Jumping on the bandwagon...so what everyone else said about Jeremiah and his new son!
I don't have a specific article that I'm going to respond to, so I'll just reflect on a part of what we discussed in class last week. One of the concepts that stood out to me the most was the additive approach to learning. Jeremiah gave us the example of helping students improve their (SAT?) vocabulary by associating the vocabulary words with more colloquial ones that the students are familiar with. So my question is, why is it important that we use this sort of approach--to welcome each student's cultural identity into a classroom? As the name additive learning implies, it serves as a foundation to help the student build on to what he or she is already familiar with, such as a native language besides the "standard" one. From kindergarten to third grade, I was fortunate enough to be in Chinese-bilingual class settings in which the teacher taught the class in both Chinese and English; as a kindergarten student, it was easier to remember what "cat" meant because I could associate it with its Chinese name, mao. Sometimes (perhaps not so much today?), as Anzaldua talks about in her piece "How to Tame a Wild Tongue," students like her are discouraged from speaking in their native tongues at school and are pushed to speak something more standard instead. Although understanding standard English both in and out of the classroom is important, so is maintaining one's cultural identity and feeling comfortable expressing it through a native language.
Diane brings about a good question. Before Jeremiah spoke of literacy and education as beyond the black texts on white paper I had not thought of the current educational system in place. I was taught in a public high school, and so the idea and consensus was that because the school was public and public means being funded by the government, that all schools were equal and all were like mine. There my teachers never told me that Chinese (I come from a Taiwanese background) was a poor language and that I was deficient because I spoke it. However, after coming to Berkeley I began to see how the current education system can undermine a student's own intellect and abilities based on their culture. Even here at the university, I have had discussions where the foreign students found difficulty finding partners for projects simply because people thought that their poor english would get in the way of what they had to say or contribute. My answer to Diane's question is that it is not so much important in the way of welcoming each student's cultural identity into a classroom but making room for adjustments so that communication between peers can occur. Telling students that they are inferior because of the way they speak or write silences their voice and creates an impression of them in the negative. This strips the student of the ability to communicate with one another and thus prevents individual growth. As was outlined by Silvia in Literacy, there are three current styles of literacy, that of adaptation, power, and grace and a pursuit of the ideal literacy is the key to education, which from my perspective seemed to be a culmination of all three types is still insufficient. That sort of literacy and education is far to individual centered. By being individual centered it creates scenarios such as mine, were I see literacy is my own perspective and not in the view point of others, similarly to my experiences with public school. What literacy lacks is not a welcoming of student cultural identity but a means of transport between the student's background to that of academia. A method where a student can be engaged to the public as a whole. In example, I look towards the cutting of a watermelon. The fruit inside represents the end goal of literacy, the sweet ability to communicate experiences and share it with others. The knife to cut the watermelon represents education, which allows the student access to the fruit. However, literacy is the method in which the watermelon is sliced. The watermelon can be sliced in multiple fashions that give access to the succulent interior of the fruit, however the society who eats the melon currently dictates that only one melon of watermelon slicing will produce fruit that is edible. That is simply not true. Any method can produce edible fruit, society now needs to be able to accept the different methods as their end goals are all the same. That is how I feel that education and literacy should be viewed, as a means of understanding one another so that experiences can be shared continually.
ReplyDeleteThis was mine.
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