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My name is Maria McDonald but I prefer to go by Mia. My name is Italian and Irish and my father picked out my name. I have always gotten made fun of for my name because Old McDonald had a farm and apparently I own McDonalds. My first name has a lot of songs written after it and I'm always getting sung to. I work at an Italian restaurant which is fitting for my first name. When I use my initials it comes out to M.N.M which is a candy. No matter how I tried to get away from my name being special I couldn't.

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Favorite Characteristic or Character Trait

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Favorite Characteristic or Character Trait

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My favorite characteristic is how strong I am and how I can smile or act funny in the wake of some of the hardest times of my life. This picture shows this strength because at this point in my life I was going through a lot and this was the first picture that I took with my fiancee. I was just joking around and we really didn't know each other and I faked a happy face. It shows how captivated he is by my funny personality and this shows how well I can hide it and how strong I can be. This strength reflects the cultural connotation of never giving up and never backing down. It reflects how you can fake it and how sometimes you need to fake it, to get through the hard stuff. It reflects looking for the bright side on every bad day and every bad situation. Even though this was one of my lowest points in life my strength pulled me through it and helped me to meet my fiancee and that is the positive cultural connotation that can be seen within.

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I chose two objects for my important object. The first object is my bear that I have had since I was a baby. He has been with me through everything. He travels with me and he has been the one that is there when I cry. I still to this day sleep with him. The second object is my engagement ring from my fiancee. I got a chance to pick out this ring and I fell in love with it when I was visiting home. It means a lot to me and I am extremely fond of it. Culturally the bear is given to children as a form of comfort and a form of kindness and compassion. This was given to me as a baby to comfort me and I was meant to grow out of him but haven't. This has followed me throughout the years as I have gone through some hard times, having my bear to comfort me. He has a tag that as a child, and an adult, I play with when I am upset. This will be passed on to my children as I want them to have the same values of having a comfort object. Culturally the ring is given as a form of commitment and love to someone you want to spend your life with. This shows my values because even as a child I imagined spending 30 or more years with the love of my life and I am lucky to have found someone so truly amazing to get to do this.

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My privilege is being raised in a family who travels and this value rubbed off on me, as pictured in the top photo of the beach. I am always wanting to travel and experience places and I have had the privilege to be able to do this as a child into adulthood as my parents were always taking vacations to the beach or to Disney. My first biggest privilege though is the ability to leave my home and move 800 miles and relocate to start a life and be able to thrive in doing so. This is shown in the bottom picture which is a photo of me when I was living in Pennsylvania. I chose these privileges because some people never have the ability to even leave their neighborhood let alone travel and experience things or even move out of the one place they were raised in.  I chose this privilege because it truly is a privilege. I know people who would kill to get out of the toxic environment that is my hometown but do not have the means to do so and thrive in doing so. I chose two photos that I had taken and put them together to represent the true privilege that I experience in getting out and experiencing life and leaving my small close minded town. Without my privilege I could be in a very bad place in life if I had stayed in my hometown.

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My cultural bias relates to where I came from. I find myself stereotyping and judging the place that I came from and the people that I know now that I have moved away. This photograph is to represent how truly small my hometown was and beautiful it was. The mountains surrounded you at every point and this is a good representation of that, and a lot of the time it made me feel suffocated and imprisoned when I would come back to visit. I felt suffocated by the same old and suffocated by the small mindedness that came with being at home. The mountains started to feel like a prison and a lot of the time when I would leave I would feel better when I was no longer surrounded by those mountains. Because it is such a small area the mentality is very close minded and small and because I moved away and experienced other things, I learned to have a more open mind and be more tolerant of others. In turn I became less tolerant and more judgmental of the place that I came from and the people who raised me. I judged those people because I no longer understood them and they no longer understood me and I felt like I had grown in a way that they hadn't which is what caused my cultural bias of stereotyping my hometown.

