Social Issues in Education, in my Classroom

As a general education English teacher, I have to intentionally try to identify the ways in which other languages occur in my classroom, since it is not the norm. I find pockets of Spanish come through in my classroom when students get emotional - upset or excited, frustrated or unsure. It comes through in exclamations and derogatory slang words. But even knowing that a majority of my students are Latinx and bilingual, I did not purposefully ever implant Spanish (or any other language besides English) into my teaching practice, and I wonder, should I? Does translanguaging have a place inside a conventionally "English-only" general education classroom? I certainly think it can. I enjoyed the CUNY NYSIEB series on teaching emergent bilingual students, even if you are not bilingual yourself. I wonder if, in a way, this series is intended to recruit more teachers for the ever-growing number of emergent bilingual students in our classrooms who may otherwise be hesitant or nerv...

Pedagogy is a political and performative act: This assertion is very powerful and when faced with the realities of this profession, at cynical moments can feel almost laughable. As Friere asserts that education should be liberating, this role as it has traditionally been structured can be that of a "dictator." These readings ground me in the importance of radical pedagogy and the gravity with which I need to acknowledge my work. Our work is not merely to share information but to share in the intellectual and spiritual growth of our students. On a regular basis, I try to remind myself that I am never just teaching "content," but I am aiding in the process of facilitating the self-actualization of phenomenal and amazing human beings. Of course, this is an enormous job. But remembering that the students should not be only ones to grow or be empowered, but that teachers should also experience these things, makes the entire venture seem much more human, and therefore...

Intersectionality is a term used to describe the fact that every individual has multiple identities that interact and overlap each other. This means that we can have several dominant and subordinate identities all at once. The end here is not to mathematically determine who has the "most oppression" here, but to thoughtfully consider all the ways in which ones different identities play into how they show up and are received in our world. In Kimberle Crenshaw's TEDtalk, "The Urgency of Intersectionality," she begins her presentation by pointing out the astounding fact that many people are not aware of the black women who have been victims of police violence in the United States. I, like most of the audience, also would have had to sit down when she began naming the first woman, Michelle Cusseaux. It is disheartening that even in the recognition of gruesome police violence, we often hear and are taught the stories of black men, not those of black women and blac...

The primary crux of "In the Shadow of Brown: Special Education and Overrepresentation of Students of Color" by Beth Ferri and David Connor is that as educators, we need to begin to "consider how many of our current educational practices serve as tools of social control and exclusion, and not, as we might prefer to think, as democratic tools of social transformation," including special education. The authors trace the history of special education back to the years following the Brown vs. Board of Education supreme court case which racially desegregated schools de jure. In those early years that followed, many schools utilized academic tracking systems and separate special education classrooms under the guise of "natural abilities" as a way to resegregate the school population. These underhanded attempts to further perpetuate institutionalized racism and classism have resounding effects today: African American and Hispanic students have been severely overrep...

This week's readings make me wonder how much my students have thought about ability and disability, if at all, and the ways in which they might articulate what these labels mean. I think it would be particularly powerful to examine disability-related language, as posed in Cripping School Curricula. I think there are several of these examples listed that I myself have trained myself to not use, though many of these sayings are rampant among the teenagers I teach. Would focusing a discussion around this topic reveal to them the importance and power of language?  In a brief observation of my students, I get an impression at times that talking about mental health (in some cases) is easier than perhaps it was when I was growing up. With TV series such as 13 Reasons Why  dominating teens' Netflix feeds, depression and suicide are not necessarily taboo subjects that they are afraid to bring up. How can I as an educator embrace this tertiary knowledge my students have to move int...