Hope and Healing in Urban Education

Hope and Healing in Urban Education: How Urban Activities and Teachers are Reclaiming Matters of the Heart
By: Ginwright, S. 

  • Domains of successfully teaching African American students:
    • Focus on academic success and facilitates intellectual grown 
    • Cultural competence or helping students appreciate and celebrate their culture as well as celebrating other cultures
    • Sociopolitical consciousness that focuses on applying learning to real-world problems
    • Developing skills to identify the root causes of problems in their lives and address them. 
    • Acknowledging that young people are more than knowledge, skills, and behaviors. 
    • Relational Teaching: Building caring relationships as an educational strategy
  • Educators need to question how their own internalized racism effects the ability to form relationships with students of color in their class. 
  • Building real relationships sometimes requires you to be vulnerable with your students to help them relate to you.
  • "It takes the hood to save the hood" - People are more likely to listen and respond to someone who has experienced what they are experiencing.
  • Critical Reflection: not going off of protocol, but using your own experiences and internal compass to guide you to come up with a solution.
  • Forgiveness allows the harmed and the transgressor to build a closer relationship. In schools this looks like holding students accountable for their actions, but instead of punishments uses it as a tool to build a relationship. 
  • Always look for opportunities in lessons to share and listen to each other. This helps students relate to one another, display empathy and causes the lessons to be real for them.
  • Establish relationships with families to build trust and understand what is going on at home. 
  • Teachers need to be aware of their own bias' and feel confident in order to create a comfortable classroom to lead these discussions. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Schools, Prisons, and Social Implications of Punishment

Schools punish the students who have the greatest academic, social, economic, and emotional needs.  Minorities most likely to be suspended and expelled. "Not the best thing for the student, but the best thing for the school." Schools inability to meet the needs causes students to be disciplined - not addressing the reason behind the problematic behavior. School punishments are consistent with how adults are punished in the US. Students lose incentive to comply with school rules - cycle of punishment Functions of schooling - sorting, socializing and social control Removing a child from school is a punishment when they most likely require mores schooling. The true factors of misbehavior get ignored. Sorting out the "bad apples" so that others can learn - only students whose behavior will change by being suspended is those who care about school.  Removing trouble making students - new trouble makers emerge. Teachers with low expectations and unmotivated - h...
Read more

Deculturalization

Image
Deculturalization and the Claim of Racial and Cultural Superiority by Anglo-Americans By: Joel Spring &  The Indian Boarding Schools By: Michelle Bollinger These two articles discuss how one culture with power can form a belief that other cultures are inferior to them. They come up with ways to justify their beliefs and execute plans to eliminate and assimilate cultures. Schools often become a large part of this process. The following are quotes that stood out to me while reading each article. "Under the direction of white, Christian leaders, savage Indians could shed their barbaric ways and assimilate into white society and become civilized." The mindset of this quote is true racism. Believing that one way of doing things is better, or the right way to do something and forcing others to lose their identify. Throughout the article you see how a group of people become powerless to people who have means, which in turn gives them power. Even though t...
Read more

How To Become Batman

Image
How To Become Batman Hosts: Hanna Rosin & Alix Spiegel This podcast is arguing that if people change their expectations then blind people will be able to see. It is an extreme example of a concept that I have always been fascinated by: enabling. Throughout the podcast you learn about Daniel who is a blind man that taught himself echolocation as a child. His mother allowed him to experiment with the world around him. She banished her own fear and raised him like a seeing child. He was allowed to climb trees, walk to school, and even learned to ride a bike. Thinking about this as a seeing person seems so unlikely. Your first thought is probably "I would never be able to ride a bike without my eyes!"  Daniel believes that these expectations are what hold people back from achieving all that they can.  When you break this down to a smaller, less extreme example it is easier to see the effects and understand. If someone does everything for you, you never learn how to...
Read more