Final
Reflection May 13, 2010
Frances Vitali
Our course
framework has been an experiential one with practicum hands-on learning,
theoretical and pedagogical skills through the text books chapter
presentations, practicum experience, community outings, discussions of race and
ethnicity through newspaper article sharing. Technology was a
featured medium of housing your intellectual property whereby taking
ownership of your work as you document your progress over time. However,
tripod.com free hosting has been fickle and frustrating for us all. When I
posted my final reflections and practicum reflections and tidied up my page did
I realize afterwards none of it stuck! So A week after
our course ended, I am re-entering my postings! We will use igoogle for our future webhosting.
Our chapter
presentations continued and I appreciate the care and diversity of presenting
your understanding, thinking of us as an audience to engage in and interact in
the content. Our community outings were stimulating whereby we reinforced our
understanding of stories. Everything we do and others do revolve around
stories.
Teaching
is relationships and stories-the stories we seek, the stories we make, the
stories we hear, the stories we collect, the stories we experience-are what
constitutes the richness of our relationships.
Our
practicum experience was another way to experience storytelling and building
relationships as you worked as storytelling coaches with your fourth grade
mentees. It was a rewarding surprise to see you finally perform your own family
character Chautauqua. I did not have an opportunity to tell you how proud I was
of you.
Learning
beside your students is what I experienced as an instructor with you. Our
debriefing session following each morning practicum was a way to touch base
with you and figure strategies out for the following week. It was also a way to
seek out answers to puzzling situations you experienced. It was a grand
learning experience for all of us and we were learning from each other. You
were experiencing the beginning of just what is a Professional Learning
Community. You were part of one!
We began
our Chautauqua practicum with some student expressing indifference: they were
not going to perform in front of others; they were not going to perform if they
could not read their story; that they were just not interested. We nurtured
them along believing in their story to guide us and them and believing in the
self-fulfilling prophesy that if WE believed that they could do it, they too,
would also come to believe it. Their Chautauqua presentations on May 13 proved
the power of story and the power of students’ growth over time when we believe
in them. I am glad you were able to mingle with family members of the students
that night.
I hope
the IRIS Modules and Teaching Tolerance and Lee & Low webpages
you will use as future resources as teachers. There is rich content that may
guide us through how to talk about racism, diversity, otherness, class privilege all related to becoming culturally
responsive educationalists.
As
educators we do not want to perpetuate untruths, teach curriculum content that
is non inclusive or act on misguided intentions. Our students are each stories
walking through our classroom door and we need to educate ourselves about the
students we teach in deeper cultural ways. Celebrating monthly cultural
awareness is only addressing surface culture. Understanding students deeply
involves an openness and receptivity to learning that as a teacher, we
represent only one of the multisperctival voices in
our multiversal classroom. I hope our course has
ignited your own learning curve about becoming a culturally responsive
educationalist.
Thank you
for the gift of you and your storytelling this semester.
You all
earned a Final grade of A in our course this semester.