Standard 2: Respectful Educational Environments

Teacher leaders model leadership by establishing a positive and productive environment for a diverse population of students, their families, and the community. Teachers are knowledgeable about cultures and global issues and how they are contextualized locally.  Teachers help colleagues develop effective strategies for students with special needs. They encourage positive, constructive relations among colleagues and students. Indicators are:

Literacy Through Photography Project
From RE 5130 Teaching the Language Arts

Context:

This large-scale project clearly was designed to challenge both teacher and student. It first challenged teachers to think deeply and more expansively about the role that photographs can play in the classroom. Second, it seemed tailor-made to get teachers thinking about and taking advantage of the diversity in the student pool. Third, once it is carried out in the classroom, it would challenge the student to work hard, be creative, manage his own learning and to "think outside the box." The project required teachers to create a set of interconnected lessons featuring the skill of "reading" photographs.  Students would be taught to read photographs and take photographs themselves. They then would be challenged to explore a topic, content area or subject through photographs along with research, writing, reflection and even interviews.  The teacher's work in creating the lesson was supported by a framework that helped to shape and design the work and ensure each lesson was aligned to the teaching objective and doing the work in its part of the overarching theme of the LTP Project. The lessons were designed to support both reading and writing objectives by encouraging students to wrestle with text in deeper and more thoughtful ways. Also, its long-term nature extends a student's work with text.


Rationale: 

This lengthy and involved project gave me a newfound respect for elementary school teachers and their thematic units. Having only taught in the high school setting, I had never imagined a set of linked lessons on the scale of this undertaking. High school teachers work in specific content areas, and move through objectives in support of that.

Having done the LTP project, I can see the potential for powerful learning by having students develop a skill such as literacy through photographs and then use that ability to explore content area concepts. This lesson was one of the most challenging ones to adapt to my current teaching assignment of Family and Consumer Science.  But after some thought, I realized that it was perfectly suited to promoting respect for diverse cultures and increasing awareness of other cultures. I decided to focus part of the lessons on the Foods 1 standard that covers food choices and food cultures. Following is a discussion of the reasons and my conclusions and observations.

I have learned through my years of teaching that students are often most afraid of, bigoted against and cruel to those they perceive as different and  unknown. Different and known can be tolerated, but different and unknown is generally distrusted and sometimes outright feared. In my high-minority population high school, we see this lack of understanding between whites and African-Americans and also between African-Americans and our Hispanic students. I have had kitchen groups of African-American students and Latino students who were openly competitive to the point of hostility. I have found that work in our kitchen lab can help diffuse tensions, but only if cultural differences are explored openly and respectfully. Teacher guidance is critical in this realm.

In our customary work, we often begin to bridge the ethnic or cultural gap in the kitchen.
Everyone has to eat. Hispanic students are more than happy to show off their culinary skills and cultural dishes from Honduran tacos and Baleadas to a cake soaked in milk called Tres Leches. African-American students want to show off their food traditions as well. I've talked to those students about everything from chitterlings to humble but delicious cornbread.

It is around the table that our students find common ground when Soul Food, like collard greens and macaroni and cheese, meets pico de gallo and guacamole. And when they find that corn meal for corn bread and corn masa for tortillas are similar; differences fade. It turns out that all the cultures in our new South eat pork rinds. It's just that the Latinos call them chicharonnes. With each new discovery, understanding deepens and boundaries weaken. That cross-cultural discovery and learning could be extended with these in-depth and interconnected lessons.  By having all the students take photographs of their cultural and family food traditions, the beginnings of knowledge, understanding and respect that are fostered in the kitchen can grow in the classroom and beyond.

Since I put together these lessons, I have realized how important is is to value the culture of each student. I have explored the food cultures of the immigrants to our area as a part of my previous work as a food columnist for a newspaper. This has allowed me to have open and appreciative conversations with students about the foods and traditions of their cultures. I initiate these conversations where other students can hear on purpose.  I believe those conversations open the door and allow other students a safe way to ask questions about other cultures. My students are all teenagers who attend a poor rural high school. They do not have expansive world views or a backgrounds of travel and exploration. If they have questions born of natural curiosity or genuine interest -- they don't know how to phrase them respectfully. I find that often I act as a bridge. The curious student will ask me questions, and I can then move them gently into posing their questions to the Latina or the Hmong student. These conversations invariably lead to kitchen lab work where we cook recipes from various cultures and share the dishes all around.

The LTP Project can accomplish this same result -- but on a much larger scale. Every student in the class has the opportunity to benefit. Each student will be doing work in their own food traditions, while getting a detailed look at other traditions.

Memoir Project
From RE 5130 Teaching the Language Arts

Context:

This assignment was to write and take photographs for an extended piece of memoir. The purpose of the assignment was to show teachers how memoir can be a powerful motivating force to get students to have more positive feelings about writing, increase willingness to take on writing tasks and to hone their writing skills. The writing was done in a collaborative format with an editing partner and the entire student group functioning as a writing circle group. The writing assignments were all of a personal nature -- designed to help students narrow a focus for the bigger memoir project. Teachers we all were, and so we would have dutifully carried out any assignment. But the personal writing topics brought about a dedication and passion for the writing that was noticibly more intense than the work on the other major assignment for this class.

