Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed

I have heard about this book in a few of my other education classes, but it was just a mere mention.  I think all future teachers need to read this book as it is very insightful.

The second chapter was interesting.  In this chapter the banking models is described which is were students are empty bank accounts that should be kept open to deposits made by the teachers.  Freire disagrees with this approach because it dehumanizes the student and the teacher.  Paulo Freire has a big problem with this approach because it stimulates the oppressive attitude talked about in chapter 1.  He suggests instead to look at the student AND teacher as incomplete.  In this case Freire is using education as a way to shape a people and the society.  We are to learn together and from each other.  In today's society many people feel there are smart and dumb and you can't learn from anyone how is not as smart as you.  I think Freire would disagree as he feels all people are incomplete and everyone needs education to change the society.

Kuma Chapter 13

This chapter made me a bit uneasy.  It was interesting to read the classroom dialog and then see the analysis of what had occurred.  However, this is what made me so uneasy.  While reading the dialog I thought of some instances where the teacher could have done a better job explaining or could have asked the students to explain but she didn’t.  When reading the analysis I didn’t catch as many mismatches as the observer had, that worries me.  While reading I was thinking of myself in the teacher’s situation, would I know the mismatches taking place, would I be able to address them or would I need an outsider to tell me what was wrong.  I don’t want to fail my students by not noticing learning opportunities, especially in an ESL classroom.  I am just a bit worried I will be more worried about my lesson than what happens during the lesson to build on (as a first year teacher).  I know from all my classes to pay attention but I’m afraid when I get in front of the class and have an agenda I may forget!  Kuma has really good exploratory projects to help teachers evaluate their teaching acts.  I think for me it is most important to remember I can always grow as a teacher and always learn from what happens in the classroom (observations don't mean I'm doing a horrible job!).  The M&M is a really good way to observe and I am sure to use it in the future.

Kuma Chapter 12

Raising Cultural Consciousness is an important issue with the growing number of immigrants in the United States.  Critical Consciousness according to Kuma requires the recognition of a simple truth.  The simple truth being there is no one culture that embodies all and only the best of human experiences; and, there is no one culture that embodies all and only the worst of human experience (271) (Whoa).  Think about that for a second.  No one culture that is better or worse than another, how many minds is he blowing with this statement.  I wonder what the world would be like if we all actually believed in this.. This chapter was really insightful.

Kuma talked about the classroom as a multicultural mosaic.  I think this is a really nice analogy.  Even if we teach a mainstream classroom with students who seem to be the same, they aren’t.  They all bring different aspects to the classroom, different life values or choices, and lifestyles.  We are all different regardless of how we appear to be the same. I also thought the microstrategies and exploratory projects are excellent for cultural consciousness in the classroom.  I could see myself using most of them in my classroom with adaptations to my students.

Progress Report

I am still observing at Oakland Elementary School on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.  Two weeks ago a taught a lesson on bar graphs to four first grade boys.  The previous day the students made the bar graph with the teacher.  When I taught the students we talked about which category was the most favorite or the least favorite.  I asked them to tell me about their graph.  At the end to review I asked them to tell me how the whole process works becuase I had never made a bar graph before.  Each boy gave me a step and then I asked the boys to do a writing for me about the most favorite and least favorite of their graph.  I had sentence strips to help them.

Kuma Chapter 10

When I first saw the title of chapter 10 I was curious as to what the chapter would be talking about.  When the chapter started talking about the four language skills (speaking, listening, reading, and writing) being taught separately I thought THAT’S CRAZY!  Who thinks this is a good idea?  In every education and TESOL class I have been in, we have talked about how activities should include all of them or some of them but never really only one of them! 

Then I read about the strict sequencing of the skills, first listening, then speaking, then reading, then writing.  That sounded silly to me as well.  Then I remembered learning Japanese.  I was in elementary school and had a private tutor so I would be able to be friends with the Japanese students at my school.  I wanted to read Japanese so bad but my tutor said I had to first learn to listen to her and pick out parts, and then I could start speaking.  Only after I had mastered speaking would we move to reading and writing.  I was allowed to write my name in Japanese but that was it.  For me, not being able to read or work with the skills together, is probably what made me lose my interest and eventually stop taking lessons.

