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...