Portfolio Review

I think that the greatest shift in my paradigm that has occurred in result of taking this Multicultural Education course at BYU and completing the assigned readings, writing assignments, and portfolios, is shown through a quote from our first week of class by Elder Joseph B. Wirthlin in his talk “Concern for the One”:

“Jesus Christ is our greatest example. He was surrounded by multitudes and spoke to thousands, yet He always had concern for the one… We are commanded to seek out those who are lost. We are to be our brother’s keeper. We cannot neglect this commission given by our Savior. We must be concerned for the one.”

I have realized the truth that teaching is not about reaching the greatest amount of people, marginalizing children, students, and humanity along the way in order to reach the end goal of an educated population by justifying not focusing on “the one” because it would detract from “the whole.” Rather, teaching is about being concerned for each individual’s needs and actually recognizing and meeting those needs. This mentality requires much more attention and effort than marginalization, but I believe that it is possible to change societal structures and myself in order to benefit the greatest number of people by focusing on individual needs.

Especially as an educator, I need to take responsibility not only for the intent of my actions, but for the impact that my actions have on students. As Gorski explained, “I can never be totally aware of the biases and prejudices I carry into the classroom and how my students or colleagues experience me,” but I have to take responsibility for the consequences of my actions despite how I intended them. In order to do so, I need to be in a constant state of self-reflection. It is also beneficial and necessary for students to learn how to be self-reflective because “an education for equity enables students not only to acquire basic skills, but to use those skills to become agents for social change,” (BANKS). Self refection is critical, as well as teaching students to question the structure of society, enabling everyone to promote social change and better human rights. My portfolio has aided my process of change prompted by self reflection, as shown and outlined below:

In Portfolio I, I created an imagined classroom. I had no idea what I wanted to put in my classroom and I had no idea what student needs even existed that would need to be addressed. This portfolio helped me to assess how much I already knew about what kind of teacher I wanted to become and how much I would have to learn in order to reach that point. By the end of the semester, my standards for the teacher I would like to become have undergone a great shift; they are much more specific and take multicultural issues into consideration.

In Portfolio II, I created a cultural snapshot of a single story for feminists. Undergoing the process of recognizing how students are affected by this specific single story, as well as how school policy and curriculum is affected by a single story, helped me to feel personally connected to the oppression that victims of other single stories face. This portfolio also helped me to recognize some societal standards for gender expression that can be oppressive and incorrect.

In Portfolio III, I described my experience as being the “Other.” I was able to learn that just because society has labeled some stereotypes as “bad,” does not mean that they are bad. Just because society and culture says that something should be a certain way does not mean that it is correct. Previous to this experience, I had tried to justify my interactions with people that I perceived as gay by reassuring myself that just because they seem gay does not mean that they actually are. I tried to give them the “benefit of the doubt.” This experience required me to reevaluate why I would feel that I would have to give anyone the “benefit of the doubt” about being gay because that mentality implies that being gay is bad. This experience also helped me to recognize that stereotypes do not always or usually ring true. I need to be aware and careful of how I label people: good or bad. I need to be aware of my own prejudices and how those prejudices influence the way that I treat people.

In Portfolio IV, I assembled some of my personal cultural artifacts and explained how the values, beliefs, and norms of my personal culture could affect my classroom. It was super interesting to me to explicitly outline what concepts I hold as good and just in society, what beliefs or convictions I hold to be true, and how those things influence what cultural norms I adhere to. My beliefs will be different and even seen as oppressive by my students and other members of the community, and I need to be able to recognize and validate others’ beliefs, values, and norms while creating a better environment for my students to learn and grow and gain better opportunities for themselves in the culture that we live in.

For Portfolio V, I had a community experience where I attended a forum that provided perspective on Mormon black history. My main takeaway from this experience was realizing that we don’t necessarily had to forfeit our own culture in order to appreciate other cultures, but that what is more beneficial to every culture is to recognize the similarities between cultures. By recognizing similarities, we can open a means of communication and better understand and get along with one another, diminishing whatever feelings of hate occur by “othering” someone. This experience also gave a specific example of how to be anti-racist as opposed to a passive racist. By including multicultural texts and perspectives in the classroom, we can help show similarities between cultures and minimize the negative affects caused by ignorance and misinformation.

For Portfolio VI, I revised my imagined classroom. By the end of the semester, my standards for the teacher I would like to become underwent a great shift; they are much more specific and take many more multicultural issues into consideration. This portfolio helped me to recognize that there are many opportunities to address multicultural issues in the classroom, whether through curriculum, policy, teaching style, or classroom surroundings. Everything about the classroom can either reinforce the dominant culture and structures, or appropriately, positively recognize non-dominant cultures and break down oppressive societal structures.

For Portfolio VII, I reviewed the book, “The New Kids: Big Dreams and Brave Journeys at a High School for Immigrant Teens” by Brooke Hauser. This book provided perspective on race, immigration, language, religion, and homelessness. What was most influential to me was feeling like the school was a positive environment compared to other schools that the students might have attended, even though education was still difficult for most of the students. Many resources were provided for the students and International High School that they would have not received elsewhere, and that I didn’t realize where even available when I was a student in high school. Reviewing this novel helped me to recognize ways to implement structural ideology, as well as just how critically necessary structural ideology is for multicultural education. I need to adopt and be an advocate for structural ideology and help my students to break down the structures that oppress them and limit their opportunities for success.

