During this week we were asked to answer the following question: 

How might we begin to address the ways in which the systems that we teach our curriculum in are intrinsically homophobic, transphobic, biphobic, and oppression towards queer and trans people?

While thinking long and hard to address these issues, individuals should take a look at our curriculums and take an understanding to whether or not there are any outcomes or indicators that openly ignore the LGBTQIA2+ communities. By doing this we will be able to see which curriculums may hold the ideals of oppressive ideas. It is also important that we ensure that the curriculum uses and includes the correct terminology for gender diverse individuals as well as sexually diverse individuals. There are many subject areas that include topics surrounding gender and sexuality, as well as pronoun usage and inclusive language. By including a more in depth explanation of these areas hopefully we can work towards making our curriculum more up to date. In the case that individuals need to expose and be able to express the idea that these oppressive systems only had three ideas of what gender is: gender biology, gender expression and gender identity (Saskatchewan ministry of education, 2015). By doing this we will hopefully be able to reduce the oppressive systems that our schools and curriculum currently have, this can be done by increasing awareness. This is important in a school system where students are still trying to find themselves. 

While taking a look at the curriculum, another good resource to use is the classroom itself and the systems implicit messages. Suppose the system assumes different ideas about other genders and sexuality, which when looked at from a heteronormative perspective is often overlooked. We often do not discuss same-sex partners in any form (Saskatchewan ministry of education, 2015). 

Resources:

Saskatchewan Ministry of Education. (2015). Deepening the Discussion: Gender and Sexual Diversity. Saskatchewan Government. https://publications.saskatchewan.ca/#/products/75989

When looking into reconciliation, I feel as if that if you don’t go in with the mindset that you will learn, and take something new away from the lesson you need to take a step back and ask yourself why you are having these feelings of rejection towards learning about our past, because no matter your culture or your ancestry if you are a Canadian citizen it is vital for you to understand the way thing where before we colonized things.

We are the problem; we are where it started and in order to understand it, we must be willing to learn it. Learn it from our history, from the ancestors who lived through it. We carry a certain amount of personal biases, stereotypes, racism, and ideas surrounding Indigenous cultures way of life, their language and culture and that there is a condition of the settler colonialism agenda. This started with the government and the white settlers who believed that they were here first and decided to impeach treaties on the Indigenous cultures, this is a large reason for why treaty education is so important for our students to know and understand but also ourselves as educators, it is important for us to be educated on the impacts that Indigenous Cultures suffered through.

Our students are our future, and for that we must realize that there is still very prominent issues on the reserves, take for example the fact that almost all reserves do not have access to safe drinking water(Cappello, 2017a). Its our job as future educators to teach students to change the conditions that our indigenous communities are faced with. It is also our job as future educators to educate our students on the different ways to view the land, like how our Crown tricked the First Nations Communities into treaties to use the land for the Crown’s benefit(Chambers, 2012, p. 27). Regardless of if you have students from First nations, or Indigenous cultures in your classroom, it is still vital that we integrate a heavier set lesson surrounding Treaty Education. These understanding will affect the majority if not all of the people living in Canada. It is also important to build an emotional connection between what our students are learning and our students themselves. In order to do this, we need to show the larger picture and continue to go back and not just touch on the subject but make it just as prominent as something like math or English.

The reading for this week covers the topic surrounding critical pedagogy and hip-hop pedagogy, it focuses on the uses of hip-hop to create a base for students to evaluate and understand issues that surround the hip-hop biases. Although we look at these biases as in the past, would it be beneficial to use in current day education to grasp our students’ attention, looking further into it though we have to ask ourselves how hip-hop can be used to help social justice within our youths’ lives, and how does it relate to being critical like it is used in critical pedagogy?

When I think of using hip-hop in the classroom I think it is a great way to bring in social justice and youth activism within our classroom. Akom explains that schools should be integrating hip-hop into the classroom and curricula. Although I think it’s a great way to bring in social justice and youth activism, I think it has to be introduced slowly and integrated into the classroom properly to avoid students and parents getting the wrong idea. Hip-hop brings a variety of different topics that need to be addressed in a controlled environment. When relating this to critical pedagogy, hip-hop is a new and relevant way to capture your student’s attention, and a good way to engage your students with something they can relate to. By having your students engaged you are able to introduce important content and have your students interested in ways that they may be able to make a change.

By using videos and music as a tool from hip-hop artists, we can have our students analyze what the music video or song lyrics means since many artists’ critique communities, society, national issues as well as government issues. When we have our students analyze these topics, they are free to agree or disagree, and this will open a controlled discussion in classrooms because it is such a relevantly new topic students are more likely to engage. This will result in more engagement and interest hopefully in and out of the classroom. This is a more evolved way for educators to implement critical thought within our classrooms with higher volumes of engagement.

