Thursday, August 5 (DJ #8)

Although these articles were short, I found myself furiously underlining a large amount of what I read. However, rather than trying to incorporate every quote I found intriguing, I would really like to respond to a few key ideas that I found particularly interesting. The first is from the Pirie chapter in which he states:

“Ultimately, it is the machinery of textuality, not the individual text, that is our object of study” (98).

Though we have been studying this concept for the entirety of this course, we have not spoken about it in such an articulate way. This is where being a multicultural educator comes into play. Yes we can choose to have certain texts on our shelf rather than others, but the main purpose (in my opinion) of multicultural education is the approach we take to the textuality, not the specific text. Like someone mentioned in class, we may not consider texts like Pride & Prejudice to be “multicultural” we can teach them using multicultural methods. I also think that teaching methods, styles and motivations are what makes a good teacher—not necessarily knowledge of a certain canonical text, etc. (Though obviously this is helpful!)

I also agree with Pirie’s assessment of redefining English to be “cultural studies” however I am not sure it is entirely plausible. I wonder how he feels about the term “language arts?” In Minnesota, our licensure is called “Communication Arts and Literature,” would he think that this is more all encompassing than just “English?” I am personally glad that our licensure is not just English because I do think that we do more than that, especially because English really has two meanings—the literature and the language. With the growth of ELL programs, being an English teacher can really mean multiple things and I think that Language Arts or Communication Arts/Literature does a nice job of differentiating that.

In regard to the Amanti piece—I was particularly intrigued by this quote:

“In this project, we challenge the status quo by asserting that local knowledge has a legitimate place in our educational institutions for both our students and our pedagogical knowledge as teachers. We also say that no matter what background our students have, there is knowledge in their home, that can be tapped into and used in the classroom” (132).

I really, really like this idea. This is also an aspect of teaching that, quite honestly, cannot be taught. We need to develop this part of our pedagogy entirely on our own. If we are teaching our students to be global citizens, we need to teach them about their surrounding as well as those abroad and across the country. She also says, “this project cannot be packaged or standardized for export” which I think summarizes this idea quite well (138). In order to truly teach our students well, we must be willing to constantly adapt and revamp our lessons, ideas and texts. I truly believe that it is nearly impossible to write a lesson or unit plan for a group of students you have not yet met.