Reflective Summary

Looking back on my portfolio, the terms, and the readings, I discovered I learned a lot more than I realized. I think the single biggest thing I learned in this class was that putting yourself in other’s shoes sometimes just does not work. This is partially because unless I experience it, I will never be able to understand what their shoes are like, and partially because as long as it is me in their shoes, I will never understand them. I noticed this several times as a disruption in my reading reflections. For example, the 7^th set of readings, I was (and still am!) beyond disturbed by the journalist who tried to be a poor person for a month and could not do it. I would never have imagined that some of the things she did would be necessary just for sheer survival. It was an eye-opening reminder that some people have to work 2 jobs or live in their cars to be able to get along. And I might have students like this. I really cannot imagine what that would be like, and as a student, I do not know how I would want to be treated at school, so it is difficult for me as a teacher to know how to treat those kids. It probably depends on the individual. Another example of the difficulty of empathy I found in my reading reflections was the set of readings on race, most memorably the Native American foster kid whose family humiliated her in an attempt to celebrate her culture. I am sure those parents were acting out of what they thought was consideration and love, but it was not how that girl felt loved or cared for.  Though I am pretty sure I am not as blatantly culturally insensitive as they were, I wonder whether I have ever been that person. People need to be loved in the way they need to be loved, not in the way I would need to be loved and cared for.

I also learned a lot about cultural capital and the culture of power this semester. I had previously recognized that the American Dream is much more likely to be just a dream for some people more than others, such as those who live in a poor area that has less access to resources and not going to college is the rule rather than the exception. However, I had never realized that even more than surface culture, such as not going to college, there is a deeper sense of culture that affects every aspect of life, including how people talk, how people think, how a family is run, what priorities are, etc. In readings about the culture of power, it became immediately clear to me that everything they were saying about white cultural dominance was true, and that because of that we do not hear what we want to hear sometimes. My favorite example being the one of the black teacher who felt like other teachers did not listen to her about how to educate black students, because what seemed like to the white teacher was deliberation, felt to the black teacher like a shut down. The fact that even in simple discussion we get such differing impressions of the outcome really helped me to understand the idea of cultural capital and how we all lack it, and how the danger of a culture of power is that most of us inside of it do not even realize that it exists. When I edited my ideal classroom, I tried to include more inclusive-feeling of visual evidence to show that white culture is not the important culture, but in looking back on it, the way I decided to go about it still feels very much like celebrating multiculturalism in a very white liberal-hipster sort of way, which is just a different facet of the culture of power, feeling all the time that we need to include other cultures, when really we should just include them and stop talking so much about it. In evaluating my semester, I have realized it is futile to try to step outside of my own culture and act as if it does not exist or as if I have overcome it, and rather I just need to accept that it is a part of me, be more self-aware of my own use of it, and try to gain and use all kinds of cultural capital in the classroom if am going to do anything about real multicultural education.

Honestly, once I learned about cultural capital and how pervasive it is, I realized that it permeates every facet of my life, and therefore can play a huge part in education. Even easily-overlooked things, such as speaking Standard English at home or having parents who quiz you on what letters say, are things that can have a tremendous impact on the effectiveness in school, which is mostly a structure of the culture of power. When I have gone to high schools this semester, I have noticed that even just the size and mere spaciousness of the schools is an expression of a middle- to upper-class values that kids are unknowingly bombarded with every day in school. In my ideal classroom changes, I tried to accommodate more for students who do not speak Standard English at home or who have not been trained since childhood for school by adding tools like modeling and many more visual, non-written aspects to my teaching that would be easier for anyone to understand, regardless of cultural background.

Ultimately, I learned that I have a lot more learning I need to do on multicultural education. My overwhelming impression coming away from this course is that true multicultural education is an overwhelming, near-impossible task that I have barely just begun to understand. I have a lot of cultural exploration to do, and much more understanding and cultural capital to gain. I realized I have only scratched the surface of the variety the human experience has to offer, and if I make an effort in teaching, I can get more of a taste of it, and can learn as much or more from my students as they can learn from me.