Looking back at that experience I can understand how important it is to use authentic materials to aide the use of all language skills.  I feel like this is a very important concept and it is important for teachers to remember students can learn without the textbook.  The textbook should be used more as a resource or a guide.

Waiting for Superman

My head was spinning after watching "Waiting for Superman".  I had been very excited to see it but in the end it let me down.   I was hoping it was the answer, but that was silly of me and the movie certainly didn't provide any answer.  The movie focused on the charter schools and bad teachers.  Getting rid of bad teachers may help yes but charter schools certainly aren't the answer.  In my psychology class we were told documentaries take one side and go to the extreme with it and that is exactly what happened with this movie.  I do feel the movie helped to explain what charter schools are and glorify their positives but what about their negatives.   What about their ability to accept whomever they want, to turn children away for their race, or language ability, or even their capabilities.  I think some of the charter schools positives such as their graduating rate or amount of students entering college is worth looking at.  Is it possible to incorporate some of their methods to help our failing schools?  I don't know where to go from here.  The public school system is having a terrible time and this movie presented a nice looking out, but aren't outs short cuts, don't they have "strings attached"?  And if charter schools were really what they seem, wouldn't their be more?  Isn't that where the nation would have taken us?  

Who knows?

Poetry

This event was very interesting for me.  I have never been to poetry event....ever.  The entertainer was just that very entertaining.  On the other side, the poems read were very serious and very touching.   The works were written about identity, trying to figure out WHO YOU ARE.  The piece presented by the TESOL minor student gave me goose bumps.  She had a lot to say about growing up Asian and some of the racist events she has had to go through.  When she talked about being stuck on an elevator with 10 white male students and they called her asian and a chink, I could feel the hair raising on the back of my neck.  I just couldn't believe it.  I think her whole writing connects with bell hooks nicely.  She explains how racism still exists, how she can't get away from it.  She talks about how it is cruel but it is what rules.  bell hooks   talks about how people think racism doesn't exist anymore, well here is a perfect example that it still does.  bell hooks chapters were a call to action and I feel this poetry reading about identity is a call to action as well.   Everyone struggles with identity, it is up to us to look beyond the stereotypes of identity and find out really WHO these people are.  It is not are place to decided that by the color of their skin, by their cultural heritage.  It is our place to dig deeper,to discover the WHO, not the label attached, and to celebrate  differences.

Authentic Materials Module 8

This module jumped out to me.  Since I have been at ISU and in C&I courses all I have heard is authentic material, authentic material, authentic material!  When I was tutoring for C&I 209 my teacher constantly discussed authentic material and I planned many of my lessons using pictures, web pages, and books (not the textbook).  I wanted to explore authentic materials for English Language Learners to see if the objective for ELLs was any different than non-native speakers.  From this video I can conclude it is not.  Authentic material is important for all students, everyone needs to build their language. The video showed several ways to use different types of authentic materials in the classroom.  The only thing to remember for ELLs is to pick materials that are at their level or a little higher, but not too hard.  Authentic material provides the learner with real language and language that is used in the target culture.  It is interesting and also can provide a lot of information.

As a future elementary teacher it is important for me to remember authentic materials, especially for my ELLs.  If I want my ELLs to speak the target language the best way for me to help them is by providing books that use the language they hear and are surrounded by.  It is also important for me to remember authentic materials are not just different kinds of printed books but magazines, newspapers, and even the internet.  Some of my students may not have access to the internet or even know what it is, it would be a great tool to enhance their knowledge of technology but also teach them different types of language and avenues for them to find information.  The internet is also a good tool for addressing different modalities in my classroom and the different levels of ELLs.  There is so much out there at the click of a mouse!

Week 10 Readings

I really liked this weeks readings, I think all the articles are relevant to our future teaching careers and it is an issue we need to say on top of.  Chapter two in Teaching to Transgress had some really interesting view points.  What really got me though was the quote on page 32, "Some folks think that everyone who supports cultural diversity wants to replace one dictatorship of knowing with another, changing one set way of thinking for another. This is perhaps the gravest misperception of cultural diversity."  I think this quote speaks for a lot of people.  The way I see it is people who fear cultural diversity have problems with the unknown.  They are familiar with "american  culture" and therefore can accept it but when you throw in a culture that is 100 percent new, their first response is fear.  

