In Chapter 4 of "Tough Fronts," Janelle Dance emphasizes the importance of student teacher relationships and how they play role in student performance. There were a lot of great points that I resonanted with throughout the chapter, like when it reiterates the significance of functional community as it provides closure between the adult communities and the communities of youth in school. Rather than accentuating the disparities among the diferent communties, we should work towards making them connect and work together. 

"These students describe the majority of their relationships with teachers as devoid of trust, devoid of caring, devoid of viable information and therefore deficient in social capital resources that enable positive educational outcomes."

I greatly appreciated Bondy et al.'s article about culturally responsive classroom management, especially its focus on resilience. However, I found it difficult to fully comprehend the importance of CRCM because I think I have always been in classrooms where either the teacher practices this style of management or the classroom is mostly white and the teacher and students share a similar cultural background. The main problem I have with this article is that this is framed as a specific pedagogical style that works especially well for African American students.

The Dance article helped me to think about my personal experiences growing up and how much cultural and social capital I had growing up compared to other students around me, as well as how much cultural and social capital I had coming to college with a much more diverse and wider pool of students. More importantly, it helped me to think about professors I have had in college, sorting out which ones had the "magic" quality of Ms. Bronzic and determining which particular qualities gave them this special ability.

I really enjoyed Levinson’s “The Civic Empowerment Gap,” although there were a few parts that I wish the chapter had included. First, I wish she had talked more about how the new civics classes could better engage students like Travis and Laquita. It is great that she speaks about the need to not just teach old-school civics class, and she seems to be using Tuck’s desire-based rather than damage-based approach, but the chapter left me hanging on how that would be shaped into a many year long curriculum. I did really appreciate though her discussion of she had to "back up" to explain the events of September 11th, and how her students' guess that Bush had organized the attacks was very much grounded in a government that hadn't served ther communitites. 

This past summer, I acted as a Teacher's Assistant in a class for high school sophomores on European History and the Holocaust.  The teacher and I envisioned the course to include aspects of history, literature, media, and discussion to really engage the students to critically think about the Holocaust.  In the class, we used MAUS as a tool to get students to directly engage with a personalized history of the Holocaust, told through the life of Art and his father Vladek (and Anja).   During the class, we very much emphasized that the students should feel empathy, which we defined as "putting yourself in another person's shoes," for the the victims and survivors.

Hasan’s statement at the end of The Civic Empowerment Gap highlights one of the real challenges we all face in a multicultural society. He says, “I think we’re different because we have to fall back on our parents’ background because our parents--that’s what they teach us” (41). The idea that certain backgrounds produce certain conceptions of what it means to be American is important to consider. It is inevitable that each person’s past will inform, shape, sustain, or motivate their level of participation in civil society or even the extent to which they feel limited or empowered by civil structures. The problem occurs when our society privileges the past backgrounds of some people over the backgrounds of others.

Reading Freiri's dialogue on dialogical learning and teaching, it made me think about a book I read last semeste, titled What the Best College Professors Do, by Ken Bains.  Bains did a study in which he looked at college professors who were being rated by their students as exceptional professors.  He wanted to know why students enjoyed certain professors and not others, and whether or not that would lead to grade increases.  What he found was that a majority of professors shared the same views as Freiri when it came to dialogical learning.  These professors saw their time with the students not as a chance for them to show off how knowledgeable they were in their given field, rather it was a chance for the two, the professor and the student, to engage in mutual learning of the same subje