Day 3

Still going strong, but this isn't going to be easy.  "Read 152 pages today and answer these questions."  We're definitely not in college any more.  

• Culture is shaped by conditions faced, and as conditions change, so does culture.  
• Beliefs manifest themselves in different behaviors depending on the culture.  
• Students will suppress behaviors that mark them as different. which makes it difficult to form their own identity.  Forming identity is part of normal cognitive development, and when that is interrupted, a student is more likely to fail in school.  
• Learning cannot occur in isolation; it is socially mediated.
• Voluntary minorities, those who immigrate to the U.S. freely, tend to be more successful in school than involuntary minorities, those who have been conquered, colonized, or subjugated by the U.S.  
• Culturally Responsive Pedagogy:  to maximize learning opportunities, teachers must gain knowledge of the cultures represented in their classrooms.  
• Proxemics:  the interrelated observations and theories of man's use of space as a specialized elaboration of culture.  
• The U.S. tends to be a non-contact culture.  When in Rome, stand as the Romans do.  

Day 2

Degree:  Masters in ELL
Class:  Culture
06/02/21

• Cultural anthropology investigates how cultures conceptualize, develop, and transmit knowledge, skills, and values.  It provided insight into the ways cultural beliefs and practices interact with thinking and learning.  
• Multicultural education needs to focus on social groups and their designs and how to survive a pluralist society.  
• Cognition is intrinsically cultural and learning is largely social
• 4 traits demonstrated by resilient individuals are social competence, problem-solving skills, autonomy, and a sense of purpose and future including having goals, educational aspirations, achievement motivation, persistence, optimism, and spiritual connectedness.  
• Education and prevention practices that do not pay attention to external assets do not improve learning and behavior in the long term.  
• Utilizing environmental change approaches provide context for relationships which meets a student's developmental need for love, belonging, respect, identity, power, mastery, challenge, and meaning.  
• "When teachers and administrators evaluate through the lens of the dominant culture, they often cannot recognize the abilities and potential of certain groups of children."  
• Deficit assumptions happen when a child is skilled in ways a school does not prioritize.  These kids, while highly intelligent, get labeled as "limited."  
• Somewhere along the line, "different" became equal to intellectual inferiority which is known as a deficit assumption.  
• Deficit assumptions have lead to the overrepresentation of racial and language minorities in low academic tracks and special education.  
• Scaffolding:  teachers identify what students already know and then build on that to create a bridge between that knowledge and new knowledge.  
• Zone of Proximinal Development:  specific ways that adults or peers socially mediate or interactionally create circumstances for learning.  
• Constructivist Theory:  students are active agents in their learning, and the teacher is a facilitator.  

And So It Begins

It's the age-old question parents ask their kids at the end of the school day:  

What did you learn today, my child?  

Their age-old answer has always been infuriatingly the same:

Nothing.  

As I began my journey through grad school today, I decided to prepare myself for that inevitable question from my darling husband and a couple of interested parties.  This little blog will not be particularly interesting and definitely won't be earth-shattering.  It's just to prove to a couple of people, and, let's face it, myself, that I'm actually progressing down the long road to graduation.  I won't even preface each day with quips like this.  So, keep your expectations low, your judgments to a minimum (she didn't know THAT?!), and your comments to yourself.  Well, unless they're encouraging.  You can share those.  

Degree:  Masters in ELL
Class:  Culture

What I Learned Today, 6/01

• We no longer refer to it as "child development" but "human development" because humans can continue to learn and develop their entire lives.  
• All learning is contextual, and a child's life outside the classroom heavily informs their learning in the classroom.  
• Intelligence is malleable and takes many forms.  
• We don't give enough credence to oral skills and rely too heavily on pencil and paper.  This excludes a large subset of students from being deemed "intelligent."  In turn, they face an ever-widening learning gap they struggle their entire lives to overcome.  
• Gardner's Nine Multiple intelligences include:  linguistic, intrapersonal, interpersonal, spatial, logical-mathematical, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, naturalistic, and spiritual.  We possess all of these to some degree.  
• "Critical Periods" are more useful for explaining extreme deprivation rather than variations in normal experiences.  The brain is capable of adapting and compensating.  
• "Enriched Environments" can be problematic because they are based on culturally-based assumptions of what constitutes enrichment.  There is no formula for universal enriching environments that stimulate learning.  
• Helping students see connections between academic disciplines helps them connect education to the world around them.  This provides superior educational results than conventional practices.  It helps students make deeper, more meaningful connections between school and the world because it draws upon their emotional and intellectual resources.  
• Students identify "caring" as the most important characteristic they look for in a teacher.  
• While there are differences in the hemispheres of the brain, no one activity is strictly left- or right-brained.  The entire brain works together.  
• Using and integrating intelligences in various ways lets students exhibit and build upon their strengths and also to use skills that don't necessarily come easily to them.  
• Making cultural assumptions and "dumbing down" curriculum based on those assumptions robs kids of vital learning experiences and widens the achievement gap.