From my perspective cultural diversity is not replacing the "american culture" but enhancing it.  Who says that just because there are other ways of thinking that we automatically are saying this new way is better or this new way is far superior to what was here first.  It all goes back to fear of the unknown.  As future teachers we have to address the unknown in the classroom to hopefully change this misconception.  Thinking about my job as elementary teacher, I feel it is important to explain what exactly cultural diversity is and have an open and safe class room to address the misconceptions.  We have a hard road ahead of us.

Week 9 Readings

Chapter 6 was really interesting to me.  I thought learner autonomy more or less, was how a person learners, what their learning preference is, and which strategies they like to use the best.  This chapter shows there is more to that.  There is learning to learn and learning to liberate and if learners and teachers take great care a learner can achieve both.  It’s interesting to see the differences of the narrow view and the broad view.  The narrow view focuses on how you can learn and the broad view focuses on how you can take learning to a further level.  I think it is important for future teachers to be aware of both the narrow view and broad view and be conscious of what teachers can do to promote learning autonomy to create learners who learn and learners who strive for more.

Week 8 Reading

This article was interesting and I liked how curriculum and syllabus was clearly defined.  However, there is something in this article that is bothering me.  Maybe I didn't really understand what they were trying to say or I understand perfectly but it still doesn't make sense.  In the beginning of the article the author discusses who the consumer, customer, and stakeholders are of curriculum design.  The main consumers are the learners and secondly the teachers, the customers are materials and test developers and program evaluators. Who are these developers and evaluators?  People who have a background in education say through classes but not experience or are they experienced teaching professionals?  If the main purpose of the curriculum is to provide these people with clear guidelines for developing materials, courses, and assessment instruments then shouldn't they be the people who understand the classroom and the art of teaching?  I guess I really just want to know who these people are that are in control of the curriculum who is making the decisions of what the students have to know and what I have to teach.

Week 7 Readings

"A method of teaching allowing the students to learn by discovering things by themselves and learning from their own experiences rather than by telling them things." (176)  This quote, I feel, explains how to activate intuitive heuristics.  Basically it is better to learn by your doing than by the doing of the teacher.  My fiance is a big computer nerd and when I need help with my computer, he won't help me.  He tells me I have to figure it out, he will sit with me and give me ideas on how to solve my problem but he never does it for me.  I think this has made my understanding of my computer much greater than if he were to come in and fix it and leave.  What would happen if the problem occurred again and he wasn't there?  I would be out of luck, that's for sure.  Kumaravaduvelu does a good job explaining how to activate intuitive heuristics.  He explains in the inductive approach to grammar, the teaching lies in helping the learner discover what the grammatical rules are.  In deductive teaching there is hardly any interaction between learners which Kuma states is necessary to create an environment promoting self discovery.  Like we have mentioned in class before communication between everyone involved in the learning process is essential to learning and better yet essential to learner discovery.  As a future teacher it is important for me to step back and reflect on my teaching to see if I am creating opportunities for my students to learn for themselves or if I am not creating opportunities but instead telling information.

Final Project Progress

I have been in an ESl classroom with K-5 students on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.  I have been observing the interactions between the teacher and student/s, students and students, and students and content.  I hope to be discussing a lesson with my CT that I will teach to a group of 4 first grade boys on the topic of transportation.

