Response to Videos

For me, the video that connected most to what we have been learning in class, and what I have been experiencing while tutoring was the video entitled Teaching After Brown V Board of Education, Larson-Billings, Lomax, Orefield. What was easiest for me to connect to primarily was the issue of unintentional segregation. In the school I am tutoring in, the segregation is highly evident. The poor neighborhood the school is located in provides for economic segregation, as well as racial, language and religious segregation. At least 90% of the students I work with as of non-white racial background, and due to the fact that the school is located right next to the projects, most of the students also come from impoverished backgrounds. The school has little resources, is located in an old, run down building in a dirty and poor neighborhood. Even though there is no law segregating the students in this school from students in other, mostly white richer public schools, the geographic map of school districts makes segregation inevitable for inner city schools such as the ones we all work in in Providence. 

Another part of the video that really stuck out to me were some of the statistics that were used. Some of them include:
- the average black family has 1/19 the wealth of the average white family
- the average Latino family has 1/13 the wealth of the average white family
- the top 400 universities have almost all white and Asian students, while the 3,200 lower tier universities have mostly black and Latino students
- California has one of the highest problems with unintentional segregation.
The last point that really spoke to me was the point Gloria Larson-Billings stated while Common Core and teacher evaluations was being talked about. She said that while both of these things are important, these issues should not even be on the forefront of education until the issues of segregation and equal funded are finally solved. 50 years ago, Brown V Board of Ed set the laws in place, however, there is still legislature that needs to be put in place to solve these issues that are still very much ongoing. Larson-Billings is right; we need to prioritize the issues of education. Those that began half a century ago and are based on human rights should be fixed before we work on new issues dealing with testing and evaluations.
The Census of 2010 supports the video in that segregation in public schools is still ongoing. The article includes more statistics and offers possible solutions. http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/news/nation/census/2010-12-14-segregation_N.htm

In the Service of What?

In the Service of What?
The Politics of Service Learning
Joseph Kahne and Joel Westheimer
This was a very relatable article for me. As volunteering was a part of the religious education (CCD) I received, as well as a part of the curriculum for the Catholic School I attended (grades 4-8), as a part of the Child Studies program I was a part of in high school for 3 years, additionally as a requirement both for my graduation of high school and as a requirement for the National Honors Society I was a part of, you could definitely say volunteering in many ways is something I have been doing for a long time.
I have babysat for single mothers for free, interned in preschools and special education classes for hundreds of hours, tutored students before and after school, participated in food drives, worked at food pantries, participated in benefit shows, danced for the elderly, sold snacks at sporting events, raked leaves, ran the Pennies for Patients Drive at my school, participated in 3 Teacher Appreciation Days, and donated and volunteered at countless other events. But never, have I ever written a reflection on any of these experiences as this text suggests.
Do I feel good after a day of volunteering? Sure. But do I feel as if I have changed the world, or learned something? No, not really. At first when reading this article I felt like it was trying to demean or diminish the volunteering that I had previously done. But then I realized that wasn't what it was trying to do at all. What I came to understand from the article was that if people continue to go about volunteering in the ways in which I had been, the cycle of need for volunteers will never be broken. There will be a constant need for help and assistance because no one is learning from the assistance they are giving. But, perhaps if while we are volunteering, we are also looking for solutions, problems, causes and effects, then actual change may be made and a problem may be solved, and the need for volunteering in that area may decrease, so we can then move on to helping and using our efforts in other needy areas .

The service learning project we are asked to do for this class provides me with the first opportunity to do the kind of volunteering described in this article. It asks us to reflect upon our experiences and relate it to articles, ideas and topics we have learned and discussed while in FNED. I am really looking forward to seeing what more there is to gain from a volunteer experience when a reflective aspect is added.   

Unlearning the Myths That Bind Us

For my blog post on Linda Christensen's, Unlearning the Myths That Bind Us, I chose to analyze three important quotes from the text. There were so many important and mind-altering quotes to choose from, but here are the one I chose:

Quote #1
"Consequently, most of the early information we receive about "others"- people racially, religiously, or socioeconomically different from ourselves- does not come as a result of firsthand experience. The secondhand information we receive has often been distorted, shaped by cultural stereotypes and left incomplete..."
I had never realized before that the shows we watch when we are young have such a deep impact on forming who we become later on in life. This was an eye opening quote for me, because I had never before questioned where my ideas on certain topics come from. This quote has made me more aware and analytical of where my deep down biases and stereotypes come from.

