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.