Goals and Lessons -> Teaching Philosophy
Teaching, at its core, is about preparing students to face the world around them in healthy and constructive ways. In order to do this, teachers must help students learn about the systems, individuals, tools, and culture of the world in which they live. Ultimately, teachers, then, try “to offset inequity [by] lead[ing] students toward a critical consciousness of power relationships and validat[ing] the … practices of students’ particular cultures” (Gere, 3). Students come to the classroom knowing a lot already, teachers have the job of introducing them to new ways of knowing, exploring with them how different ways of doing and enacting ideas work in different contexts. Everyone enters the classroom already writing, reading, and doing mathematics, it is then my job as a teacher to connect the writing, reading, and math they're already doing to academic forms of writing, reading, and math. Overall, the goal is to help students gain the skills to decide for themselves what kinds of literacies they need for specific contexts.
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In order to accomplish the above goals, it is important to foster a learning environment of respect, mutual understanding/cooperation, openness, and validation. Not only should teachers model this toward students, but also toward parents, and they should expect students to enact these toward each other as well. Because a big part of a classroom dedicated to offsetting inequities necessarily includes an inclusion of multiple viewpoints, ways of thinking, and ways of knowing and operating in the world, it is important that students not only respect one another, but are also open to understanding how other classmates, and other people outside the class, might be interpreting and using the world around them. In other words, students and teachers need to recognize and value the contributions the others bring to the classroom, and then use those tools of understanding and openness to reach into the world outside their classroom to understand other perspectives.
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In English
By approaching both canonical and non-canonical texts with these four elements of a healthy learning environment, teachers should strive to both critique and learn from the texts they and their class study. Texts are intimately connected to the world around us, and are used in various ways throughout history. Teachers of English should take into account that different texts have different meanings throughout time, and attempt to help students realize that texts are used in multiple ways. In order to do this, teachers must not only teach canonical texts, but also introduce their students to texts in the real world, whether those be tweets, blogs, news articles, young adult books, advertisements, videos, pictures, memes, graffiti, or any of the other plethora of different ways that authors communicate about the world around them. It is the teacher’s responsibility to help students navigate the messages of these texts, and the messages that categorize these texts. The ultimate goal is for students to become informed, active members of a society who continually challenge the inequity they see, hear, and experience in ways conducive to producing change. |
In Mathematics
In math class, these four elements of a healthy environment look a little different than in an English classroom. Mathematics helps us understand and critique the world around us in different ways than texts in an English class. Texts in a mathematics class look different as well. There are still academic texts, such as data tables and formulas. However, students engage in informal mathematics every day, such as spending money, figuring out which of their friends is more likely to help them when they need it, or reading news stories that use numbers to express a point of view. Mathematics teachers should take students' lives and informal mathematics into account when teaching. Value and build off of these knowledges, and introduce students to new ways of doing mathematics. |