Week 8

Chapter 2 (Wong)

Although the first section was a bit too physiological for my personal tastes, I most definitely appreciated the following two quotes:

Page 44: “Through teaching, Confucius sought to influence society and to bring about social reforms.”

Page 46: “The quest for selfhood is not a heroic act of individualism or a private matter. It is social rather than an individual pursuit.”

These quotes transitioned nicely into the author’s ideology of that learning goes hand-in-hand with the community, which in essence is promoting that need for scaffolding proposed by our dear friend Vygotsky: “Language occurs on the social plane or in community before it occurs independently or individually” (49).

Cummins framework for empowerment of language minority students peaked my interest: additive, collaborative, reciprocal and assessment. I think we forget about viewing a lot of minorities in our classroom as marginalized within and outside of school grounds; as teachers it is vital that we make such efforts, as mentioned by Cummins, to make the excluded, included – or at least to the extent that we are able to. That Canadian case study proves this!

Another interesting quote: “We size up other people in conversations… It means that in order to communicate we must always jump to conclusions about what other people mean. There is no way around this” (61). Need I elaborate? Funny yet true.

The point regarding the adopted children being put on the spot by the teacher about their cultural heritage is a valid point. I have friends who were adopted from China when they were around 5-7 months old; they are practically clueless about the “framework” of Chinese society. People assume, though, that they are an overflowing resource into that particular cultural lense based on their appearance. On a similar note, I was born and raised in the United States. And the more I travel, the more I am realizing how little I even know about my own cultural heritage.

Lastly, the bullying and hate crimes have been a relevant issue lately in our society. I actually had to watch a documentary on this development within our public schools in addition to the different case studies involved in such hate crimes (e.g., sometimes to the point of suicide). Even though we might have different morals, views, perspectives – I am a strong believer that you can still respect that person, even if you dislike their views on a topic. Maybe I’m in the minority on that one.

“Breaking them up…”

“In almost every classroom in the school, about half of the enrollment consisted of children whose home/first languages were other than English.”

Since I am a visual person, I was envisioning this scene as a future professional. This article reminded me how rough it can be to teach K-12 sometimes. Now as a graduate assistant, I have almost “accustomed” myself to college methods, whereas all my undergraduate experiences were in high school classrooms. This article was a good reminder on how new this TESOL field of study really is; there are so many studies and theories still being produced and analyzed today. Should we pull out ELL? Should we always have a translator present? How do we handle six different ELLs all in one classroom with less than basic-level English? These questions are beyond my comprehension to begin to answer.

The three practices – sitting at own desk, using own materials, doing own work with own words – all dictated that the learning process is an individual journey, instead of fostering and supporting learning in community. Unfortunately, this ideology is not one that merely happens over night; it is one that gradually grows over time. We as professionals must nip it in the bud as soon as we recognize the contagious, deadly weed in our classroom. But why don’t teachers stop this? Is it ignorance or apathy?