Weblog VI

Based on your reading of Ladson- Billings (2001) Chapters 3-5, write a first person narrative about culturally relevant pedagogy including discussion of its three (3) aspects: achievement, cultural competence and sociopolitical consciousness.

When I become a teacher, I know that these three aspects of culturally relevant pedagogy will be important in my classroom. The first of these aspects is achievement. The most important thing I read in Ladson- Billings’s book about achievement is that the teacher needs to create a reason for the students to want to achieve or learn. The “because I’m the teacher and I say so” approach will not always work and is not an ideal approach either. An excellent example of creating a reason to achieve was when Hughes cohort member, Kyla, struggled with a particular young girl named Latrice. Kyla had difficulty getting Latrice to participate and engage in learning. However, when Kyla presented a unit on AIDS, Latrice was eager to learn and contribute in this unit because her grandmother had passed away from AIDS. As Kyla learned, relating what you are teaching to your students’ lives is important for achievement. In my future classes, I hope to be able to apply my lessons to the lives of my students, helping them create the desire to achieve on their own, because they have a true interest in the material, and not because they are told they have to.
Having cultural competence will also be important to me when I become a teacher. The booked stressed the importance of teachers having an understanding of their students’ cultures and backgrounds because it is a large part of their lives and how they learn and interact with others. A great example of how important it is to understand the culture of your students is a story told to me by a professor here at JCU. The professor was lecturing a student who had misbehaved and became angry when the student refused to look him in the eyes as he reprimanded him. The professor took this as a sign of disrespect and contacted the student’s parents. However, the professor later found out that in this student’s Hispanic culture, it was considered a sign of disrespect to look at an adult when they are reprimanding you. Through this example, it is clear how important it is that I know the cultures of my students and the school’s community because it directly affects my instruction and interaction with the students.
Finally, the booked stressed sociopolitical consciousness as an important aspect of culturally relevant teachers. One of the indicators the book states is: “The teacher believes that students’ success has consequences for his or her own quality of life.” (pg121) I believe this indicator should be the reason a person becomes a teacher. You should want to be a teacher to provide a better future for our world by influencing students to take a stance on important issues and implement solutions. Therefore, their learning is a directly related to you not by just meeting state requirements, but because ultimately they will one day be the primary influence in our society. It is then important that in my future classrooms, I address social and political issues and encourage my students to create their own ideologies and opinions on such topics. I need to also encourage them to act on their beliefs and have an effective role in society. I had this in my own school experience. My seventh grade social studies teacher would regularly have us write to our congressmen and express our concerns about issues we felt were important to us, thus influencing us to take an active role in our society as we get older.