Okay, there was a lot going on in the readings for this evening, so I think I am going to focus on the Dilg chapters that dealt with understanding our histories and self-identities in relation to the histories and identities of others. I encountered a lot of these issues during my student teaching experience and these chapters offered me new insight into why those situations arose.
Dilg addresses the presence of history in the English classroom as “a web of historical threads…woven around us in any given classroom before the first ‘lesson’ begins” (39). I think this is a great way of presenting an image of various personal, familial, and cultural histories that are a tangled yet invisible entity within every classroom from day one. Only through respectful communication between students and teacher, students and students, can we become aware of the complicated ways in which our histories are interwoven. The classroom becomes a place of negotiation, learning, and insight from which students can learn a great deal about themselves and each other. During this time, I think it is the responsibility of the teacher to illustrate both the unique and universal qualities of humans in relation to their unique cultural histories and experiences and their universal emotions—this ties into the important concepts of helping students feel sympathy and/or empathy for the diverse characters in the texts they read. In the meantime, students need to understand the constructed reality of the texts as stories that may or may reflect one experience from a given culture. It is not their job to criticize the actions of the characters in relation to their own perceptions, but to discuss the “multifaceted” existence of and illustrate a sympathetic reaction to the characters within the story while being “thoughtfully skeptical or critical” or situations regarding the motivations/decisions behind the actions/thoughts of the characters (Dilg 54). I think Dilg is correct in assuming that students need to be gradually led into difficult/controversial texts in order to prepare them for the portrayal of characters in a certain light. When reading Night with many of my students, this was crucial in setting up the actions of Elie and the Jewish people of Sighet or preparing students to think about Mexican immigrants when reading The Circuit.
Another issue I faced while student teaching revolved around the idea of who we are in relation to others. In a class comprised on 15 black students, 2 white students, and 2 Latino student, tensions arose between various groups. One white female identified with a group of black female students, and in conversation often referred to a black male student in advanced classes as “not really being black.” Among the black male students, one stood out from the rest due to his style, participation in class, and interest in both writing and reading fantasy books. This separation was noted on a daily basis in the way the other students—who obviously were from similar social circles—talked to him and about him among themselves. One day this tension manifested when the “outsider” male made a comment to the class that was perceived as disrespectful to the others. One black male student jumped up and confronted the “outsider” in a forceful and challenging way saying, “You better not have been talking to me! I know you didn’t say that to me!” After inserting myself and ending the confrontation, I was made acutely aware of the way in which the “outsider” was perceived by his peers in the class. Reading the section of Dilg about how important it is for students to develop an identity for themselves and the repercussions faced among people of their own culture was fascinating, and I hope to be able to use information from this chapter as I continue my foray into the world of adolescents…
Great work, Meredith. I thought your student teaching experience about the black student "outsider" was particularly interesting and relevant. It reminded me of a similar experience I had during student teaching with a student with an IEP because of autism (he had pretty severe Asperger's syndrome); this was the first regular ed English classroom he had been in for a number of years. The class was generally patient with him, but there were a few male students who on a few occasions purposefully tried to get a rise of him; trying to help these students to understand that this student had a much different perspective and personal challenges became interesting water to navigate.
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