Quote #2
"Personally, handling the dissection of dreams has been a major cause of depression for me. Not so much dissecting- but how I react to what is found as a result of the operation. It can be overwhelming and discouraging to find out my whole self image has been formed mostly by others or underneath my worries a out what I look like are of being expose to TV images of girls and their set roles given to them by TV and the media."
When I read this quote for the first time in the article, I was shocked to realize that this is exactly how I feel. After reading the beginning of the article, and reading information such as the quote listed above, I was depressed and saddened as well! It is sad, especially for females who are arguably more impacted due to the importance fairy tales play for girls at an early age, to think that the person we have developed is not something we ourselves developed, but parts of us were developed by society and are developed the same for every American girl. I always thought I was in control of establishing my own values, beliefs, likes, dislikes, aspirations and dreams, but when I look deeply into all of those things, I realize I was definitely not responsible for the shaping of all of them.

Quote #3
"During a class discussion Sabrina said, "I realized these problems weren't just in cartoons. They ere in everything- every magazine I picked up, every television show I watched, every billboard I passed by on the street"... but as Justine wrote earlier, at times my students would like to remain "ignorant and happy". Without giving students an outlet for their despair, I was indeed creating "factories of cynicism" in my classroom- and it wasn't pretty."
This quote shows me how grateful I am for the realization I have received from this article. Although it may be less painful and less work, it is unintelligent and ignorant. I am now so much more aware of the information being sent to me through all forms of media. Like also mentioned in the article, I am going to be much more cautious with the television shows I let my own children watch someday, and as an educator, I hope to do the same.

This article was super eye opening for me, and probably the most relatable article I have read so far. It has made me much more analytical of the daily information I receive from various sources.


http://liptongued.com/are/are-disney-princesses-damaging-our-daughters-ideas-of-women.html
The picture posted and the hyperlink both discuss the impact of princesses on young girls.

Speaking the Unspeakable in Forbidden Places: adressing lesbian, gay. bisexual and transgender equality in the primary school

Alexandra Allan, Elizabeth Atkinson, Elizabeth Brace, Renée DePalma and Judy Hemingway

There are many parts of this article I found interesting. To start off, I would like to discuss the idea presented in the article on the idea of "spaces" where it is safe and unsafe to talk about sexuality. There is a quote from the article that is quite telling of this idea:
"What is interesting to note, however, is they way in which these relations constituted and were constituted by social space; the ways in which the school corridors, in particular, were being recognized as public, mobile, child-inhabited and therefore, dangerous places to talk about sexuality."
I disagree with the well known phrase that "there is a time and a place for everything", and using that reasoning maybe we shouldn't talk about gayness in the hallways, or in a classroom. I would instead prefer that for large social issues such as gayness, there is always a time and place for the ideas to be addressed, and rather a strategic and intelligent way of going about it. I don't think we should hold open debates or seminars in elementary classrooms about whether or not it is okay to be identified as something other than heterosexual. However, if instead the idea was brought up in classrooms through ideas such as role play or books as expressed in the article, then there should be no part of a school that is "private" or "public" when it comes to addressing these important issues.

The second point that caught my attention in the article was when it began to discuss parental resistance to educating elementary students about homo(sexuality). This was something that was in the back of my mind while reading the entire article, and was finally brought out towards the end. The article states that "Here, the fear that a number of "No-Outsiders" teacher-researchers have articulated that parents might be offended or upset by the discussion of sexualities in primary classrooms- is counte3red by positive parental reactions. As suggested, the session prompted a meaningful discussion between one child and her mother that might have not happened otherwise". While I think it is a very positive thing that educating students on this issue resulted in a positive family experience outside of school, I think the article severely underestimates parental response. The experience compares the negative parental impacts equally with positive ones and says that they will basically balance one another out. In my experience, however, with previous parents of classmates of my own, and parents I have met while volunteering in other classrooms, the ratio of conservative, religious, parents who would disapprove of such discussions is way higher than that of more liberal and perhaps gay/lesbian parents who would approve of the same discussions. This is a point I would be interested to bring up in class. I believe it would be interesting to see if other people's experiences are similar to mine, or different.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5J06NpqnvZ0