Caine is a 9-year-old boy whose afterschool and weekend project turned into an international imagination movement. As the Caine’s ArcadeLinks to an external site. video explains, Caine built a gamin
Caine is a 9-year-old boy whose afterschool and weekend project turned into an international imagination movement. As the Caine’s ArcadeLinks to an external site. video explains, Caine built a gaming arcade almost entirely out of cardboard and opened it up for business in the storefront of his father’s auto parts store. This story provides an excellent example of how characteristics of Caine’s personal identity might affect how and what he learned from the specific experiences portrayed. The video story identifies the cultural values that nurtured Caine’s curiosity and inventiveness, and you can readily analyze the factors contributing to his “funds of knowledge” going into the project. After viewing Caine’s amazing story, reflect on the different skills he learned and applied as he completed his “project,” and consider how his personal identity shaped, and was shaped by, his amazing experiences. To help you better understand the underlying influences affecting Caine’s learning experiences, read Chapter 7 of your primary text.
This chapter presents information and examples associated with how social class can have an influence on student achievement and behavior in school. You also need to read the article by Moll, Amanti, Neff, and Gonzales (1992) regarding Funds of KnowledgeLinks to an external site. about how family and cultural backgrounds impact students and their families.
Initial Post: View the Caine’s ArcadeLinks to an external site. video and construct an initial discussion post that addresses the following questions:
- What external factors influenced Caine’s ability to successfully create his arcade (e.g., what role did his father play in encouraging his project?)?
- What internal factors influenced Caine’s ability to successfully create his arcade? Consider his world view, values, and funds of knowledge as internal factors.
- How valuable do you think these skills are in the real world? How well do they align with one or more of the 21st-century skills identified on the Framework for 21st Century LearningLinks to an external site. web page?
· Instructor Guidance
· Week 1
· Week Overview
· This is a dynamic and important course comprising part of your journey through an education graduate program. It is important because it is designed to connect you to the most important source of understanding, guidance, improvement and challenge in the field of education: you. Regardless of how many years you have studied or practiced in the field of education, you are already an expert in how YOU learn. You possess a lifetime of case studies that illustrate clearly specific strategies to help you learn things well, and strategies that may not work for you. You discern for yourself what is relevant, what makes sense, what kind of feedback helps you the most, and what motivates you to learn things that are rather difficult.
This is the most crucial thing to consider at all times in this course. You are an expert in how you learn. And just as important, any students you may teach in classes now or classes in the future are just as expert in their own understanding of their own learning. This is crucial to keep in mind.
EDU692 is designed to help you learn instructional strategies that complement and take advantage of the expertise your students walk through the classroom door already possessing. These students convene as members of a distinct community, with cultural norms, understandings and imperatives that drive everything they do in class, and everything they will try to learn. Rather than ignore cultural attributes (or worse, fight against them), the strategies promoted in this course incorporate the culture that influences and affects each student in a class with learning experiences that support skills, knowledge and attitudes worth learning. Collectively, these strategies define culturally relevant pedagogy, the focus of this course.
It is also important to note that throughout this course you will be working toward a very important, very concrete goal. Your Week Six final assignment asks you to create a fictional grant proposal to compete for money that can be used to support the development of effective learning experiences. Even though the proposal will not be real, it is based on an actual funding opportunity some teachers have to obtain the resources needed to develop and support effective, creative and innovative learning experiences. The Teacher Creativity Fellowship Program websiteLinks to an external site. (Lilly Endowment Fund, 2013) provides real information about such a program.
At the heart of culturally relevant pedagogy is culture itself. Therefore, you will begin this course by carefully examining your own culture, the culture that surrounds and supports you now and the culture that helped shape and define you as you grew up. This will be the starting point for learning how to incorporate cultural concerns into your instructional practice in deliberate ways. In doing so, you will improve your skills as an educator committed to helping a diverse population of students succeed within the learning environments you establish.
Following reflections on your own cultural identity as well as those presented by the other students in the class, you will analyze an amazing learning journey undertaken by a creative and innovative boy named Caine. His story provides an excellent opportunity to analyze the role specific cultural characteristics play within the process of learning in authentic situations. And you will complete the week by analyzing factors that influenced and affected the teachers and students who participated with you in important, personal educational events. These factors include culture as well philosophical and theoretical perspectives contributing to the decisions made those educators in your life who helped you learn.
By the end of this week you will learn how to analyze the relationship between an individual’s culture and her/his personal identity. You will also illustrate how characteristics of individual learner identity might affect how and what people learn from a specific instructional experience. And you will explain how educators can use information about culture and individual student identities to make well-informed instructional decisions.
Because you are learning how to apply an important instructional framework to the development of effective learning experiences, you will likely need to apply certain education skills that are not facilitated explicitly in this course. These include basic lesson planning skills, such as writing clear objectives. You will also be asked to express some of your work through the development of digital resources and files. Some of the tools used in the course may be new to you. Hopefully, learning new computer applications quickly is a general skill set you currently possess!
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· Intellectual Elaboration
· At its core, this course is designed to help you become more effective professional educators by helping you learn to apply fundamental principles of creativity and cultural relevance to your instructional practice. These skills can help you best meet the individual needs of students comprising diverse classroom populations. In the process, you will learn strategies for facilitating creative and innovative thinking skills within learning environments that complement and reinforce the personal culture defining individual students.
Culture
The central theme of the course is “culture,” yet the author of the course text Human Relationships and Learning in the Multicultural Environment (Wardle, 2013) indicates that there are, in fact, many commonly-accepted definitions for this concept. This short one-minute video from the Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs (2011) illustrates this point nicely:
Though many reasonable definitions exist for this important concept, the following quotes taken from a video produced by Tolerance.org (2010) communicate thoughts about culture by two researchers who have contributed significantly to the development of culturally relevant pedagogy can be used as the general focus of culture for this course:
Jacqueline Jordan Irvine: “I think people, when they use the term culturally responsive or culturally relevant pedagogy forget that the base of the word is culture. So culture has to do with world views, beliefs, language…values…”
Geneva Gay: “Culture to me at its essence are…those filters that help us as human beings make sense out of the most ordinary things.”
For the purpose of this course, culture will be considered in these broad terms. As you move through the course, the definition will be elaborated upon in order to accommodate a wider scope of factors that influence how people make sense of the world around them.
The instructional events for this course that are designed to help you learn the skills needed to identify culturally relevant solutions to educational problems will be contextualized within a comprehensive project involving creativity applied within a simulation. You are asked during the final week of the course to create a proposal that might result in funding the development of an instructional experience designed to teach a specific population of students some worthwhile skills. At the heart of the proposal is cultural relevance, and the “hidden curriculum” of the first couple weeks of this course goes beyond helping you learn more about culturally relevant pedagogy. Hopefully you will begin to truly value the approach to teaching inherent in culturally relevant instruction, and you will choose to adopt and implement such strategies in your own educational practice.
Research
To help “sell” you on the value and importance of culturally relevant pedagogy, consider the classic educational research study conducted by Pichert and Anderson (1977) that…
