Preface - Culturally Responsive Unit

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    Preface: Culturally Responsive Unit

    Students enter the classroom with an integrated pattern of knowledge, attitudes, values,

    goals, strengths, and weaknessestheir communitys, their familys, and their own. The purpose

    of culturally responsive instruction is to use all these qualities to the learners advantage. In the

    classroom, these cultural references extend beyond ethnicity. The language, history, and

    geography of a group of people are important. The interests, needs, and learning styles are

    likewise. In the creation of my culturally responsive unit, the goal was tosee the children. Rather

    than do so explicitly by creating a multicultural unit of study, I infused culturally responsive

    strategies within the topic of the ocean biome (a seemingly un-cultural choice). I used their

    primary language, interests, and learning styles to build the lessons.

    The physical geography and language of my group of students was taken into

    consideration. First, the ocean is local. Its close proximity makes it a topic of choice when one

    visits the beach over the weekend. One Monday morning, Brain entered the classroom eager to

    tell me about the sandcastle he made. He did not have all the vocabulary in English, so much of

    the conversation was in Spanish. This dialogue informed my unit topic. Providing content

    vocabulary to this end was advantageous for Brian as well as the other students. The children

    have content knowledge, but do not have the high level English-language skills to communicate.

    For this reason, the structure of the lessons encourage them to communicate in Spanish. I expect

    them to. Kathleen relies solely on English in the classroom because she acquired enough English

    to do so. When she does not know how to respond in English (for formal andinformal purposes),

    she does not respond at all. Brian and Alvaro, on the other hand, use Spanish in informal settings.

    The use and validation of their primary language within the lessons offers opportunities for all

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    students. Kathleen is encouraged to use her mother tongue. The boys use their home language for

    academic purposes.

    The unit references the childrens learning styles and interests. Much of the instruction

    time is spent doing paper/pencil work (or in this case, whiteboard/marker work). On several

    occasions, the teacher let me loose in the classroom to create mathematics lessons for groups of

    struggling students. For a lesson on addition, we worked with unit blocks. The concept of adding

    to the existing tower was well-received by the students. For a lesson on subtraction, we worked

    with cookies. The concept of taking away was attained by eating the cookiesone, two, and

    three at a time. Simply put, the students came alive when given the opportunity to work with

    manipulatives and realia. This directly informed the first two lessons: (1) hands-on science, and

    (2) use of manipulatives to model mathematics problems. Furthermore, the students interest in

    animals of all kinds lent itself to the unit topic. During family reading time, I often read with the

    group of students (including Kathleen) whose parents could not be present. Of the dozens of

    books to choose from, the students most often chose those pertaining to animals. One book

    entitled Fins was a popular choice. Each page reading, _____ have fins (i.e., Dolphins have

    fins.). The students would recognize the sentence structure, take clues from the picture, and

    read the sentence. During read alouds, books in which animals were personified were the most

    popular (i.e., The Berenstain Bearsby Stan and Jan Berenstain). The children related to the

    characters, making the reading more accessible. The third lesson, collaborative story writing,

    references these interests by encouraging students to personify the characters, using a problem

    and solution of which they are personally familiar.

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    The unit is interdisciplinary, integrated, and student-centered. Students benefit from

    interdisciplinary curriculum because their strengths in one content area support new learning in

    another. The content is scaffolded, within each lesson and the unit as a wholeeach lesson

    builds upon the next, even though they are in separate content areas. For example, the

    characteristics of the ocean gleaned from the first lesson (science) are utilized to provide a

    detailed description of the setting in the third lesson (language arts). The collaborative story

    writing is student guided. The assumption is that the students have acquired the knowledge in the

    first two lessons. Thus, the teacher provides the facilitation as the students use it to inform the

    writing process. Most importantly, the lessons set high expectations for the students. The content

    and language objectives are challenging, yet attainable because of the culturally responsive

    instructional strategies used therein.

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