be the person who doesn’t speak the academic language perfectly. This levels out the gap between us and hopefully led him to trust and respect me more while also showing him my confidence in speaking French even if it isn’t always correct.
Also by showing respect to his own language and showing him the parts of a sentence and how they transfer in French, I am taking in Goldenburg’s ideas (a theorist who believed that learning to read and write in a home language will better facilitate learning the English language) and putting them into action in order to raise the value of his native language and combine it with the language of the majority. By using this theorist’s ideas mixed with many of the other ones that were read and discussed in my FNED class and in my previous blogs, I think that I am inadvertently contributing to the change model since I am socially acknowledging the linguistics and culture of the student and by doing so it has become a transformative teaching experience where, in the future, I can apply the skills that I am learning now to make my future classroom into a better learning environment. By doing this one-on-one tutoring almost 100% in the French language (since they started off knowing basically nothing in the language) I have let them know that even though they are learning English and people are pushing them to do so, it is still very important to keep their culture and that it is worth something, even if the dominant ideology may stress the importance of their own.

Cultural rules and "issues" in the classroom (3)

All of the students in my classroom come from non-English speaking backgrounds and therefore also bring with them into the American classroom a unique cultural experience that varies from student to student. There are high schoolers from Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Central Africa, the Ivory Coast, Gabon and many other places that shape who they are and how they will react in certain situations and the cultural rules that they abide by. As mentioned by Lisa Delpit in her article “The Silenced Dialogue” there are codes and rules for the “culture of power” which are a reflection of the ideals of that culture (or white Americans) and if someone enters that culture from an outsider perspective they could get confused by social norms and rules. Many of the students in the classroom are extremely loud, talk over each other, and seem to have disrespect for authority while others sit quietly alone, hardly dare ask to go to the bathroom, don’t stop working during the break, and barely talk even spoken to. Both of these are extremes and of course there are students in the middle, but each student brings some sort of cultural ideology that molded them to act how they act.
Since some of them can barely speak English, it is hard to transfer and teach those cultural codes that Delpit mentions to the students which leads to an oversimplified characterization of someone who might seem rambunctious or socially hermitic. Today “Pepe” got into a small fight with someone who wasn’t from the class. It was obvious to me that it was playful and not life threatening, just a show of machismo that is almost necessary in Hispanic culture. The teacher understood this as I did and split them up, took them aside, and explained the rules of the school to the students and let them go with a warning. If this was to happen in my old High School, they would both probably be sent down to the office to be suspended for a couple days or so. Another girl, “Yaneli,” took out her iPod to show me pictures of her family member’s quinceñera (a sweet sixteen party that brings a woman into adulthood). Instead of telling her to put it away or taking it, I acknowledged the fact that family means something deeper to Latin Americans and that a quinceñera is extremely important to girls, so I looked at her iPod and through a couple pictures, commented and acknowledged my interest, and moved on with her worksheet. This creates a bond between the student and I, it only took a minute of time out of the class, and I didn’t punish her even though it was against school rules to have it out during class. The reason why I didn’t take it away was because she knew what she was doing and in her mind saw it as fine. This means that the rule of the classroom wasn’t clear to her or she doesn’t accept it which also hints towards a misunderstanding of the rules. By understanding Delpit’s idea of cultural power, a teacher can gain respect in the classroom, create a bond with the students, and teach or even better the understanding of those cultural rules and why they are in place.