As an educator, I locate myself with my students by sharing with them my Dominican roots. I find the students are able to better connect with me when I share my personal struggles as a student in the classroom. When I explain that I was that student sitting in their seat. I was that shy little girl who spent a year “silent period” just observing everything before I found my voice. I shared, how I repeated the first grade because I lacked English proficiency and the teachers thought I needed more time. My mother unknowingly agreed.
...I believe in transparency...Sharing who you are to being vulnerable to your students.
Being an educator in the Providence School District in a Developmental Bilingual Class of 24 heterogeneous learners of the English Language, who all share a common thread creates a challenge. Although, we are all recent immigrants or children of first-generation immigrants many of the cultures represented in my room are from the Caribbean, Central America, and South America. This common root connects us all together as we navigate our way through life trying to find our truth of who we are in a land foreign to us. Struggling to identify with unfamiliar cultural concepts that both challenge who you are and society thinks you should be is a process. This process of acculturation creates a divide between the two worlds, one of your ancestors and the other you are trying to make your own.
...I believe in being content with who I am and embracing me.
I like to think of my classroom as a platform where I encourage the students to develop their identities through leadership opportunities. The student-leaders develop quite naturally as some students embrace the idea to take the lead while others cautiously observe as I did when I was young. I observe their individual personalities and encourage all students to improve their actual and perceived needs through sharing stories. I let the students share their personal narratives in written form that are later published by Student Treasures. I believe everyone has a story to tell and through storytelling, we can find common threads and realize our strengths and find healing.
....I believe in the power of empowering students.
I appreciate your educational beliefs. I especially connect with the power of empowering our students. Student empowerment is what I consider one of my main responsibilities. Your method of having students reflect on their actual and perceived needs through storytelling sounds engaging.
ReplyDeleteHi Patrick,
DeleteI find that by having students write narratives to share their story provides a sense of healing. Many of our students we serve, whether have felt needs (needs students feel they have) or perceived needs (the needs I perceive them having)(Graves, 2000) should not go unmet for long periods of time if we are to challenge them academically. As mentioned, there should be a balance between Maslow and Bloom.
I admire the way you connect with your students by sharing a part of your own experience that many of your students identify with. You make yourself vulnerable to students in a way that invites many to begin building that trust that we talked about as being so essential in class today. Given that my own experience will be very different from that of many of my students (I am monolingual and several generations removed from my own family's immigrant experience in this country), I find myself thinking about ways I can effectively share my own story and make my students feel seen, welcome, and valued in my classroom. I have to keep in mind that, being a white male, my story is coming from a place of relative cultural power in our society. Even so, I have a responsibility to build the same relationship of trust with my students that you build with yours. You touched on this a little bit in class, but I am wondering, given your own experience with a silent period in the classroom, in what ways do you make space for students to go through their own silent period in a productive way?
ReplyDeleteHi Seth,
ReplyDeleteI'm glad you're making the journey to find ways to connect with your students, and understanding how your positionally (class, race, gender and language) play a role. That is a great question. I do struggle with implicit biases do to my own negative experience with such a long silent period. I am triggered by quiet, shy students who remind me of me. I try to encourage and push them by using different grouping configurations,.i.e., pairs, triads, quads. Eventually, I have them share individually where they have to explain a math problem that was done for homework. At times we will present projects we've worked on to other classes usually lower grades, in order to raise their self-confidence and self-esteem. During our quarterly assemblies, I have a student volunteer help me present awards. These are some of the approaches I take to help them move through their silent period. Their silence speaks volume! And I listen