10/7 - for Ryan, Kathie, Jason, Alex

We all probably agree that there aren’t set, predetermined ways to teach lessons and learn them in school. Instructors and students are individuals with characteristics unique to them, and these characteristics all influence how a certain classroom runs. Especially in a city as large as Chicago, it’s highly likely that in any given classroom you’re encountering at least, like, thirty different life experiences and perspectives.


As much as we want to provide for our future students and as well-meaning as we are, the problem is (in short), there’s been this buildup of societal beliefs and judgments that accumulated to create the underlying (or blatant.) discrimination against students of different cultures in education. Studies and research itself often fail to realize this nebulous idea of “culture” can actually be expressed and examined as a practice in the present, not just as history of the past, which is what I took away from Farr’s piece. We, especially as teachers, have to pay attention to how culture takes shape in the context of the modern day if we want to address the needs our students will have, and if we want to ensure they can learn to the fullest in a facilitative environment. 

Part of the diversity we’ll experience in classrooms involves students who are multilingual and may be learning English as another language. I liked the way the Schonewise and Klingner piece framed bilingualism less concretely - when I was younger I didn’t really know where I stood (like, if I really was bilingual or not) because both Tagalog and English were used in my house in a way so that I had something like “half” of both languages, but not the “entirety” of either. I would end up having to perfect English later throughout school. However, the reading reconceptualizes bilingualism to include the way different languages are used, together or not, and I found this point of view way more relatable than what we’ve kind of been told bilingualism is: fluency (implying literacy as well) in multiple languages. At the end of the day, I think what matters most is how we communicate, which we don’t necessarily have to reduce to just speaking in a certain language and using certain words. How we communicate can be through how we present our own ideas and concepts. and this fact also opens up more doors - most importantly presenting language not as a deficit but another resource, a fund of knowledge students can bring to classrooms.

This ties into the Moschkovich piece on math instruction - its purpose was to illustrate different ways of teaching math that adhere to the standards that schooling places on students, but also account for the different ways students who speak multiple languages communicate math concepts. I’ve always preferred prioritizing concepts and applications when teaching math over specific vocab and definitions, using them as necessary, instead of designing lessons around, like, walls of texts describing what, for example, slope “is” or its “definition.” It’s more important that students understand what slope means, and see how it can be used. Moschkovich writes a classroom vignette of third-grader Julian being able to talk about what the concept of parallel is, in his own words, without having to use specific math vocabulary. So if students can communicate they understand an idea like Julian does, wouldn’t that then be the time to dig deeper and expound upon that understanding using the specific language, instead of simply overloading students with cold, hard definitions and vocab lists?

The piece referred to this specifically as a good approach for students who are learning English, but do you guys think it would work for all kinds of math classrooms? Even further, how would it look in your history classrooms or any other classrooms?

So I think the key here is to create meaning in what we teach, while integrating aspects of students’ identities in the school setting. It sounds like a very compounded, complex task to work on, and, well, it is, but I think it’s worth it to try. Woodley’s piece on teacher Andrew Brown’s classroom shows us what engaging, cross-cultural teaching practices look like through translanguaging, and it proves effective - Brown’s students utilize their prior knowledge and their own ways of communicating a certain concept to dig at the main ideas of lessons. I feel like by creating meaning in lessons based on experiences that students have even before entering the classroom, they’ll also be able to better understand what they learn in a comfortable setting. To make a connection to an ed psych theory, this practice kind of up-ends Bloom’s Taxonomy triangle, but not in a bad way or anything - it instead integrates both the “understand” and “create” tiers, all through the implementation of this practice over time in a classroom.

(Also, just out of curiosity, I looked around to see if there were any similar ideas of re-organizing Bloom’s Taxonomy to make it as applicable as possible, to as many classrooms as possible, and I found this as a little bonus. It’s cool to see an established theory re-examined and re-contextualized.)