Blog Post #4

For my fourth blog post, I decided to go more in depth into the benefits of children who grow up in the culture of bilingualism. The article I read was rather short, but it was packed with many valuable facts and sources. It is called, “The Benefits of Being Bilingual,” and although it does not list a single author, it seems to be a great tool for a believer in bilingualism. The article is written from the opinions of the Head Start program, and their programs belief’s about bilingualism staying active between the children’s homes and schools. Because Head Start is a preschool program that serves very low-income families in the United States, this population also includes many diverse families. The Head Start program is so diverse, in fact, that according to the article, “Head Start currently serves more than 300,000 children who ar dual language learners (DLLs) in 87.4 percent of its classrooms (Office of Head Start, 2011). The article places the benefits of bilingualism into four major categories: cognitive, social-emotional, learning, and global benefits.

In each category, there were benefits that I had before never considered. To just give a few examples, some of the cognitive benefits of bilingualism were that research shows that their brains are more flexible than those who are not bilingual. Also, they tend to be stronger in focusing, remembering, and making decisions. In the social-emotional category, research shows that bilingual children tend to have stronger ties within their entire family, culture and in some cases community. The learning category somewhat ties in with cognitive, but what stood out to me was that children who are bilingual develop a more flexible approaches to thinking through problems. Also, because of their ability to read and think in two different languages, they tend to have higher levels of abstract thoughts. Finally, as for global benefits, bilingual individuals have the opportunity to participate in the global community in many more ways.

The section of Affirming Diversity that this article almost directly relates to is under “Linguistic Diversity and Learning.” The section states that “In contrast to negative perceptions of bilingualism, a good deal of research confirms the positive influence of knowing more than one language, and these benefits begin very early in life,” (226). The passage goes on to tell more examples and studies of children who grew up in a bilingual setting. Both of the book and this article work well hand-in-hand to demonstrate the benefits of teachers and parents supporting bilingualism within children’s education.

Blog Post #3

For my third blog post, I read the article “School tracking Harms Millions, Sociologist Finds,” from the Stanford University News Services. This article works as a great parallel to the tracking portion of Chapter 4 of Affirming Diversity: The Sociopolitical Context of Multicultural Education. This summary of this article is the compilation of all of the negative affects that tracking can have on students, especially when in high school. The article also agrees that tracking is a system that does no good when met with the demands for a more multicultural education in America. The article explains that one of the shocking parts of tracking is that students and parents in the schools may not even be aware that it is going on, because it is never clearly stated whether the classes they are taking are college preparatory or not. This might be intentional of the schools, the article explains, because this helps them avoid the many complaints and requests they would receive from students and their families.

            Chapter 4 of Affirming Diversity states that, “Research over many years has confirmed that tracking is frequently linked with racial, ethnic, and social-class differences,” (110). The article I read for my blog is just another believer in this situation. The article claims that not only does tracking limit the opportunities for the high-achieving students, but it is particularly “disastrous” for students who find themselves to fall in the middle range. A research experiment that was conducted in this article consisted of researches selecting randomly an equal proportion of students with high, middle, and low grades for each gender-ethnicity combination (so that there were no ethnic differences in school grades for their sample). After comparing the students’ schools records to their current placements, here were the results: “The researchers found that the proportion of high-ability African American and Latino American students not taking college prep courses in math and science was more than twice that of white and Asian American students of the same ability level,” (Standford University). In my personal opinion, this is an eye catching statistic that should not go ignored, and should be an alarm to administrators everywhere that tracking in high schools has to end. 

Blog Post #2

For Blog #2, I read the article “Implementing Multicultural Practices in Early Childhood Education” by Quinita Ogletree and Patricia J. Larke from Texas A&M University. The ideas from this article were very symmetrical with Chapter 2 from “Affirming Diversity; The Sociopolitical Context of Multicultural Education.” While Chapter 2 defines multicultural education for school reform, Ogletree and Larke’s article gives very realistic and direct solutions to help improve the multicultural educational status today in schools, particularly in Early Childhood Education.

