As a teacher in an urban inner-city school I may encounter some challenges while collaborating with the parents of my student. For example one of those challenges may be the language and culture barriers between the child's parents and myself. As I have mentioned in a previous blog one of my students is Spanish. Although English is his first language, that is not the case for his mother who only speaks broken English. I would tend to think that this would become a challenge during a parent-teacher conference. The parent/s may feel like I (as the white teacher) am pushing the white culture and language upon them. Lisa Delpit explains the "culture of power" in her article The Silenced Dialogue. She explains that issues of power are enacted in classrooms because schooling prepares people for jobs, and what kind of job a person has determines their personal economic status and power. Therefore, the schooling is greatly related to that power. She also goes on to explain that it is not the schools job to attempt to change the cultures of the nonwhite children and insist that they adopt the values of the dominant culture. Rather, she is simply encouraging that they embrace the dominant culture while still practicing their own, which will only benefit their child/children. She believes that the world would be diminished if cultural diversity was ever eliminated and I agree with her. Therefore as teachers we are not trying to take away their personal language style, but simply encourage them to learn an additional one.
Another challenge that I will probably face as a teacher will be when the parents simply don't care. As I explained above language barriers may be challenging, but it does not mean that the parents don't care. While speaking with the teacher she has informed me of several students in the class who are in desperate need of academic interventions with their parents, but when trying to contact them and get them involved she has no such luck. She said there have been numerous letters sent out and phone calls made but it is like trying to contact people that "don't even exist." So when I become a teacher and am faced with this challenge, which I'm sure I will be, what would be the next step? What do I do when my letters are not being responded to and my phone calls are not being answered? Do I go to the house of that child? Is that even allowed? This will prove to be the ultimate challenge.
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Teri,
ReplyDeleteDuring my VIPS experience I also had a student who spoke a different language, although his language was something of an Asian dialect. I had to speak with his mother once, who also spoke broken English and it was very hard for her to understand what I was saying at some points. I was getting very frustrated when she kept questioning what I was saying. This was a learning experience for me and I had to take a step back and put myself in her shoes. I am in a program at RIC called "Emerging Leaders, where I had to do an experiment with languages. It was a game that consisted of a conversation, although I had to come up with two verbs in each sentence and had to speak it fluently. This experience really put me in someone else's shoes who does not know how to speak or understand a language. It has taught me to become more patient with parents' and students' who are trying to learn English. My advise is don't make it more of a challenge than it is by getting frustrated. Try to understand where the parent is coming from and help them out. :)
Jodi Robert
You make a lot of interesting points here, especially when you talk about the parents not caring. The teacher that I worked with during our service learning experience always threatened the children by stating that he would “call their parents.” But for some students this didn’t matter! At home, the parents may not care what the student does which could be why the students misbehaves in the classroom to begin with. Along with that a lot of the parents don’t speak English which is why it makes it harder for the teacher and the parents to communicate. Then, some parents who are of a different language want their children to learn predominantly English.
ReplyDeleteThis raises a huge question. How should our school system approach teaching styles to multilingual children? Goldenberg wrote an article called “Teaching English Language Learners.” Students need to learn to use academic English but in many cases it might be better if they’re taught in their own language. But on a negative note, some parents absolutely do not want their students to do this. This leaves a huge gap in the question towards whether or not parents are useful tools in a teacher’s approach to helping a student learn. It truly does remain to be an ultimate challenge.