In order to illustrate the process that I have undergone throughout the course of this class and the creation of this portfolio, I have included my weekly disruptions that occurred from the reading assignments in the form of journal entries. Some are only a few lines; some I felt required greater explanation.

DISRUPTIONS:

January 25 Culture

Some disruptions that I had from the reading were that my pity, or attempt at sympathy, however well intended, can be just as offensive and unacceptable as intolerance, as well as that hegemony is so invasive that it tends to be invisible, and I can go on not even knowing that there’s a problem at all.

February 1 Costs and Benefits of Culture

What made me uncomfortable from the readings was realizing that my judgments on other cultures can come from my unconscious, and I can’t usually explain why I might feel the way that I do, or where those feelings originated. I benefit by white supremacy through my own unconscious, as well as others unconscious. Even if I try to be reasonable and aware of white supremacy, my bias is often unconscious. As an educator, my unconscious analysis of students will affect the way that I treat them, which in turn affects the way that they act and learn.

February 8 Language and Culture

I felt discomfort that Lisa Delpit was not speaking of how things should be, but of how they currently are. Just because things are a certain way doesn’t mean that they are correct or should stay that way, but we as educators have a responsibility to prepare our students to be able to function in the world we live in. My disruption was the reality that I need to prepare my students to function in a society whose cultural norms and expectations I don’t even agree with. We can’t create change unless we already function in the system, and our students need to be able to function in the system.

February 15 Race and Ethnicity

I was very, very bothered about the Japanese concentration camps during WWII. I was bothered that I hadn’t learned much about them. Yes, there was maybe a sentence or two in my 11^th grade U.S. history book, and maybe one test question, but the importance of the reality wasn’t there. Our education was posed from a very pro-American standpoint, and bad parts of American society were always deemphasized. I think that this “America is so great” teaching standpoint reinforces white privilege, racism, and discrimination both within schools and in society. By not acknowledging that racism exists, those that benefit from it go on believing that racism is not something that they should worry about. What bothered me the most was the realization that not only do teachers and administrators act racist in the way that we treat students, but that the material that we teach is also racist and we usually don’t realize it or don’t teach it.

February 22 Class and Poverty

The greatest general discomfort came from the assertion that education is about so much more than being smart and capable – where you come from really does have an effect of where you go. I have been becoming more and more aware of the difficulty level of getting out of poverty, but I didn’t realize the details of extremity. Schools provide different opportunities to different economic classes simply because different economic classes values different things, influencing each culture to reinforce the values unique to their class. Teachers can make many incorrect assumptions about the students they teach surrounding the issue of poverty. For example, if a student is sleeping in class because they are homeless and uncomfortable in a car, or waking up at night because of his or her hunger, the teacher might assume that the student is disinterested in school or lazy.

February 29 Language and Immigration

I hadn’t before realized how hostile and cruel the education system often is for immigrant students. Where I’m going to school to become an educator, I value education as a means for helping others to learn and better their lives. To realize that the structure of schooling environments often does just the opposite for immigrant students, that their educational success is “not necessarily because of the system, but despite the system,” was very upsetting to me (Gonzalez 242). In Portes’ article, Unz and his supporters fought to end the bilingual education of their communities. This was at first surprising to me because of the videos talking about how we learn language and about how the students struggled when they hadn’t first learned English before taking the regular classes. As I read further, I realized that this fight against bilingual education was not against “bilingual education at all, but a well intentioned albeit misguided security blanket thrown at immigrant children” (570). While bi-lingual education can help students to learn English as a secondary language, it often enforces the assumption that because someone can’t speak English that they are insufficiently capable in other academic areas as well. I was upset hostility, cruelty, and unfairness of well-intentioned programs as well as the bullying and racism that occurred among the students as reinforced by the school.

March 7 Utah NAME Conference

In “Increasing Global Understanding with international and Multicultural Literature,” at the Utah National Association of Multicultural Education (NAME) Conference, I was upset that it’s now acceptable to study literature from different cultures including Latino/a, African and African American, differing socioeconomic levels, religion, Asian and Asian American, Native American, and even literature with strong female protagonists as part of class curriculum in order to provide a “sliding glass door” through which students can experience these different cultures, but it’s not yet acceptable to do so with LGBTQ literature. The presenters gave different reasons for including all of these varying genres of literature, as well as different ways to incorporate the suggested novels into class time. However, the suggestion for incorporating LGBTQ literature was to provide the literature at the library and within your own classroom, but not necessarily to focus on it as a whole class because it is still an extremely controversial and not yet generally accepted for discussion. We talked about the concerned parents and citizens who would fight back and possibly cause you to lose your job. My disruption was realizing that I could lose my job by trying to educate my students about different cultures.

