Classroom Confidential Ch.4

I first began to really delve into what it means to celebrate minority cultures my junior year of college after being enlightened during an RA training session. Up until then I felt I was a rather culturally aware and sensitive person. I discovered, however, that I was actually a subject of the mainstream colorblind ideology. I had grown up thinking equality among races meant pretending everyone was knit from the same cloth; there were no true differences between us. As my African-American instructor spoke on life experiences from the lenses of minority populations, I began to awaken to the ignorance in my cultural practices. Cultural equality does not mean treating everyone the same. It’s about acknowledging the differences amongst minority and majority cultures and doing one’s best to equalize access to knowledge, power codes, and influence within the society that we share.

I found myself eagerly consuming the information in this chapter, vigorously nodding my head in agreement to the frustrations and illuminations written within. With psychology being one of my favorite fields, I was drawn to the examples of cultural inclusion that spoke to basic human needs. Specifically I agreed that truly impactful classrooms are the ones where kids are convinced they are safe and valued. Transparency is emphasized, along with a true desire for the well-being of students. The almost too-good-to-be-true example of Rafe’s classroom, explained how he provided his students with the unstated rules of life and externalized his thinking all day long for them. Page seventy-seven describe his students as: “the children he shepherds tenderly and tenaciously toward adulthood”. I found this to be incredibly moving. When serving students, I believe teachers are not called to morph learners into imagine bearers of the majority culture, but rather shepherd them into adults who can think and be independently.

Over the past few years I have grown exponentially in how I navigate multicultural settings. Laying my need to make sense of that which eludes me, I sit at rest with ambiguity at first. Instead of making judgments or speculative assumptions, I can look around and stem my own curiosity. Slowly, my students and others teach me. It can be easily to live color blind and misidentify cultural learning styles as learning difficulties. I hope to minimize the occurrences of misinterpreting such interpersonal responses and teach myself to see differences as something potentially instructive. For I have much to learn.