Socio-Culturally Responsive Education: ready-set-go

     With the concept of multicultural education evolving over the past twenty-thirty years as it is now, we face moving forward with the vision of 'just doing it.'  The word is out and the questions are ' where are the textbooks, where are the curricula, what does multicultural education look like in the K-12 classroom? '  I believe, piece by piece these questions are being answered, but still not quite coming together as a ready-set-go model that so many K-12 educators are accustomed to being handed.

     What is needed now are the pulling together of the pieces and giving teachers the package, or at least pointing them to the cadre of self-designed, action-responsive books, materials and tools that are there, but are all over the place.  I am prompted by the article Claiming Native Youth Knowledge:  Engaging in Socio-culturally Responsive Teaching and Relationships by authors Tiffany S. Lee and Patricia D. Cerecer, published in the October-December 2010 issue of Multicultural Perspectives.  These authors showcase how Navajo and Pueblo youth are informing educators about just what socio-culturally responsive teaching looks like, what it is for them.  These students are saying they want courses that encompass, include who they are, how they live and where they come from in this world, right now, right now.   Where are the materials, text, books, right now?
This blog will help answer those questions, providing out-of-the-way, not well known, non-mainstream curricula that are being used in the K-12 classroom.
     Each blog posting, I will feature a text, curriculum, trade-book or materials that provide opportunities for teachers to practice socio-culturally responsive education.  Allow these texts, materials to remove the boundaries, remove the borders separating students, parents, teachers and administrators.  As one Pueblo student articulated so well in the the referenced article in the preceding paragraph:  If you are a teacher you are a person of authority and you need to know that, especially if you're looking down on someone which that shouldn't happen anyway but like, you should treat them with a certain amount of respect, not just like, you know, looking down on you...sometimes I feel that from my teachers, they don't respect me or they just don't listen to me because they're trying to come up with a solution right off the bat...I think a lot of it, that comes down to, and you've probably heard this a few times is, you know, communication and respect...It's so simple yet there are a lot of things in the way...so many boundaries between teachers and students. [Multicultural Perspectives, Vol 12, No. 4, Oct-Dec 2010, p. 204].

LET'S START WITH STORYTELLING - the use of storytelling can offer 
 a dramatic narrative that not only stirs the emotions but also contributes to the cognitive power of these emotions, making particular contributions to moral learning (Winston, 1999).  Suggestions below include short stories, memoirs.

Children Tell Stories: Teaching and Using Storytelling in the Classroom 2005, Richard C. Owen, Katonah, NY (1-800-336-5588) 

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Preacher's Daughter, Preacher's Kids, Church Kids: The phenomenon of growing up crazy in the Apostolic Pentecostal Church By Jennifer Herring, 2007, Springfield, IL (217-741-2432)    This memoir captures an African American woman's life in a family of nine children, as the daughter of the preacher who converted the entire family as he travelled from the Baptist to the Apostolic Pentecostal denomination. Her story explores each sibling's response as well as her own to the strict lifestyle of the Apostolic Pentecostal. She shares her evolution in establishing her own identity, growing in her own beliefs and faith in the God of her childhood.============

Voices From The Fields: Children Of Migrant Farm Workers Tell Their Stories  Atkin, S. Beth,  

 

Powerful black and white photographs lend drama to this collection of interviews and poems, which tell the stories of Mexican-American children and their migrant families. Foreword by author Francisco Jimenez introduces the painful reality that migrant life today is as oppressive as it was thirty years ago; we continually neglect to consider the hands that carry our fruits and vegetables from the earth. The voices of the children in this book convey the hope, pride, fear, and struggles that make them unique from, and at the same time similar to, their American peers. This simple yet powerful book shines light on the weathered hands of migrant children reaching out for better opportunities, better lives. 

 

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Until next time, Jennifer C. Herring