Week 7 Readings

Really liked these readings. As I've mentioned, I spent a year teaching in Japan. It was basically the opposite of the problems discussed in this week's reading. In my case, the teacher in front of the class (me) was the only one who was not in his cultural element. Naturally, I did what I could to learn about the culture I was immersed in and teach accordingly, but often as not, I designed my classes much as I would have if I had been in a class full of South Dakota kids. I think this often people's natural reaction to cultural difficulty.

I particularly liked the discussion of the "product" of an activity setting on page 13 of Tharp-Gallimore. This isn't something I had really thought about before. We -perhaps especially those of us who belong to the dominant culture - come to red letters written on the tops of tests and papers as the desired "product" of our educational experience. This chapter took a while to get into, but I loved how fierce the authors were. Academic writing is usually characterized by impassivity, but I like it when people get a bit passionate about things.

The thing I'm having trouble with relates to the topic I'm working on for my paper. It seems to me (perhaps a bit conceitedly) that the issue of culture plays a particularly tricky and important role in the teaching of the social studies. I'm planning a unit on evaluating sources of historical information. I've worked in intercultural education ever since I left college, and I had a very hard time wrapping my head around a lot of this stuff. How do I teach my high school students what culture is and how it affects history? It's a big question, but if we are ever going to give our students anything other than the fairy-tale version of American or World History, we have to figure it out.