Willow's Classroom

  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...