Willow's Classroom

In the classroom, there are three different types of curriculum we come across. The first type of learning is explicit curriculum, which is the information that is formally taught and is the planned course of study that teachers present to their students. The second type of curriculum is null curriculum: the information omitted from the explicit curriculum. This can look like topics that are not commonly covered in our history, such as Native American rights. Null curriculum excludes perspectives of minorities in our cultural history and can even be as extreme as banning the learning of certain histories or events. Lastly, there is the hidden curriculum. Hidden curriculum is the underlying idealogical message that students' absorb from the explicit curriculum. It is the learning of "conventions and assumptions imbedded in language and culture" (from our hidden curriculum powerpoint).  The problem with these types of curriculum is that they manipulate the narrative our stu...

I would like to think that we have come a long way from dealing with segregation in our schools. However, we are still dealing with segregation in our school system, and our students of color are having to pay the price. In our module this week, we learned about the systematic segregation that disadvantaged people of color called redlining. Redlining was a practice that denied black neighborhoods home loans and trapped them in poverty, while white neighborhoods were given opportunities to accumulate wealth. Although redlining is now illegal, it set up a society where the black community has struggled to move out of poverty. In the video we watched, The Disturbing History of the Suburbs , it explains how after laws were passed to ban the practice of redlining, black families were left with barely enough money to pay their bills and remained trapped in a cycle of poverty. So, how does this relate to our society today? In Schools Are Still Segregated and Black Children Are Paying a Price ...

 In this week's module, we covered the poverty myth and the experiences that children from lower-income families go through in our school system. In one of our articles, The Poverty Myth , Jacqueline Ching brings to light the misconception that if you are lower income, you cannot achieve. We learn that that is simply not true. Teachers may often have the predisposed idea that the children who come from lower-income families are not as well equipped to succeed as other children from higher-income families. This translates to the way that they treat these children, and can end up "[signaling] disdain or [having] lower expectations for these students" which shows in various ways such as labeling them, seeing them as unstable, or poorly motivated. In the state of Texas, we have faced a long battle of equal funding for all students in our school system. In the video we watched, Texas Funding Still Unconstitutional , they go over how funding in schools is proportionately in fav...

  After going through the module, I took my notes and combined my common words to make my WorditOut. Of course, students is the biggest because I used that word the most often, but I think it is interesting that the second biggest words are "succeed", "learning", and "able". Our module this week talks about culturally responsive learning: a way to utilize and mimic students' own cultural learning tools that they receive from their family or community. Often times teachers end up falling into the misconception that every student can learn from the same methods. For example, in our article we read "3 Tips to Make Any Lesson Culturally Responsive", she talks about how one teacher struggled to get her class to learn science vocabulary. She explained that she would list the words on the board, have her students copy them down and use it in a sentence, and then be quizzed on them. In the article it explains how this was not working for her class be...

 When we look at our current school system, we would hope that we can confidently say that all our students get treated the same and have the same schooling experience. Unfortunately, for students of color, that is just not the case. The school experience for children of color is drastically different than their classmates who happen to be white. In the article Why We Need Black Teachers , it states that although students of color are expected to make up about 56% of the student population, teachers are still predominantly white. The problem with this is that when children of color are being taught only by white teachers, they are being subject to isolation in the classroom, more severe punishment than their white classmates, and constant surveillance from their teachers (from How School Systems Make Criminals of Black Youth ). Rita Pierson explains that teachers need to be able to connect with their students in order for them to learn, saying "no significant learning can occur wi...

 In this week's module we covered the importance of being taught in school the "full picture". When we are overlooking the history of our country we are leading our students to ignorance and dysconscious racism. In our module we learn from Joyce King that dysconscious racism "describes the habits, perceptions, attitudes, and beliefs that justify racial inequality". In our world today, there are so many micro-aggressions against people of color that are a direct result of dysconscious racism and not understanding how harmful these actions are. In our classrooms, are we teaching only a part of the full picture? In school, I never learned about the awful persecution and colonization of Native Americans. Many are still taught to believe that Native Americans "died out". In museums they often place the Native American exhibit next to the dinosaurs and other extinct species. Why? Because we are taught a part of the full picture. We are not taught that Native...