Latisha Blackburn, M.B.A.
Goals & Objectives
• Expose you to ways to give students the opportunity to critique society and
examine their place within it.
• Introduce opportunities that allow students to consider the role they play in
their shortcomings, as well as the roles their teachers, schools, and
community plays.
• Connect the social, the economic, and the political to the educational
• Give examples of ways to serve as soft role models in the absence of
physically present role models by providing motivation, direction, and hope
for the future and suggesting what is worthwhile in life.
Mind Spark:
Cultural Descriptors
Direction: Write your name in the center circle. Fill in each outer circles
with a dimension of your identity. (e.g. female, brother, Asian, upper
class, etc.)
Purpose of Mind Spark
How do we decide what is
significant and how do we
determine how to describe
this significance?
Marcus Garvey once said, “A
people without knowledge of their past
history, origin, and culture is like a tree
without roots.”
Dr. James A. Banks- Multicultural Education
James A. Banks is an educator who has
been called the “father of multicultural
education.”
Born in 1941 near Marianna, Arkansas
• Grew up in racially divided South
• Questioned why and how different cultures
and races were depicted in textbooks
• First Black professor at University of
Washington (Seattle)
• Founded UW’s Center for Multicultural
Education
• http://www.learner.org/workshops/socialstu
dies/pdf/session3/3.Multiculturalism.pdf
Factors TO consider
Who’s to Blame?
Four Corners
Exercise
Students
Govt. &
Public
Policy
Teachers
Parents
EQUITY pedagogy
An equity pedagogy exist when a teacher
modifies their teaching in a way that will
facilitate the academic achievement of
students from diverse racial, cultural,
gender and social class groups.
EQUITY pedagogy
Texas: A review of the new social studies curriculum standards by historians
and college professors indicates that 83 percent of the required historical
figures and notable persons for students to study are white. Only 16 percent
are African American or Latino. Minority groups, including state legislators,
warned the 15-member State Board of Education throughout the curriculum
standards process that it was shortchanging the achievements of minorities.
Of the 4.8 million children attending Texas public schools last year, 66 percent
were minorities. Whites make up two-thirds of the State Board of Education.
If “Push Out” (Drop-Out) rates are a concern; make the lessons
meaningful.
Neither effective reading strategies nor comprehensive
literacy reform efforts will close the achievement gap in a
race-and-class based society unless meaningful text are
at the core of the curriculum.
Students present condition have to be taken it account
(Tatum, 2005).
Tatum, A.W. (2005) Teaching Reading to Adolescent Males:
Closing the Achievement Gap. Portland, ME: Stenhouse
Publishers
Metacognition
Metacognition refers to higher
order thinking which involves
active control over the cognitive
processes engaged in learning.
Activities such as planning how to
approach a given learning task,
monitoring comprehension, and
evaluating progress toward the
completion of a task are
metacognitive in nature.
Higher Order Thinking:
Monitoring Comprehension:
Conditional Knowledge (When, Where,
& Why)
Evaluating Progress: Planning
“Yes, he’s got a father, but you can’t never find him these days. He used to lay drunk
with the hogs in the tanyard, but he hain’t been seen in these parts for a year or more.”
(2.16)
Prejudice
Reduction
Focusing on characteristics of students racial
attitudes and how they can be modified by
teaching methods and materials.
Objective:
1. Give students the opportunity to
critique society and examine their
place within it.
2. Allow students to consider the role
they play in their shortcomings, as
well as the roles their teachers,
schools, and community play.
Objective:
1. Connect the social, the
economic, and the political
to the educational
Content
INTEGRATION
“Through My Eyes” by Ruby Bridges
“In the late spring…the city school
board began testing black
kindergarteners. They wanted to see
which children should be sent to the
white schools…(Bridges, 10-11)”
“Still, I remember that day. I
remember getting dressed up and
riding uptown on the bus with my
mother, and sitting in an enormous
room in the school board building
with about a hundred other black kids,
all waiting to be tested (Bridges, 11).”
Deals with the extent to
which teachers use
examples and content from
a
variety of cultures in their
teaching.
“Several people from the
NAACP came to my house in
the summer. They told my
parents that I was one of just
a few black children to pass
the school board test, and that
I had been chosen to attend
one of the white schools,
William Frantz Public School
(Bridges, 12).”
Knowledge
CONSTRUCTION
Teachers need to help students
understand, investigate, and
determine how the implicit
cultural assumptions, frames of
reference, perspectives, and
biases within a discipline
influence the ways in which
knowledge is constructed
1) Guy Montag, a futuristic fireman who burns books in a
society where people do not read books, enjoy nature, spend
time by themselves, think independently, or have meaningful
conversations. Instead, they drive very fast, watch excessive
amounts of television on wall-size sets, and listen to the radio
on “Seashell Radio” sets attached to their ears.