References

Akom, A. A.(2009). Critical Hip Hop Pedagogy as a Form Of Liberatory Praxis

Equity & Excellence in Education 42(1), 52-66. DOI:10.1080/10665680802612519

In todays blog I will explain the future goals for what I would like my classroom to look like. More specifically, when asked what it will look like, sound like and feel like in terms of culturally relevant pedagogy, and how I can build a sense of place for my future students and their sense of belonging.

My classroom will be built off of a mutual respect, for our classroom and the bodies that occupy my classroom. My classroom will be a safe place to discuss our own beliefs, ethnicities, and things that we have faced as individuals. I will have an array of resources available to my students, such as books, articles, and anything else they may need to grasp the content to the fullest. Pieces of a texts and history should relate to our current issues that my students may come across, there is a study that was done by Lopez (2011) that suggests that their must be a analysis of the students lives when looking through resources. Keeping this in mind it draws me to believe that my classroom will be based largely around the idea that there will be debates as well as discussion for each individual. While there will be an abundant amount of discussion this will also lead to plenty of questions for not only me but my students as well, this will allow students to engage with their critical thoughts. The classroom will be full of conversation, I will allow my students to pair up or converse in small groups, this way they can build onto each others ideas. I hope to make my classroom a safe place for everyone’s thoughts and opinions to be heard and accepted.

With Concerning Brook’s Work the article points out the use of multiple genres when learning music that reflects the different cultures and students’ true interests(Brook, 2013). If you take the same philosophy, it introduces many additional historical facts that I could incorporate into my lesson plans. It is important to understand and follow the outcomes and indicators of the curriculum, but it is also important to add additional information to build onto these ideas. I want to make my classroom a safe place to want to learn about all histories and cultures that they are free to ask questions and have faith in me that I will be educated or have the resources to provide them with the information they are looking for. While reading Brook’s article he explains that we need to conscious of the mirror relationship we have with our environment as well as our relationship with others (Brook, 2013).

According to Joel Westheimer citizenship is the idea that we need to be engaging within our communities and improving our world. He runs that idea that people who understand and engage in citizenship also engage in critical thinking, they take part in their society, understand and engage in politics and are up to date with current events happening around them.

However Mike Capello describes citizenship as something that every member of society should have. Mike also describes citizenship as citizens who strive for change when it’s needed, contribute to paying taxes, who take the time to participate in voting, and justice-oriented, and chose to stand and participate in our national anthem.

Although my understanding of citizenship is somewhat similar to these ideals, citizenship in my eyes is about building off my knowledge and basic ideals. It is about building onto our community, as a future educator we should be very involved with our citizenship, and creating a safe environment for our community and our children and future generations. We need to work towards a better community and making our society and ideals more open to our ever growing society. It is our job as future educators to be organizing our society for change, and on the front line pushing for our future generations. Citizenship is about our social responsibility although it may not be directly related or correlated to us, we have had negative notations about our pasts.

The lack of input from teachers and students within the curricula is alarming. Education and the curricula is based on politics, bringing in politics into our curriculum even in elementary education makes little to no sense in my mind. As a future educator I feel as if we should try and weed out  the politics within our curriculum and bring in input from future educators, educators that have retired and people who are knowledgeable surrounding the areas. I also think that things like religion should not be a fundamental when it comes to building our curriculum. We need to think further ahead when thinking about things when we are building our curriculum, taking into consideration things like sexual education, how to safely interact with other peers. Things such as sciences, math’s, arts should be in our curriculum but less based on the ideas of politics and more based on the fundamentals. Take for example because our curriculum is based off of politics in our math classes instead of teaching things like the square root of a number, we should be teaching things like how to balance money, and how the deductions work on a pay stub.

What does it mean to be a ‘good’ student according to common sense, according to Kumashiro to be a good student is to follow and respect the rules and expectations of the classroom. A good student is usually defined as a student who actively engages in classrooms activities, that understands the curriculum with little to no assistance, who achieve high grades, and is respectful to the classroom teacher and the students around them.  Kumashiro defines a “good” student as a student that believes in the values that we believe that mainstream society chooses to place on a specific types of behaviors, knowledges and skills. In one of his examples Kumashiro gives us some intel from his previous teaching years, these behaviors were exemplified.

The students that benefited from this definition of the good student were the students of the wealthier families. The ones that often had the extra resources to be successful in and outside of the classroom. They had the resources to seek help when they were struggling with a topic, where as the students that were defined as “bad” students often did not have an idea place to go to be successful. They did not have ideal home situations, or the resources to be successful.

The “good” student has been shaped by historical factors in many ways, it is seemed that throughout history,  the ‘good’ student is based off of what is expected from your student in certain cultures. It is often based off our past expectations that we have associated with cultural traditions and values. It has been made abundantly clear that the ideals of a ‘good’ student are students of white descendants, if you did not fall into this category you would struggle to be seen as a ‘good’ student. We as educators need to put aside our biases and become more adapting to all of our students.

References;

Kumashiro, K. K. (2009). Against Common Sense: Teaching and Learning Toward Social Justice. (Revised ed.). Routledge.

