Curriculum in Action – Approaches to Unit Planning

In Culturally Relevant Pedagogy and Critical Literacy in Diverse English Classrooms: A case study of a secondary English teacher’s activism and agency, Lopez describes culturally relevant pedagogy as seeking “to develop cultural competence, academic excellence and socio-political consciousness” (76). Since I am focusing on early elementary years (K-5) in my degree I think what I would implement in my classroom would look different than the grade 12 English class that was used as an example in the reading. However, it is still just as important, or debatably more important, in the elementary years and it is in high school. I feel like in elementary year the “agency to disrupt the dominant and Eurocentric forms of knowledge and discourse” (76) won’t be as explicit as performance poetry. It could take the form in something like teaching both western and indigenous sides to history, providing literature with diverse character (characters of colour, LGBTQ characters, diverse family dynamics, ect.). Or if we come across a story that reinforces gender norms we could break that down together as a class. In my ELNG 200 class we were learning about “Linguistic landscapes” and I think that would be a good topic to bring into elementary classrooms. You could give groups of students a camera and go for a walk around the community taking pictures of various types of signs and then once back in class discuss what languages are represented in the pictures and why that may be.

Based off what I read in Placing Elementary Music Education: a case study of a Canadian rural music program, one of the biggest thing I hope to do to contribute a sense of place for my students is to apply learning to their local environment. I feel like no matter what the subject you can find ways to include aspects of the students community. For example, ELA you could have local authors, in science you could include the local environment and animals, in math you could incorporate aspects of the community into problems for the students to solve. Beyond that I also think it is import to bring the community into the school and also take to school into the community. This could build off of the first suggestion so for example, have the local author you are learning about come speak to the class or take the students to their book talk or something along those lines. I also agree that Brook’s use of music festivals is a good way to bring the community into the school to watch to student preform. I also know first hand how much music festivals are a tradition in a small town, we would have Carol Festival, Spring Concert, Remembrance day ceremonies, etc. I also hope to teach in one of the small towns around where I grew up, so these festivals will most likely also be something I do to help contribute to my future students sense of place.