March 7 Religion

I think that a statement found within the Rolling Stone article, “The Forsaken, A rising Number of Homeless Gay Teens Are Being Cast Out by Religious Families,” can summarize my greatest discomfort. Alex Morris wrote, “The number one hurdle to LBGT equality is religious based bigotry,” and I think that religious based bigotry is the number one hurdle for creating a safe, positive learning environment within my own classroom.

This statement is especially difficult for me because I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and I do believe this church to be true. The Mormon church believes marriage between a man and a woman is ordained of God, and that acting on “same-sex attraction” is a serious sin, even though being attracted to someone of the same sex is not. In addition to this belief, there are certain doctrines that I believe to be true that other religions do not. Our church is very devoted to missionary efforts, and we ask others to build upon the truth that they already know and value, but in order to be an active member there are certain rules that must be followed. While I concur with the belief that marriage between a man and a woman is God’s ordained way, I also believe that people who identify as LGBTQ need to feel accepted, loved, and supported. Everyone needs to feel that their lives have value, and I believe that “religious based bigotry” doesn’t help anyone. I need to figure out how to validate my own religious beliefs while simultaneously respecting and validating those that differ from my own. Just because I believe my religion to be the restored truth does not mean that other people are inherently “bad” or “wrong,” and they need to be supported in their own beliefs.

March 14 Ability

My disruption is best summarized by the statement from Nocella, “The disabled are not ill, sick, or diseased. They are different. A disease or illness is not part of ones characteristic or being.” While I previously understood this to an extent, the videos and reading helped to analyze and understand some of my own beliefs about disability. My sister has a physical disability that limits the function of the left half of her body. When she first received the traumatic brain injury that caused her hemiplegia, my mom dedicated all of her time to finding Kaylee the best occupational therapists and physical therapists. She fought through the systems to get Kaylee the help that she needed, but at times she was frustrated at different approaches from different therapists or educators. I remember her trying to explain it to me, that one approach enforced the idea that Kaylee could improve and her disability could be made less and the other approach settled on the idea that the disability was permanent and she would not improve and she just had to figure out how to function around her disability. It has been 13 years since the accident, and while Kaylee regained a lot of functionality, her disability will remain throughout her entire life and it is part of who she is. While her disability presents limitations, it is different from a “disease or illness” because it has become part of her identity.

March 21 Gender

My greatest disruption came from the “Dude, You’re a Fag” article where the students talked with the experimenter about their use of the word “fag” and how they would never actually call an openly homosexual person a fag. They said that they accepted homosexuality as a lifestyle or personal choice of whom you want to sleep with, and implied that they didn’t have a problem with it and didn’t want to offend homosexual people. The real issue for these adolescents was whether or not there was conformity to gender stereotypes, and I realized that I enforce this same mentality. I never use the word fag, but I have come to be more accepting of the idea of someone being gay or lesbian than the idea of someone being transgender and completely rejecting the gender that they were born with. I hadn’t realized that homosexuality and gender conformity were completely different concepts, and it made me uncomfortable to realize both my ignorance and that I was reinforcing the same gender stereotypes that bother me.

March 28 Sexual Orientation

Up until this point in my life, I have been fairly neutral in my views and actions in concerns to gay rights and interacting with the LGBTQ community. I knew that hate was wrong and that all people deserved love and respect, but I didn’t know how to interact with people who identified or had strong feelings about LGBTQ from either side (supportive or unsupportive). I felt uneducated and uninformed and unqualified to speak about LGBTQ and therefore didn’t stand up for members of that community because I didn’t know how. What hit me hardest from the videos and from our discussion here is that by trying to remain neutral I have contributed to the hate and discrimination against LGBTQ. It’s not that I was unaware, but that I didn’t know the best course to take because I felt conflicted between my desire to love everyone and my testimony of the truth of a Gospel that condemns homosexuality.

The videos helped me to understand that I am definitely not forfeiting my faith by standing up for members of the LGBTQ community, and that is my responsibility not only as a future educator but also as a Christian. I really liked what Jonathan said about preferring to have a live, unchaste student than a dead, chaste one. This rings true to me. All life has value and we need to encourage life and learning rather than hate.

April 4 Teaching for Social Justice

My experience this week was different in that the article by Ladson-Billings didn’t really make me uncomfortable. It felt like a good wrap up to the semester by suggesting that teachers need to utilize a culturally relevant pedagogy by helping students achieve academic success, cultural competence, and critical consciousness. How I felt during the article rather confirmed necessary action to a disruption that I had during the videos. I realized that instead of being anti-racist, I am non-racist, and I have come to be more comfortable with Grit Ideology than Structural Ideology. Because the issues of multicultural feel so huge, I have come to adopt the mentality that I need to help students be aware of the structures of inequality and know how to work within the system. My disruption was acknowledging that learning to navigate the system is different from refusing to challenge the system. I need to be careful that I don’t just become comfortable with working the system rather than trying to change it.

Rather than provide a works cited page from everything from the course, I have labeled the lesson topic for each of my disruptions and you can explore the course readings associated with each lesson through this link:

https://sites.google.com/site/mceddraper/lessons

By recognizing my disruptions I have been able to evaluate what I should do and what I am willing to do in order to become the teacher that I want to be: focusing on the one, creating a safe class room environment, enabling student success, and inspiring social change.