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Dana Sutcliffe Action Plan/Reflection The focus of my praxis project has been on smaller minority groups in public school

society. Specifically looking at the needs and sensitivities around those students that are Deaf/Hard of Hearing, Academically Gifted and Talented, Eastern Religious practitioner and Gay/Lesbian/Transgender. These student populations often fall through the cracks due to their small numbers within the larger population in public schools. Each needs to be nurtured and praised as much as any other but also need specific support with dealing with their peers and adolescent development. I made this focus due to my personal experience trying to foster growth and support in middle school students within these minorities. Each was so used to being the outsider that it was hard for them to except praise and to feel comfortable with their peer groups. I specifically worked with a Hispanic female that was academically gifted and talented. She was a minority with in her AIG classes due to her Hispanic first generation background and a minority in her general education classes due to her mental aptitude of being gifted. The second was a young man that was openly gay. He struggled with working with other male students within group assignments and caused dramatic chaos with female students. Both of these students and grew over the year but I hope to become more aware and bring a better environment for other students within minority groups such as these.

Action At the beginning of the school year, I plan on working within my middle school team (students all have the same core teachers for Math, Science, Social Studies and English Language Arts) to incorporate team building from a more of a cultural standpoint. The first two days of school always involve going over school handbook, classroom expectations, introductions, resources and technology training. I am going to get my team members on board for minimizing those procedures down to a day and a half. Id like to spend half a day building up the identities that make our team. From there, I would like to have monthly team time in which students will be able to learn more about their peers and other cultures that they could be interacting with in their future. By the second day of school, students are aware of the school wide rules, since they are the same as the previous year. The only thing that has changed is the makeup of their teams. From year to year students get placed differently to diversify, assist in academic needs, adjust to instructional stability and social needs. Often times they only have about 10 students out of the 112 that were on their team from the previous year. They are now starting to get to know students that are on their team this year. I believe this is the perfect time to start allowing all students to feel like their voices are important and that they are not alone in their adolescents trying to assimilate into the perfect peer. I would start by reading, for my students, my I am poem describing where Im from and information about myself that will help my students understand my background better. The next step is to teach them how to write their own I am poem. Stephanie Jones states, Through

such personal writing, I can attempt to walk in the shoes of the students, look at the world through their eyes, and avoid the pitfall so many students and teachers experience. By starting with getting to know all of my students on a more personal level enables me to prevent offending them unintentionally, scaffolding understanding about a norm that might affect a member of our student population and allow other students to be aware of their peers cultural norms. It allows me to also see what type of individuals Im working with and a better understanding of their norms before a negative experience happens. An example would have to ask a student why they dont standup for the pledge of allegiance every morning. Peers would start to notice this action and why there are challenging the expectation of the school. If in our I Am poems they mentioned they were Jehovah Witness then the conversation would be applied before the misunderstanding could take place. I want to enable my students as Jones states by, challenging beliefs, and nudging toward the construction of hybrid identities that incorporate home and emerging academic identities in my students. The hope is that students will not be afraid of their community identity but enable to build upon it with new understandings from their peers and academic knowledge. The intention is not to change their cultural norms but to allow them to expand their cultural understanding of their classmates norms. After the poems were completed I would have my students post their poems around the room. The students would then have time to walk around the room reading the, I am poems that are posted. My students would be given sticky notes

and able to write down questions or comments by each of the poems. That way their questions could get answered without possible not being asked due to possible embarrassment. The student authors would then have a chance to go to their poems and read the questions that are asked of them. I would walk around the room and assist students if they needed help being able to think of how they would answer the questions they had been asked or to protect students from inappropriate questions that would need me to respond to them. Then wed have Answers from the Author time, where each student will read and respond to the questions, if any, that are asked of them. This allows for understanding and building up the team atmosphere sooner, rather than later, in the school year. Im looking forward to finding out about my students and what type of social and cultural norms I need to incorporate into my class to fit their needs and growing cultural understandings. An example would be to support the building of support network for students that are homosexual. Adolescence is a challenging time of growth on all individuals but I want my team to feel supportive and to foster the support of their peers. Cahill supports my thoughts in stating

In schools across the country, GLBT and supportive straight youth are organizing to make schools safer, more affirming places where GLBT students can develop socially in ways parallel to their heterosexual peers.

From this point we would allow for them to be kept in the classroom while we rotate rooms. Since there are around 112 students on our team and each class is a different make up of these students we need to allow them all to get to know each other and not to just know the 27 that were in their homeroom class. During the

rotation if students have questions they can leave it on a sticky note that the author will see. I believe it will be up to us teachers to find a solution to allowing the author to answer all of their peers questions without having the process be overly drawn out. I find this to be one of the limitations in this project.

It might work out for each author to be recorded answering their questions and having the poems put on our teams website with the responses to questions as a possible solution. With students being able to use their study hall time at the end of the day to go online to view the responses. Since at the beginning of the year they dont have homework and remediation hasnt begun.

