Course Description

This course familiarizes students with history, theory, practice, culture, politics of second language pedagogy and orality and literacy.  Students will gain an understanding of effective teaching methods and cultural sensitivity for working with linguistically diverse students, realizing that language and culture are synonymous.

 

                Rationale: Most classrooms are comprised of uniquely diverse learners on all levels, including linguistically and culturally. As educators, we must learn to be flexible in our thinking, teaching and learning to address, respect, celebrate, and support the richness and complexity of the children we teach.

 

                Instructional Strategies: Students and instructor will engage in the following ongoing collegial learning interactions: reflective writing, reciprocal learning, reflection/communication blog, authentic learning, practicum experiences, individual conferences, and cooperative and collaborative activities/projects, Literature Circles, Chautauqua.

Culture is "the dynamic feature of relationships, of how human beings fill the space between themselves and other people. This space can be filled with basic respect, admiration, playfulness, touching; or it can be filled with disregard, suspicion, anxiety, holding back. It virtually is always filled with language and gesture."   Tice, T. (1993). The Education Digest, p. 39.

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"Culture is a mold in which we are all cast, and it controls our daily lives in many unsuspected ways...that part of human nature which we take for granted-the par we dont't think about, since we assume it is universal or regard it as idiosncratic....Culture hides much more than it reveals, and strangely enough what it hides, it hides most effectively from its own participants"  (Hall, 1990, p. 29).

Hall continues: "The ultimate reason for such study [ studying other cultures] is to learn more about how one's own system works. The best reason for exposing oneself to foreign ways is to generate a sense of vitality and awareness-an interest in life which can come only when one lives through the shock of contrast and difference" (Hall, 1990, p. 30).

"Culture is communiction and communication is culture" (Hall, 1990, p. 186).

Hall, E. (1990). The silent language. New York, NY: Doubleday.