Week 6 Readings

After reading the article by Christine Sleeter I had several different thoughts going through my head.  At first I was comparing my best friend and me.  We both want to be teachers but we have two very different views of teaching and diversity.  We are both white females, she wants to teach in a farm town with no diversity, I want to teach ESL, I embrace the idea of diversity and would love nothing more than to teach in a more diverse setting than I was raised in.  We both grew up in a predominately white school system; the only difference was my school did have ESL.  Did this little exposure to diversity while I was young, change my whole outlook on education?  I thought about this a lot after reading about the amount of diversity training most pre-service teachers have and their ideas of diversity in the classroom.  Then I started thinking about ISU and how it prepares our teachers for a more diverse classroom.  I looked at my diversity hours and noticed that I had completed all 50 of them but I don’t remember doing this.  I don’t remember going to a diverse setting and it made me wonder what ISU considers as a “diverse experience”.  Not only that but how can just 50 hours prepare pre-service teachers for a diverse school, it doesn’t and it can’t.  Like the article said after the short exposure to a diversity class many pre-service teachers didn’t have a lasting impression.  Their ideas of diversity were changed for a few months and then returned to the previous state.  As diversity increases pre-service education needs to increase diversity teaching as well.  I like the idea of field experience or even the immersion experience.  This idea has good bones and can only benefit both teachers and future students.  My last thought follows the quote, “the researchers mentioned here attribute students’ learning to the power of community-based, cross-cultural contexts in which they have to grapple with being in the minority, do not necessarily know how to act, and are temporarily unable to retreat to the comfort of a culturally familiar setting”.  It’s a long quote but I feel it puts the shoes of diversity on the white majorities feet.  We get to feel what its like to be the minority.  Again this can only help our understanding of diversity in the classroom.

Week 5 Readings

     This weeks readings gave me something to think about, especially minimizing perceptual mismatches.  In many classrooms there are perceptual mismatches between the teaching objectives and the learning outcomes.  Kumaravadivelu discusses ten potential mismatches that can occur daily.  It was really interesting to see all the mismatches and how often they could occur in a language classroom.  The first three mismatches, cognitive, communicative, and linguistics are important for future language teachers to consider and become conscious of.  If these three mismatches are not considered then there will be a lack of learning in the classroom and a great deal of frustration.  

     The author then explains there are three pedagogic insights about perceptual mismatches, they are unavoidable, identifiable, and manageable.  After reading his chapter I would agree with him.  Looking back at the 10 mismatches it is hard to believe some of them still occur even with the best efforts of both the teacher and student to minimize it, they will always be unavoidable.  I also agree they are identifiable.  In order to identify the mismatches it is best to discuss and understand the teachers and learners perspectives.  The last insight, mismatches are manageable, gave me the best source of comfort.  While reading the chapter I was so worried that I would be creating all these mismatches and my objectives and my students objectives wouldn't match and I would just have a mess of a classroom.  This quote," a mismatch can be converted into a learning opportunity in class" really made me feel better.  Yes mismatches are unavoidable but if I can at least identify the issue then I can create an opportunity for learning for me and for my students.

Week 4 Readings

I found this week’s readings for interesting.  Chapter 3 of the kuma book reinforced what I have been learning in the education program at ISU.  The best way to maximize learning opportunities is to build on the interactions between students and interactions between the students and the teachers.  Dick Allwright defines classroom instruction as "the interactive process whereby learning opportunities are created."  I feel this quote is absolutely true.  In a successful classroom there needs to be interaction between students and between the teacher and the students.  When interactions take place in the classroom it feeds both students and teachers with opportunities that may not have occurred otherwise.  It was interesting to see some teachers miss learning opportunities and then explain they just didn’t think about it.  As future teachers this is a macrostratgy that is one of the most important.  If we cannot build learning opportunites from our students interactions or create them for out students then we as teachers are not only allowing our students to fail on understanding but we are setting them up to fail in the real world by not showing them how learning opportunities are everywhere.

I also found the article on CLT and the way Chinese schools and learning are not compatible to be a good source of information.  In China there is a deep respect for education.  The teachers are seen as a mentor and sometimes a parent, good teachers are the ones who care, help, and pass on their experiences.  They also hold teachers in such a high position that they are supposed to posses all the knowledge and always have the right answers.  This is not true of the teachers in CLT, teachers are at the same level of students and can learn from students.  This is only one way the article discussed the incompatibility between Chinese culture and CLT.  This article really brought to my attention how important it is to pay attention to the culture and context you are teaching in, to find the most appropriate method or methods.  In China, CLT won’t work as well as other methods, however, some aspects of CLT will work.  This reinforces that teachers cannot pick a method and stick to that but use several different aspects of several different methods to promote the best student learning.  