Painter, F. V. N. (1886). The International Education Series: A History of Education (W. T. Harris, ed.; Vol. 2).  D. Appleton and Company. https://archive.org/details/historyofeducati00painiala/page/n9/mode/2up.

Sexual education is failing future generations, it is lacking in all perspectives. It has been a problem within our school systems for decades, the curriculum does not leave students with enough knowledge to be safe outside of schools. The curriculum has been outrageously cautious, leaving out vital information, which then leads to them having the same amount of information that they went in with.

Although you would never think that suicide is linker with sexual education an article I read states that “suicide continues to be a considerable health risk among adolescents and is the second leading cause of death amongst adolescents between the ages of 10 and 24.”( Gwendolyn Brown et al.) One major stressor seems to be sexual activities and navigating sexual relationships. Sexual education has failed within schools leaving it up to parents to have these conversations at home, but what happens when there is not a reliable source at home, or relationships at home deter from having this conversation? Then we are leaving our youth at risk for sexually transmitted diseases, unplanned childbirth, etc..

The American journal of sexuality education speaks to the volumes of educators that are to teach our adolescents. The journal helps provide sex-ed educators with the best education programming, practices and sample lessons. It address a variety of sexual topics as well as audiences presenting up to date theory and practice lessons. Sexual education is constantly changing, this article helps provide a diverse spectrum to help all audiences.

The best thing we can do for our youth would be to integrate sexual education back into our curriculum. Unfortunately our school based curriculum is not that easily changed. we will have to work together to implement a vast change into our curriculum, not only in Canada but in all continents, it will require heavy amounts of change and support. Us as teachers need to understand that the world is changing and the rates of death, sexually transmitted diseases and confusion rates are growing, it is our job as educators to make sure we open schools to be a safe place to speak about sexual education. For so long it has been shoved under a carpet, leaving our youth to rely on what they know and the internet which is not a reliable source.

In the article “curriculum theory and practice”, Smith outlines a variety of different approaches to the curriculum, including Tyler’s rationale. Tyler’s rational focuses on 4 key points. Education as experience, Assessment via evaluation, Curriculum development as problem-solving, Teacher participation. Although Tyler focus is on the 4 main parts of his rationale, I believe heavily in the following 3 key terms when going about my educational journey. Predetermining what students need to learn and creating objectives that outline what they should learn. Selecting and organizing methods to teach said objectives to our students and specifying how we need to go about evaluating if the students have met each objective.

This is very prodominent in schools still today, take for example when I was in elementary school we all needed to learn how to do the multiplication table, the issue with that was that we were all expected to learn it the same way. The children who accelled in subjects like mathematics were very successful but for someone like me who has always struggled with math I did not pick it up at the pace that the rest of the children were so I was deemed a ‘failure’ and needed to be put in a separate class so that I could catch up with the other children. This is just one example of how tylers rationale was used in my own schooling, this continued throughout my elementary schooling, and well into my high school mathematics classes. Math teachers were very stuck in their methods for teaching and what worked for the majority is the only way that they taught because that’s the way they understood it. We would learn the material by lecture for usually by taking notes and going over power points and then we were evaluated using standardized testing. The Tyler approach is still very prominent, and present in schools still to this day.

Tyler’s rationale is based off of a very systematic approach, it deals with the focus of organized and managed learning.

One of the first limitations that stood out to me while reading Tyler’s rationale is directly correlated to what schools decide to teach their students. This often limited students to what ‘common sense’ was and how schools taught and that they would only teach what they believed would be useful after high school. Schools leave out vital learning experiences especially throughout high school, instead of learning about things like how to read a poem and pick it apart to find the idioms or the irony within the poem. Don’t get we wrong I do think language arts is a vital part of our school systems, but I also think that learning things like, taking out a mortgage or financing a vehicle should be taught more heavily. Not only things like mortgages or financing but also sexual education should be taught within our schools and no I’m not talking separate the males and females and tell them things like you will bleed once a month and when men wake up in the morning they may have woken up in a puddle from a wet dream. I mean bring in someone who knows both anatomy’s and go through the things that can happen thoroughly. Tyler’s rationale puts a large emphasis on “effectively organized” (Schiro 2013) but this can cause limitations. While it is good to be efficient while learning I think Tyler’s rationale puts too much focus, on being focused while doing school work. There is no time in Tyler’s rationale to be an individual. Children need a little bit of a lead way to become themselves and gain knowledge outside of schoolwork to become individuals. We are helping these children become the best version of themselves not robots.

Although Tyler’s rationale presents a variety of issues within our school systems it also poises some valid points, some of those being that for teachers it would be easy to stay on task and to create outcomes for children to obtain. This would help create a sense of structure within the lessons. Although you learn through experience, I do not believe that organized experience is the only way to go. Young children learn best sometimes through unorganized play. Overall, there are both benefits and limitations to Tyler’s rationale. It can benefit teacher as long as we understand that not everything ever goes to plan and that depending on what school, and grade you are teaching Tyler’s rationale might not work for your classroom setting.