stonewall's blog

Emily Crispell

Multicultural Education

Final Field Paper

May 8, 2014

Understanding Identity and the Latino Diaspora in Middle School

Emily Crispell

Multicultural Education

Inquiry Project

April 17, 2014

Increasing Latino Parental Involvement through Parental Partnerships with Schools

Introduction

Last Saturday, at my placement in Adelante, we had a parent/student session in Norristown to share with the parents and students information on different learning styles. The week before each of the students took a quiz to see what kind of learner they were. At the beginning of the session we played a game with the parents and students. There was a bag filled with different colored paper and each person had to take a peice. If the person picked a blue paper they would have to share their dreams for their child. If they picked a green paper they would have to share their favorite book/movie. If they picked a yellow paper they would share a place they want to travel to some day. As we went around the room people shared their answers. None of the parents spoke English and most of them had to bring their younger children with them because they couldn't get a babysitter. When asked what their dreams were for their students a lot of the parents said the same thing,they wanted them to go to college and make a better life for themselves, and the American dream and whatnot. After one mother shared that she wanted her son to go to college, our coordinator added "and graduate!". This reminded me of a book that I'm reading for my inquiry project called From here to university : access, mobility, and resilience among urban Latino youth by Alexander Jun. In the book he discusses why Lantino retention rates at Universities are so low. This moment also reminded me of what my parents wanted for me.

I had some issues with Napier's chapter Nuns, Mid wives, and Witches. While I really liked some of her points and found them to be really progressive, there was alot about the article that I thought lacked insight to the intersectionality of her students identities. I liked that she wanted her students to challenge cultural stereotypes about what it meant to be male or female by having them study both male and female roles in the middle ages and put them selves in the shoes of women at the time. I also like that she provided her students with the vocabulary of words like feminism, sexism, and oppression early on.

However the issues that I had with her chapter were that in the first paragraph she mentions how at her university the names of important women were hung in the university library and she refered to it as "women's achievements merit them a place among the great sholars". Yet all of these women were white. She also refered to her classroom as diverse but only 10% recieved financial aid. So when it comes to class I wouldn't agree that her classroom was very diverse. I know that she was focusing on a feminist approach to teaching but I think that there were lots of issues with regards to multicultural education that she ignored/did not address.

I would like to investigate methods to get underrepresented groups intersted in pursuing exclusive fields such as the STEM fields. By using my observations from my praxis placement at Adelante, I would be able to look into current practices in outreach to Hispanic middle school students in Norristown Pennsylvania. Some questions I will keep in mind are: what are the benefits of starting college preparation in middle school vs. waiting until high school?, How can we teach science in a way that is more accesible to a broader range of students?. From this information that I gather from my observations and outside research I will write a reasearch paper or ciriculum.

“How did I come to be who I am? And who am I becoming?”

Identity is a funny thing. I feel like every day I am finding out new things about myself but at the same time I feel like I will never really know who I am. As Yukari Takimoto Amos put it “I have experienced culture shock and marginality in the United States and in this sense have been discovering and recovering myself every day since my arrival”. Although unlike Amos’ reference to arriving in the United States and her transition from being a part of the majority in Japan to becoming a minority in the United States, I grew up in the United States and have always been a part of the minority. However, I can still relate to this concept of constantly discovering and recovering of myself. Growing up I found that there were very few spaces in which I felt the privilege of fitting into a certain group especially with regards to race, sexual orientation, and class. I am not saying that I have not experienced some privileges due to certain aspects of my identity; however, I believe that I will never be able to fully identify with the way our society categorizes individuals and groups of people. Until very recently I found it hard to identify with any one group, mostly because of my racial ambiguity. This is the result of our system of categorizing being limited and limiting.

My praxis is at Adelante. Adelante is a middle school after school program that meets on the weekends. It focuses on preparing students and families for college and promotes interest in the STEM fields. The all of the students in this program identify as Hispanic and the majority of them go to the same middle school except for one or two students from the neighboring middle school.

It is hard for me to think about the possibilities and challenges for this program because I have only actually been to the site once. However, from what I witnessed, I think that one of the challenges will be getting the students to interact with other students outside of their already established friend groups.

I think that one of the possibilities is that even though the program focuses on getting the students interested in STEM there is a chance to use the dialogic method that Freire refered to. While the program consists of having the students do a different physics project every other week, I think the coordinator has set up the experiments in a way that emphasizes the dialogic method because the experiments involve the a students discussing what they observe with each other and the instructor.

One of my good friends on the rugby team came to Bryn Mawr her freshman year with plans to join the soccer team. On her first day the team seniors talked to the new players and one of the things that they took pride in/ bragged about was how they were the only "straight" team at Bryn Mawr. This made my friend really uncomfortable and she quit the team that week.

I don't know all of the soccer players but I do know that this isn't the first time that I've heard from players on the soccer team that the team has some homophobic people on the team. This summer I worked at Bryn Mawr with a girl on the soccer team and we would occacionally talk about our teams. So one day I brought up the story my friend told me. The girl I worked with admitted that it happened and that she didn't think it was right.

I'm surprised that this is a thing at Bryn Mawr and really want someone to explain this to me because I don't understand how it wasn't addressed.

I had a good friend from elementary through high school whose name was Gulistan. We’d been in  a lot of the same classes together throughout school. People, students and teachers, would make fun of her name, make a funny face when they heard it for the first time, or not even bother to try to say it right. She was the only Turkish person at our school besides her younger brothers. In elementary school kids teased her and called her Gully even though she didn’t like being called that. Once in high school, I even heard a teacher make a comment about her name in front of the class saying that it sounded like a country “You know Pakastan, Afghanastan, Gulistan” then laugh about it. When that happened I felt really bad for her because the teacher was making fun of her in front of the whole class. Now looking back at that experience I still find it incredibly disrespectful that he did that. My high school was mostly White with some Black and Hispanic students. However, in the advanced and honors courses there was very little diversity. After reading the Amos article it reminded me of this experience and how people aren’t conscious of their privilege unless they find themselves in a situation where they are the minority.