Week 3 Readings

This weeks reading was full of information.  In chapter 1 of Beyond Methods, I was presented with different roles that teachers play.  Teachers can be passive technicians, reflective practitioners, and transformative intellectuals.  Each role includes characteristics of another role.  Teachers play many different roles through out the school day and even the school year.  Knowing these roles and how they connect and integrate into one another will help me plan my roles accordingly.  Chapter 2 of this book gave me a few things to think about.  The chapter discusses the dislike of methods, this is new to me.  Kumaravadivelu suggest a postmethod pedagogy with three parameters.  The parameters of particularity, practicality, and possibility.  Again these parameters share characteristics of one another, they work together to create a relationship.  I think the roles that teachers play and the parameters of the postmethod pedagogy show what teaching a second language is really about.  You can't have just one or the other.  The roles and the parameters intermingle and build on each other and this is what happens in a language learning environment.  Language learning builds off several different aspects from methods, to parameters, to the roles that the teachers play in the classroom.

Language Approaches

I have had my fair share of language learning experiences.  When I was in elementary school I took Japanese lessons and throughout junior and senior high  I studied Spanish and German.  I continued with Spanish through my first few years of college.  In my Spanish classes at the college level my instructor used the communicative language teaching approach.  From the beginning of the semester he made it aware his goal was to get us to communicate as much as we could in the target language.   In class we would have several opportunities to discuss material, role play, and create dialogues.  During this engagement in the language the instructor would be available for help and advice and also take notes on errors.  When the class would come together again we would discuss some of the errors he noticed, no one was ever singled out. At the end of the semester we would have a 10-20 minute conversation with the instructor individually as an assessment of our language ability.  This gave us a purpose in the class and many people strived to communicate in a purposeful way instead of to get the grade.  I think this approach really improved my spanish because I had to learn the language in order to even attend class and communicate with my classmates.  I also experienced the direct approach.  My teacher would always have examples, pictures, props, for the new vocabulary we were learning.  When it was time to talk about grammar the class was presented with a  situation and we had to figure out the grammar rule.  We spoke a lot in the class and reading, writing, and listening were all based on what we were doing orally in the class.

I was more comfortable with the communicative language teaching approach.  I enjoyed talking with my classmates and my instructor and not having to worry about my errors.  I knew if I made errors my instructor would address them whole class and never single me out.  This made me more comfortable in all aspects of language learning. On the other hand, some aspects of the direct approach made me feel more in charge of my learning and I like.  I like figuring out the rules and taking pride in the knowledge I am gaining.

There is never one best way of doing anything.  This is especially true for language learning.  Each student is an individual with individual ways of learning.  To say one method is better than another is depriving students of a different way to learn which could end up benefiting them in the future.

Dream Job

My dream job is to be an ESL teacher to elementary students.  My classroom will be filled with students from various countries and rich with culture.  I will teach in a medium sized school district in an urban area.  This will allow me to have access to more materials and more experienced teachers for advice/ help than a small district yet is not large enough to intimidate me.  This sized school district will also provided me with a larger range of students than a small district.  I would like to work in an urban area that has several different cultures, which will help me understand my various students.  This area would also be on the middle to upper end of the economic scale.  This placement will allow me better resources to help my students learn English and better opportunities for experience.  Most of all I would just love to teach in any ESL classroom with students from all over. 

I think it is very important to be knowledgeable and conscious of TESOL for many reason.  The most important reason is the fact that the immigrant population in the United States is growing and will continue to grow.  If we are going to pride ourselves on being a melting pot then we need to understand the needs of our new comers.  I also feel it is important because these students and families are entering a whole new place, especially the school systems.  These students need help just like native speaking students and it would be a disservice to let these students fail because the teachers didn’t know how to present the material or adapt the tests to help the students succeed.

From TESOL Methods and Materials, I would like to gain a practical approach to teaching students from various countries English.  I would like to know how to vary my teaching to help each level in my classroom.  The most important goal for me, is to know how to increase learning in my classroom.  I don’t want to enter an ESL classroom and feel unprepared and not be able to create a stimulating curriculum and classroom.