“Honesty, Empathy, Advocacy and Action”
The subheadings speak to teachers who are culturally accepting, and teachers who are agents for change. Not only do these four descriptive words mean so much, but can you imagine a world where everybody followed these morals?
Teachers need to be honest in recognizing the “dogmas of dominance” and realize that there in fact is dominance everywhere we are, even if we are blind to it.
Teachers need to be empathetic. We need to identify with everyone one of our students in our class, whether it is there strengths, difficulties or culture. We need to teach our students to be empathetic to each other and the struggles that we all go through. This will help our students in turn realize how alike everyone on this planet is and in turn they will become agents of change.
Teachers need to be advocates! If we are in the dominant culture we need to identify the problems that we are creating and educate our colleagues and other professionals so that they can change. “Through acts of advocacy we can begin to undermine some of the assumptions that have grown from centuries of dominance” (Howard, 82).
Action. Honesty, empathy, and advocacy mean absolutely nothing if there is no action taking place. Teachers need to put in place actions to make their classroom a safe-haven of positive learning experiences. In turn students will benefit from multicultural education and a more equitable pedagogy that tells all sides of the story.
These statements not only put in perspective parts of what it means to be a great teacher, but these descriptive statements, shed light on what it means to be part of a potentially great global community.
RIGOROUS RESEARCHER
Chapter four depicts the healing process for Gary Howard’s son after the loss of a friend. He uses great analogies to demonstrate how the Rio Grande is like America and is always changing. What really stuck with me is the pain that Benjie (Howards son) and how he dealt with his loss and the pain he was feeling. Although Benjie was an adult and was able to go on his own healing journey, I asked myself “what if one of my elementary school students had to deal with loss, or pain? How would I be able to help them deal with that?”
These are great resources for upper elementary school kids;
http://www.nasponline.org/resources/crisis_safety/griefwar.pdf
http://www.pbs.org/witheyesopen/griefk5.PDF
A great blog with picture books for younger students:
http://teachwithpicturebooks.blogspot.com/2010/01/helping-children-cope-with-death.html
Essence Extractor:
Being a good person is essential to be a good educator and agent of change. In order to have an impact on our students to be agents of change we must practice what we preach! We nee do be honest, empathetic, advocate for each other and take action!
Incredible links!! My wife recently lost her Grandmother and we began to have the conversations about how we would broach this subject with our two children if Amy's Grandmother lived near us, she was in Florida and wasn't able to travel in her last few years so never met our children. But I think about my sister, who's twin girls are a month older than my son, and my sister's Grandfather-in-law passed just about a year ago when my nieces were about two. Not only are the children not prepared to deal with this sort of permanent loss… I am completely NOT prepared to guide my children through this process.
ReplyDeleteAgain, thanks for the links… they will be bookmarked for years to come not only to help my students, but also my children and me as a parent.
awesome summary of the 4 key points- finally something that is useful in teaching!
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