2) Montag encounters a gentle seventeen-year-old girl
named Clarisse McClellan, who opens his eyes to the
emptiness of his life with her innocently penetrating
questions and her unusual love of people and nature.
3) His perspective is changed and he finds camaraderie in
a retired professor who assist him in his escape from this
dystopia society.
4) He drifts downstream into the country and follows a
set of abandoned railroad tracks until he finds a group of
renegade intellectuals (“the Book People”), led by a man
named Granger, who welcome him.
5) Enemy jets appear in the sky and completely obliterate
the city with bombs. Montag and his new friends move on
to search for survivors and rebuild civilization.
Empowering School Culture
Grouping and labeling practices, sports
participation, disproportionality in
achievement, and the interaction of the
staff and students across ethnic and racial
lines must be examined to create a school
culture that empowers students from
diverse racial, ethnic, and gender groups.
The Treacherous Trip
to
School
Many of us have heard the stories of how our parents
or grandparents had to walk miles in the snow to get to
school. Perhaps some of these tales were a tad
embellished, but we got the point. A lot of American
kids have the luxury of being driven in a warm car or
bus to a good school nearby. This is not the case for the
children in this gallery.
In the above photo, students in Indonesia hold tight while crossing a
collapsed bridge to get to school in Banten village on January 19,
2012. Flooding from the Ciberang river broke a pillar supporting the
suspension bridge, which was built in 2001.
Staying Above Water
Students wearing rubber boots use chairs as a makeshift bridge to get to a classroom at their
elementary school in the Taytay, Rizal province, north of Manila in the Philippines, on July 18, 2007.
Teachers claim that the school grounds, built on a former garbage dump site, have no drainage and
are constantly inundated with water.
In the Philippines, according to UNICEF, only 62 percent of children attended high school during the
2007-2008 school year. This is a significant drop from the 85 percent of kids who attended primary
school that year. Approximately 11.64 million youth are out of school in the country
Balance, Balance, Balance
Kashmiri children cross a damaged footbridge built over a stream in
India. The kids are on their way back home from their school in
Srinagar on May 11, 2012.
In India, the number of out-of-school children has declined from 25
million in 2003 to 8.1 million in mid-2009, according to UNICEF.
Starting Out
Getting There
On Point
Above & Beyond
“I am still working to
understand what selfdiscipline means. In
general, I think that it is
the responsibility of
someone else to
control me and
monitor my behavior.
“I can explain what it
means to be selfdiscipline & give
examples of this. I
sometimes monitor
myself and others
when it is time to be on
task during classroom
instruction.”
“I consistently and
independently keep
myself on track, and I
also monitor others. It
sometimes takes me
several attempts to stay
focused, but I
demonstrate the
behaviors associated
with being selfdisciplined quite
frequently.
I am a consistent and
proactive self-discipline
student. My teacher
rarely has to redirect
me. I am a leader in the
classroom, and beyond.
I influence others to
become self-disciplined
because I recognize
that school is an
environment where
opportunities are
created, and it is my
responsibility to take
advantage of it.”
Top 5
For “Top 5”, I identify per my Class Dojo
report for the week, who were the most
challenging students in the class. After those
students have been identified, by pulling the
report tab for “Most Needs Work” I confer
with those students about what their needs
are. I ask them what is it that they need from
the group, and myself to get onboard with
the positive behaviors.
More often than not, I’m provided with
information that I can use, such as, I need to
be isolated, I shouldn’t sit by this student, or
I prefer to work by myself.
They Need A
Latisha Blackburn, m.b.a.
Blackburn.Latisha@gmail.com
678.806.8474
Resources
People:
Social Media:
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3.
4.
5.
1. Your students and their parents
2. Your colleagues
Teach for America
The Zinn Eucation Project
Teaching Tolerance
Black Then
Edutopia
Text:
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2.
3.
4.
5.
Making Race Visible: Literacy Research for Cultural Understanding Edited by: Stuart Greene/Dawn
Abt-Perkins Forward by Gloria Ladson-Billings Afterword by Sonia Nieto
Race, Empire, and English Language Teaching: Creating Responsible and Ethical Anti-Racist
Practice by Suhanthie Motha
Educating Citizens in a Multicultural Society by James A. Banks
Facing Accountability in Education: Democracy and Equity at Risk by Christine E. Sleeteb, Ed.
The Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers of African American Children by Gloria Ladson-Billings