The next part to my years action plan will be to give time to more free conversations when they arise. I want to enable my students to feel confident in asking hard or sometimes socially inappropriate questions that they seek answers to. I want them to feel that I am a valid resource to them and if I cannot answer their questions that I can guide them to someone that can answer their questions. I was able to do this in the past with me English Language Learners class due to its small size and quickly rushed through such questions with my larger classes. I am going to change that this year. The last part of my action plan is to focus on the peer tutoring groups to be more multicultural in the pairing of partners. Previously we allowed our tutors to select out of those needing tutoring. Id like to intermix students to not only build a connection and self-esteem but to share cultural norms. I might begin by pairing a

Jewish student with a student from Nigeria. That way they will become comfortable not only sharing their academic knowledge but hopefully their cultural norms as well. I also will probably mix a tutor from a poor background with an wealthier tutee. I think that by focusing on the details of the backgrounds of my students from the beginning will enable them to grow and enrich their cultural knowledge throughout the year without telling them exactly what were doing. The only perceived drawback Ill have to be on the watch for with be those peer tutoring groups that arent being successful. For example, students may get offtask and spend more time socializing than working, and higher-achieving students may become resentful if asked too often to help their lower-achieving peers (Vaughn, Bos, & Schumm, 2003) The goal of this action project is that by day 180 my students will become more culturally aware of not only their peers but of the society they are apart of. I want them to be able to confidently intermix with others that share different norms than themselves. I hope that they will build positive self-esteem that will encourage them to share their cultural norms with others while teaching them that there is more than one way to persevere cultural norms. The last is that they want to support their peers that may have a harder time going through life due to others ignorance.

Reflection I wanted to be able to learn something new through this class. I feel that my understanding of cultural norms is average due to my diverse teaching environments and life experiences. I was ready for more and I got just that. For me it was more than just the readings it was the combination of the reading and my peers within this class that really brought a new level for me in cultural understanding, plus the ability to pick my own project that will go right into my teaching for this coming year. I enjoyed reading Stephanie Jones book Girls, Social Class & Literacy do to its conversation style writing. She made it easy to follow her thought process along with the experiences her students shared with her. She made me take into consideration how emotional needs and development of my students need to be more intertwined with my content. I need to find more ways to showcase to my students that the world changers that made history have similar backgrounds as they do. That just because your norms are different than a force against you or beside you, doesnt mean it has to back you in a corner. I believe that the first person Im going to utilize is Toussaint Louverture, the Haitian Revolutionary Leader. He is an example of a Black slave owner that related more to those in France than those he, himself, enslaved. It wasnt until he had a major disagreement with Napoleon that he decided to lead a revolution. From here we can then look at current revolutionary issues going on in Syria and their reasons for rising up. Reinforcing that even with different cultural norms they have the same desires and goals for themselves and their people.

Before this year, I had never thought of Gifted and Talented students being a minority. I understand that they fall under exceptionality chapter of Bridging Multicultural Worlds. It discussed different programs such as one for minority students that met on Saturdays utilizing real world examples. I started to wonder why do minority programs have to meet outside of school? What prevents them from having these enrichment programs during school hours to allow them social time during the weekends? Due to my praxis project on smaller minority groups I read an article about the gifted and talented among minority students. It stated that the testing to get into gifted programs were so geared towards white upper middle class norms that the majority of low income minority students that are gifted and talented do not have the background to pass the acceptance testing to get into the programs. This forces them to not be challenged throughout their education and to most often drop out do to boredom. I started a conversation with our AIG math teacher and she agreed that not many in the program were minorities. I hope that we can find a way to better prepare elementary teachers to catch AIG minority learners earlier on so we can get them into the programs that inspire them instead of bore them. The second thing would be to change the testing to be less bias of learners norms. Im not exactly sure how that could be done but I hope that an effort by those in the AIG community could constantly improve the testing. I think that is a struggle for me, to know that something like a testing protocol is broken and know that Im not in a position to change it. I have a passion for those that are not given an equal opportunity in education. Thats why Ive always chosen to teach in low-income schools or schools that struggle. I can reflect on a Hispanic male that could

have been successful in the AIG program if he would have been placed earlier in his education. Instead hes let his grade fall year after year and has joined a gang. He challenged me this year with excellent questions that impacted his life such as Why is there White (Non-Hispanic) a ethnic choice on paperwork? Its a great question! That brought out great conversation. My peers have challenged me through our discussion form. We were all able to probe questions and relate situations to many of the topics that really made me feel comfortable. That there are others that are questioning the norms of our society and ways we can impact our multicultural public schools. From the forum posts and seeing that there are other educators that are thinking, challenging, and improving the way students are made to feel within our classrooms I decided to bring to my county wide meeting a conversation I normally would of kept to myself. I was sitting in our curriculum planning meetings this week and saw the court decision about a transgender first grader and had to share it with them. I could tell a few people were hesitant to share, so I discussed my thoughts on the situation. From there someone else joined in and then another. At one point I could tell the 10 people in my group were all engaged in the conversation of what is best for students in public schools including transgender. It came up how we think it should be addressed in our county and of course there was a difference of opinion but nothing was heated. I was so proud that we could have this conversation not go into a negative black hole. Im glad I took that step to share it and enable a conversation to take place that I previously wouldnt of done. I was also pleased that my online post brought conversation as well.

From this point I want to be an advocate in my county for the equality of all minorities. I want to enable the decision makers of our county to always remember to put their personal beliefs aside and think about whats in the best interest of the students in our county that we are to help raise to be productive members of our diverse community. Im going to look into what is the next step I need to take to make sure I can be successful in this task. Im not sure if its a license in psychology or multicultural studies that I need to be academically deemed a professional in this area but Ive made the decision to find out.

References Holmes, S. E., & Cahill, S. (2004). School Experiences of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Youth. Journal Of Gay & Lesbian Issues In Education, 1(3), 53-66. Jones, S. (2006). Girls, Social Class & Literacy. New Hampshire: Heinemann.

Vaughn, S., Bos, C. S., & Schumm, J. S. (2003). Teaching exceptional, diverse, and atrisk students in the general education classroom (3rd ed.). Boston: Allyn & Bacon.

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