Rationale:

As a vintage master's student at the ripe old age of 45, I have experienced first-hand two types of focus in classroom teaching. In the days before No Child Left Behind and high-stakes testing, I was a student in public schools. I was tracked by ability my whole academic career, and my teachers focused on keeping me and the others in my group or class very busy at our instructional level. The teacher's attention was directed at challenging the higher performing students.

But after the advent of No Child Left Behind, the focus of teachers shifted to that all important level three score. Teachers focus a great deal of time on those students who score low threes and high twos on benchmark tests. It is logical in the system that has evolved after NCLB because teachers are judged by student performance, and those low three and high two students have the most profound effect on overall class performance averages.

The student who is a "guaranteed four" is often left to her own devices in the classroom. My own school-aged children (both in late elementary school) describe a school day where when they finish their "regular work," they have quite a bit of time left. They have filled this time by pleasure reading. I was never allowed this much free time during my school day. My teachers focused on providing enough work to keep us busy.

I can see that this memoir project would be one that could challenge the whole class at whatever ability level they perform. Each student has memories, thoughts and perceptions of her own life that can be put down on paper. Writing about self will give students an engaging topic -- and it levels the playing field. Advanced students will have less of an advantage over their peers here. They will have all learned to ride a bike, lost a tooth, discovered that Santa is not real or experienced the loss of a pet or relative. These childhood experiences are common to all students -- and they can unite the classroom in dedication to curriculum work and improve the emotional climate as well.

Some of my Hmong students can tell harrowing tales of walking down from the mountains and through the jungles of their family's home countries. Some of my students have experienced profound losses, and I have found that memoir is a powerful way to share those experiences in a safe way. Writing it down on the page distances them from it somehow.  In writing instruction work, memoir is the first assignment I give. It gives them a compelling topic (what teenager isn't at least somewhat self-absorbed?) and allows them to build a community in the classroom with the shared experience of reflecting on memories. Once that task has been carried out, we can transition to more academic writing and the sense of community and trust that has been built can carry them through the more demanding work.

     

Literature Reviews
From RE 5140 Advanced Study of Children's Literature

Context:

This course is a survey of children's literature that focuses on award-winning texts from a variety of viewpoints and cultures. The survey includes the historical heavy-hitters of the Newbery and Caldecot winners along with newer awards from wider and more inclusive ethnic and cultural perspectives. Within some guidelines, students select their own titles to read for the award books. A certain number of specific texts are assigned as well. Students are expected to read and review each book for its engagement, content, teachability, suitableness, and potential for classroom use. The course also included two major projects, a writer's biography and a literacy autobiography. Both assignments could be adapted for classroom use.

Rationale:

I read an unbelievable number of children's books for this course and enjoyed nearly every minute of it. As a high school teacher, my knowledge of children's literature was informed only by my own years as a voracious childhood reader and my guidance as a parent in introducing my own three children to books.  Despite my deep and long-standing involvement with children's literature, the depth, breadth and quality of modern children's literature astounded me.

My husband and I purchased a copy of Flotsam after falling in love with it while I was reading it for class. My own children have spent hours staring at the pages of that nearly wordless picture book. I realized that children's literature has come a long way since Make Way for Ducklings and Blueberries for Sal. Modern children's literature is truly literature with the power to amaze, move and astound in ways comparable to the adult titles I choose for myself now. I had my eyes opened by a trade book about a boy who had to go live in prison with his parents in South America, cried my eyes out when the father died in The Green Glass Sea and marveled at the craft of Laura Amy Schlitz, who won a Newbery with the first book she ever had published, Good Masters; Sweet Ladies.

I was mortified and angered by the historical fiction book Day of Tears. I think it reflects some of America's lowest moral moments in the same way Night does for the Holocaust. I put Day of Tears on the list of titles to be considered for adding to our supply of supplemental titles in the American literature resources at my high school. I loaned my copy to our department chair, who loved the book. She did comment that it was a downer and reminded her of the titles in the 10th grade lists of materials. At our school we sometimes describe World Literature as death, death, rape, pestilence, horror, more death and more pestilence.

But I think Day of Tears is an important book for students to read, especially since I teach at a poor rural high school with the highest minority population in our county. Which text will be compelling and make connections with the students  -- Day of Tears or the sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God"? I chose not to teach the sermon when I taught Junior English. After a quick survey of the colonial period, I moved to more compelling texts like Light in the Forest, Of Mice and Men and the poetry of Carl Sandburg. 

This course showed me on a real gut level that there is compelling literature our there for students of all levels, all ethnicities and all cultural backgrounds. It only takes a little bit of time and research to find it. I believe that may have been the most important lesson I learned from this class. Step away from the state adopted literature texts and there is a whole universe of compelling and rewarding texts that students can be invited to read.  The beauty of these kinds of texts is that more students may accept that invitation to read -- once they can see how easy it is to be drawn into an engaging text.

The English Department did not select Day of Tears that year, but I will continue to suggest it when I can. Budgets have been so tight that there has been no money for supplemental texts of late.