EDUCATION ESSAYS
This is an excerpt from the paper...
Con Respeto by Guadalupe Valdes is an ethnographic exploration of the lives of ten Mexican families. The focus is not exclusively on the schools, but on the intersection of the culture that the family has brought with them and the mainstream culture in the United States. The lens through which she views this intersection is the situation of Mexican immigrant children in the school system and the way in which schools view them as problems, and their families and cultures as problems too. Valdes first examined the concept of school failure, then looked at the families themselves, with a focus on the perceptions of the mothers regarding family values, the situation of their family, and what was required to succeed in this new world. She takes a novel approach in viewing school solutions as misguided and suggesting that perhaps we should not intervene in the situation of Mexican-origin families, but allow them to maintain the cultural values that may contribute to school problems in the conventional sense, but also contribute to the strength of the family and their potential for long-term success. In Sonia Nieto's book, The Light in Their Eyes, her focus is on exploring ways to create successful multicultural learning communities. It is a given that the United States is a multicultural society, with more and more potential to benefit from that if it can be seen as promise and possibility. In the classroom, the social context is still not conduc
. . .
chances that other children will wind up in the same place.
Premise
Like many of the other authors we have read, Darder starts with the assumption that the United States is a society that is rife with social inequality. She believes that this social inequality helps to create socially unequal conditions in the classroom and that the classroom is actually designed to ensure that the social structure remains relatively intact. While some may move up in the system, the vast majority of those in disempowered groups remain disempowered when they become adults. In order to change that, Darder assumes that pedagogy must be altered from the traditional banking-type of classroom work (a term from Paulo Freire that can characterize it) to a critically reflective pedagogy that allows students to explore, criticize, and help transform their social reality.
Language is also a central concern of Darder, with her basic assumption that language has a major impact on our lives and is also one of our most significant human resources (p. 101). It can shape the way that we perceive ourselves and it can shape the way we are perceived by others.
For Ayers, I am not sure that he starts with assumptions as much as he begins with questions. So
. . .
Some common words found in the essay are:
Sonia Nieto's, Likewise Xu, Assumptions Bensman's, Darder Ayers, ESSAY#3 Summary, Head Start, Paulo Freire, Juvenile Court, Sister Sara's, Guadalupe Valdes, mainstream culture, cultural interchange, student learning, family values, critical pedagogy, ayers concerned, learning communities, multicultural education, social inequality, learning community, multicultural learning communities, section noted learning, criminal justice system,
Approximate Word count = 4320
Approximate Pages = 17 (250 words per page)
More Essays on EDUCATION ESSAYS
|
Customer Service
to Over
32,000 Professionally Written Papers!!!
