Level 5: Parents and Pedagogs

Prompt 5:
As I continue on through my VIPS experience, I look at the students in the classroom and I consider their background. In the environment that I was raised in, I have little in common with the diverse bounty of students in the classroom. But with every student, there is some sort of parental involvement. In terms of parental situations, I started to consider issues that I would have.
The first problem was a reflection of statistics of the region of providence. According to a report published by Kids Count in April, 2009, Providence faces certain statistics that puts parents at a disadvantage when interacting with their student’s teachers. The first statistic that made me consider the situations of students was that 51% of children live in a single-parent family. If a parent has to single handedly raise a child, it can often be difficult to communicate with a teacher to monitor their child’s progression. Another statistic was that 40.5% of children live below the federal poverty threshold. With such a large percentage of students living in poverty, parents need to work harder to provide for their children, and due to this, are unable to spend as much time monitoring students progression. As a teacher, the solution that I saw for this problem was to go out of my way as a teacher to let each parent know how their student is doing. Whether it is leaving a message, sending home a letter, or making a phone call, it is critical for the parent to know and support how their child is doing, and if the situation at home makes this difficult, then it is essential to do all that you can to rectify this situation as best as possible.
Another problem that I would anticipate is the diverse cultures that parents would expect their students to learn about. It would be extremely important to promote the work of Asian-Americans, African-Americans and Hispanic-Americans, among other groups. Even despite the young age of the students, parents appreciate observing the incorporation of their own culture into a curriculum. This reminded me of an article by Ira Shor, titled Empowering Education. It is within this article where Shor promotes education as a tool for social change, a place that students can be trained as critical thinkers, skilled workers and active citizens. One crucial element of education is to make sure that the material that you are teaching your students is relevant to them. One effective method of empowering education was the implementation of problem-posing, the utilization of applying classroom lessons to problems in their own lives. Culture relevance is also extremely essential to take into consideration. Parents in a classroom that primarily consists of minorities do not want their students taught by a curriculum that reinforces the dominant ideology. In his work, Ira Shor acknowledges that curriculum is one place where the dominant culture can be supported or challenged, depending on the way knowledge is presented. It is the responsibility of myself as a teacher to not only include the voices of marginalized groups, but to make them prominent for the students to see intertwined throughout the curriculum.