Book Review: Honky

Points of Disruption

What in this book was not disruptive? From the beginning, his seeming loss of innocence was a disruption in and of itself as he began to realize how race was an issue that it previously had not been for him. I found it disruptive that he did not begin to feel a sense of superiority over his multi-racial neighbors until he started going to a middle-class, white school. The level of privilege that white kids seemed to get, even when they were in the heart of other cultural centers, was disrupting to me as well. For example, when he brought his rich white friend with him back home, he was really worried that his friend would not have the cultural capital necessary and would make him look like a fool. However, his friend seemed to cope with the people there just fine, if not better, than he did. It helped me realize that cultural capital in a culture of power often ends up being more important than having cultural capital in your own culture, which I think was pretty disruptive. Additionally, I often had the question of "How can we ever do race right?" come to my mind as I was reading. For example, the story about his younger sister getting a white doll and all the black girls in her class getting black dolls was fairly disturbing to me. The fact that all the black girls were vying after her white doll, when she did not really care about what race her doll was, made me realize more how much ingrained the culture of power idea is even from an early age in cultures of less power. The fact that even 3 or 4 year olds could feel this distinction tells me that racial problems are not just caused by the culture of power, but are reinforced by the cultures not in power.

Clarifying Examples

The doll story was a good example of the influence of a culture of power, and often how unaware the culture in power is of its existence. His privilege as a white kid in a slum community often was shown by his experiences or lack thereof. His family was similar in most ways to others in their neighborhood--poor, working-class, on food stamps, living in government-subsidized housing, etc. However, because he was white, he had access to things other kids did not. For example, his mom used her friend's address to get him into a more white, middle-class school. However, if he had been a black kid trying to do that, he would have stuck out there, and therefore it is unlikely that using someone else's address would have worked to get him in there. Or it is likely that a black family may not have the social capital of knowing someone who lives in a good school district to be able to get them in there. The idea of cultural capital was also very prevalent in the book. He had cultural capital within his neighborhood, but when he moved to the middle-class white school, he struggled because he lacked the social capital to understand what other kids were talking about. I loved the example of how he did not know who Jimmy Carter or Gerald Ford was when all the other kids in his school had opinions on it. He had to listen to his friends' conversations, pick up on the main points, and then used what he picked up to help him fit in, even though he knew nothing really about it. I loved that he even stumped for Jimmy Carter after just having heard about him and really not caring at all so that he could win friends. Then after school he would go home and research all the things his friends had been talking about at school. So even though he was white, he had to acquire white capital to fit into that community.

Application as a Teacher

Honestly, this book left me kind of at a loss as to how to address race in a productive way that would not isolate or marginalize or assume anything about any race. I would like to not make assumptions about students' funds of knowledge because of their race, as this book showed that there can be a pretty wide variety of cultural capital and experiences that students will bring to the classroom. I realized more in reading how much the idea of race and ethnicity ties into shaping personal identity, something that is obviously very important to students. Students will use race to stick out or to fit in. I do not want to be the one who is creating or altering their identity because of my perceptions about race; rather, I would like to let them define themselves, and then let me interact with them in the way they want to be interacted with. I also want to be aware that just because kids are white does not mean that they have money. I found his examples of wanting to buy pizza with his friends and having to use his emergency money or resorting to stealing in order to fit in pretty compelling. I hope to not assign things or expect things of students that would require them to spend money to successfully achieve, when they could be on food stamps for all I know. I also want to be sure I do not unintentionally alter expectations for students based on race or class, expecting less of students who I might think would have a harder time being successful based on their background. Instead, I want to be able to give them the same assignments, ask them the same questions, and expect the same results from a group of black students as I would from a group of white students. Obviously what they bring to the table would vary, but I don't want to give them an education based on what I think is their ability to perform in school, but rather on their actual ability to achieve in school. I don't want race or class to make so much of a difference.