Geneva Gay Response
The Geneva Gay article was about culturally responsive teaching. The author defines this type of teaching as, "using cultural knowledge and prior experiences to make learning relevant to diverse students" (Gay, 2001,p. 49). In my own placement experience the demographics of my school are that the majority of students are white and the minority are hispanic. I definitely feel that my experience in my placement school has very much been geared toward the majority. A lot of the ELL and hispanic students in my class are expected to read books by all white authors or participate in lessons that may not engage them. Recently my mentor teacher had all of her classes write a letter of thanks to the military. I definitely felt some tension from the hispanic students because of the political atmosphere that is going on currently.
Gloria Ladson-Billings Response
This article is about a study on culturally relevant pedagogy. The three main findings that are outlined in this article are the conceptions of self and others, social relations, and conceptions of knowledge. The study also found that culturally relevant teachers used "community as the basis of their curriculum" (Ladson-Billings,1995,p.279). I like that in this article it outlines the ways in which you can practice this method through strong communication with students. Reflecting back to the phone conference with the educator from Savannah, it is also important to have strong communication with the parents of your students.
James A. Banks Response
This article is about 5 dimensions of multicultural literacy. The 5 dimensions that are highlighted in this article are content integration, the knowledge construction process, personal cultural, prejudice reduction, equity pedagogy, and empowering school culture and social structure (Banks, 1993, p.25). Some main take aways that I got from my reading of the article is that achieving multicultural education is complex and should not be over simplified. Achieving multicultural literacy in our schools requires more than just surface level inclusion and this article provides clean and cut examples of effective and ineffective methods. This article also analyzes the use of canonical texts in a multicultural classroom.
References
Banks, J. A. (1993). The Canon Debate, Knowledge Construction, and Multicultural Education. Educational Researcher, 22(5), 4-14.
Gay, G. (2002). Preparing for Culturally Responsive Teaching. Journal of Teacher Education, 53(2), 106-116.
Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). Toward a Theory of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy. American Educational Research Journal, 32(3).
Banks, J. A. (1993). The Canon Debate, Knowledge Construction, and Multicultural Education. Educational Researcher,22(5), 4-14. doi:10.3102/0013189x022005004
Gay, G. (2002). Preparing for Culturally Responsive Teaching. Journal of Teacher Education,53(2), 106-116. doi:10.1177/0022487102053002003
Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). Toward a Theory of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy. American Educational Research Journal,32(3), =. doi:10.2307/1163320
