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Block Party: Writing prompt response to a quote below and share with a partner.
Exchange cards and then match up with new partner to share index card responses.
Exchange cards and match up with new partner until party is over.
QUOTES
“One of the great challenges facing multicultural education today is the widening gap between its conceptualization as a redistribution of power and privilege in all aspects of schools and schooling and the practice of well-meaning, left-leaning educators who implement it in ways that recycle, rather than overturn, systemic power imbalances.” Christine Sleeter
Peter Hall (1997): “Schools represent a relatively stable system of inequality. They contribute to these results by active acceptance and utilization of a dominant set of values, norms, beliefs which, while appearing to offer opportunities to all, actually support the success of a privileged minority and hinder the efforts and visions of a majority” (Changing the Discourse in School in Race, Ethnicity and Multiculturalism: Policy and Practice, p. 151.)
Ivan Illich refered to compulsory education as a compulsory lottery system with a few winning but more losing. Those who fail to have the winning lottery number (grades) are stigmatized. This compulsory lottery system continues to higher education where it intentionally reproduces privilege rather than inspiring scholarship “Killing curiosity and killing students in the process” (Utne Reader, 1995, Snell, p. 93).
Similar to Illich’s concept was South American literacy activist Paolo Freire, who compared education to a banking system with students as ‘depositories’ and teachers as ‘depositors’. The banking system perpetuates domination and learners are passive consumers. Freire advocated for the liberating of education where the learner becomes empowered agents responsible for their own learning – not just what others want them to learn. This is what he called conscientization. Freire’s ideas about literacy empowerment were so controversial and in opposition to the dominant way of thinking that he was exiled from his own country. As educators, what kind of activists will we become as we teach in the name of educating students?
Speaking is merely the utterance of words, but communication occurs whenever meaning is attributed to an object, event, situation, or behavior, or to the residue of that behavior,” (Pewewardy, (1998, p. 70)
I think it’s really become a cliché [bridging the two worlds: Anglo and Navajo]. It’s untrue for me, because the way that I was raised, my philosophy is really in me; the way that I think is very much internal. I could go to India or China and still have a sense of who I am.” (Crawford, Eysturoy & Balassi, 1990)
Although I knew about the Long Walk of the Dine people from stories told within my family, I had never before heard anything about it in academic classes. Once Dee Brown seared our tragic histories into my awareness, my perspective on almost everything changed drastically,” (Deschenie, 2007).
Reconceptualists are not only, or even primarily interested in the official curriculum, as curriculum developers are, but seek to examine the hidden curriculum, the subtext that comes with teaching a specific curriculum a certain way to specific groups of students. Reconceptualists, in other words, are interested in much more than subject matter. They are interested in the messages or ideologies (hidden knowledge) that underlay not only subject matter, but also pedagogy, social interactions, and classroom settings, and educational practices as well as institutional contexts that have long come to be taken for granted. Many reconceptualists ultimately ask the question, who benefits from these configurations, and who loses…. in the cultural-sociological-political implications of schooling with respect to social justice, citizenship, or the role education is or should play in society at large.
Source: American Educational Research Association (AERA) Division B - Curriculum Instruction. (Retrieved August 7, 2007).
Bernice Reagon: People “know that nobody can survive in a minority position with only one point of view -- we have always had to understand the majority view as well. In the effort to understand the story of America, we're still not getting enough help from many people who share the story, because they come from a culture that says that their view is the only one. Well, I say to them: Welcome to prekindergarten! You will not die if you discover that there are more lines out there than just your own. In fact, you'll discover that you will have an advantage if you know more of them!” — Utne Reader (March/April 1996)
“We are chords to other chords to her chords, if we’re lucky to melody.” Joy Harjo
“I use the term ‘rising up’ because reading and writing should be emancipatory acts. When students are taught to read ‘the word and the world,’ as Brazilian educator Paolo Freire wrote, then their minds become unshackled. Teaching students to read is not enough. We must teach students how to ‘read’ not only novels and science texts, but cartoons, politicians, schools, workplaces, welfare offices, and Jenny Craig ads. We need students to read the inequitable distribution of funds for schools. This is ‘rising up’ reading—reading that challenges, that organizes for a better world.”
Christensen, L. Reading, writing and rising up: Teaching about social justice and the power of the written word. Milwaukee, WI: Rethinking Schools Publication, p. VII.
From Shirley Brown Essay: Lighting Fires,
I knew that the curriculum wasn’t directly related to their lives at the same time that I knew, in an abstract way, that connections should be made between students’ lives and the curriculum . Clearly, bridges were not being built. I could see that assignments that were personal and that allowed students to draw on their experiences were successful, while more abstract ones were tortured. But how could the lives of students be important in academic work? What connection could there be between their personal lives and important themes in literature? Caught in the dialect of the father tongue, I couldn’t see or hear that it was the language of the patriarchy that supports separating the objective from the subjective and that honors universality over particularity. The language of schools and academia supported the notion that there was a general norm that all people aspired to, and at the same time I didn’t question the classist, racist, gendered-biases of such assumptions. Because I felt responsible for preparing students for academic discourse, I, too, maintained the schism between the lives of students at home and in school. (p. 243)
From Cochran-Smith, M. & Lytle, Susan (1993). Inside/Outside: Teacher research and knowledge. NY: Teachers College Press.
“Connecting students’ home culture to the academic content of the curriculum is especially important when students’ primary language is not English....Because language is at the very heart of culture, educators must pay attention to both first and second language learning, Vygotsky made clear that learning language and literacy is a never-ending process of communicating with others and internalizing content, meaning, and feelings (p.198).
Oakes, J. & Lipton, M. (2007). [3rd.]. Teaching to change the world. New York: McGraw Hill.
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