This article first begins with the needs for multicultural education in Early Childhood programs. It gives the many rising statistics of the changing of the proportions of the American population. The article explains that the National Association of Education for Young Children (NAEYC) has made significant advancements of developmentally appropriate practices, including a, “commitment to respect the ‘dignity, worth, and uniqueness of each individual (child, family member, and colleague,’” (NAEYC, 1997, p.7). However, the article goes on to explain that, “the three top child developmental theories (Piaget, psychoanalysis, and learning theories) are linear, universal, and individualistic,” (2010 p.2). In other words, they do no match the ideals of a multicultural education that is needed today. This is when the article introduces “Banks Five Dimensions of Multicultural Education,” which are ways to describe how programs/schools can implement components of multicultural education. These are listed as Content Integration, Knowledge Construction, Prejudice Reduction, Equity Pedagogy, and Empowering School Culture and Social Structure.

Content Integration is essentially to create an awareness of different cultures, but it goes far beyond just the content in general. This relates to our text in the section that talks about multicultural education being pervasive, meaning multicultural approaches are “apparent in every lesson, curriculum guide, unit, etc.,” (2012 p. 50). The pervasiveness in multicultural education also relates to another one of Banks Five Dimensions of Multicultural Education, Equity Pedagogy. These are “teaching techniques and strategies that are designed to improve the academic achievement of diverse students.. understanding learning styles, teaching styles, and language,” (2010 p. 6). Again, considering multicultural to be more than a lesson, but also a way of learning.

I think promoting a school environment in all grade levels of more multicultural education can only have positive implications on more than just students, but even families, teachers, and communities as a whole.  According to the article, research has shown “that by the age of three or four, construction of gender and racial identity has already started in a child, “and also “research supports that a child’s racial attitudes can change but education must start early, (2010 p. 2). This is why by implementing a stronger dosage of multicultural education especially in Early Childhood Education will help decrease and hopefully eventually eliminate discrimination and social injustice of all people.

Culturally Responsive Differentiated Instructional Strategies

Blog Post # 1

“Culturally Responsive Differentiated Instructional Strategies”

For my first blog post, I discovered the article “Culturally Responsive Differentiated Instructional Strategies,” from the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, Metropolitan Center for Urban Education, written in 2008. The article first starts off by describing the basis of Differentiated Instruction and how it can be accomplished, and also giving the basic Principles of Differentiated Instruction. The main purpose of this article, however, is supporting Differentiated Instruction with all cultures of students, or “Culturally Responsive Pedagogy.” The article gives some interesting statistics of student to teacher ratios. For example, during the 2002-03 school year, nearly 42% of all children in public schools, grades k-12 are students of color, and 10 years later there has not been a significant change in the makeup of the nation’s teachers (most elementary and secondary school teachers are white (87%) and female (74%))(3). The article explains that the problem with this is that since our culture is ultimately how we identify ourselves, “classroom teachers, school administrators, and policymakers carry their cultural experiences and perspectives into their everyday decisions and actions,” (4). The article goes into much more detail on the negative effect this has on students of color and different cultures, but to sum it up in one sentence I would choose, “Many students of color have an understanding of and some have internalized negative images of their race. These negative images, promoted by the larger society, affect how they perform in school,” (4). The article goes on to explain that t is the school’s job to take these negative images these differently cultures students face, reconstruct them, and help them to form a more positive product of self and cultural affirmations, thus leading to more learning. Finally, the ending of the article lists the Seven Building Blocks of Differentiated Instruction: Knowing the Learner, Traits of a Quality Teacher, Quality Curriculum, and Classroom Learning Environment, Flexible Teaching and Learning Time, Instructional Delivery and Best Practices, Assessment/Evaluation/Grading (4).

            This relates to the material we’ve reviewed in class, because we have thoroughly established the importance of teachers to be culturally open-minded to all students. Not only should teachers have an open-mind, they should have experience on relating to those of different identities then their own for effective learning to take place.  It is important of people of different identities to feel “liked” and understood by the teacher and education system, so that they can feel their own self-affirmation and willingness to learn. In summary, it shouldn’t be about WHY they need to learn, but instead feeling their own WANT to learn.

            It was difficult for me to give a brief summary of the article I read because almost every sentence is filled with interesting material to get teacher’s, educator’s, parents, administrators, and others really thinking about how they can improve the learning in ALL children’s lives. I felt I needed to include the many dimensions of this article. Give it a read- you won’t regret it!