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One cultural value that I inherited was determined or hard working personality. This could also be seen as perseverance. This photo represents that by taking a picture of all of my school work and supplies. I have spent 6 years since I graduated high school in college and 5 and a half years finishing the degree for education. I have never given up and I have done everything that it took to maintain close to a 4.0 GPA and got good grades. I have given up everything that I loved to do and I moved away from home just so that I could focus on a better education and do better for myself. My father was raised this way and I have also been raised this way because I have been working since I was 12 and I continue to work even though it is close to impossible to do. I thought this photo was a good representation of all of the stuff that I have accumulated, and its not even all of it that's just half if I showed you all it would look like I never keep anything clean, over the past 6 years.

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This is my reading river which shows the literacy practices that I engage in everyday or most days. It starts in the top left corner with speed limit signs and traffic signs because I use these all the time so that I don't get lost because I am so unfamiliar with the area even though I've lived here going on 4 years. It moves to the Google Maps symbol because this I use daily as well to help me travel the area and it uses directions to help me. It then moves to my text message symbol because this is my major form of communication and my phone is my biggest form of literacy provider. Next it moves to the Instagram symbol because I do my most digital photography literacy on this platform and I talk about the pictures that I post. Next it moves to my Spotify symbol because I Bluetooth Spotify in my car daily when I am traveling anywhere and music is a big part in my life which is largely literacy. Last on the top is the Facebook app which I use to communicate and to stay up to date on what is going on in my friends lives from home so it helps me with literacy and communication. On the bottom left there is a Carrabba's menu because I am constantly communicating with the public and reading my menus and my orders and this is a big form of communication. This was also where I learned the most about the Spanish culture because of my coworkers. It moves on to the paper symbol because I love to write and I want to be a novelist someday but I always am writing papers for classes or communicating about something that I have learned. My laptop is next because I am usually always reading literacy articles for class or communicating or writing on my laptop. Last is books because I am always reading for college but I also love to read when I am not in school it is the biggest relaxer for me. This reading river shows some of the major literacy experiences that I deal with almost daily at this point in my life.

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The literacy practice that I love to engage in as a form of self care is reading. I LOVE to read so much. When I am not in school I am able to read all the time. I always get super upset when I start college again because I have no time to read. Barnes and Noble is my favorite place to go and at any time I always have 18 books or more that I have not read yet and I love that. This photograph shows how I love to read in a peaceful place like my backyard even though it was rainy. It calms me and takes me away from everything that is going on and for a short time I get to read and learn about someone else or live through someone else's experiences. Reading gets me out of my own head and away from everything that I may be thinking about and to focus on a different place and time or a different circumstance and I love reading. I love holding a book and reading and I try to do it as much as I can.

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My important book is The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I read this book in high school and it quickly became my favorite. I have read so many books and I have enjoyed and loved many of them but when I think of picking a favorite it is usually pretty hard. This is the story that comes to mind when I pick a favorite. I reread this book in a college English class and wrote a theme thesis paper on it and it changed as I read it. This book is something that sticks with me intellectually because it has changed over the times that I have read it as I have changed. This book has taught me so many things about life and being an adult and as I read it as an adult it was interesting to me that it resonated in a different way then when I was a child. There are a few favorite lines I have from this story: "Whenever you feel like criticizing any one," he told me, "just remember that all the people in this world haven't had the advantages that you've had.”. “There are only the pursued, the pursuing, the busy and the tired.”. “You see I usually find myself among strangers because I drift here and there trying to forget the sad things that happened to me.”. “Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.”. I had found this book at a book sort I did for volunteer work last year and kept it and was hoping to get an original copy because I always feel it is good to have a book then a copy or an electronic copy of a book.

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Struggle with Teaching Culturally Diverse Students

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Struggle with Teaching Culturally Diverse Students

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The biggest struggle with teaching diverse students is figuring out how to do this in a way that relates to them. I feel like the idea of this and the theories that we are taught are so abstract that sometimes I struggle to make my lessons more culturally diverse and I wonder "am I going to be a good teacher?" "will I be able to relate this to students in a culturally diverse way?". My biggest fear is that I won't be able to relate to my students in a culturally diverse way and teach in a culturally diverse way and then I will be a teacher that they don't love or respect or understand. The one thing that I strive for is to be a teacher that helps and relates to students on their own level and in their own way but I struggle with this when it comes to learning about it through the theories and the approaches. This led me to my thought process of this photo. These are pictures of my nephews, missing my niece because I haven't got to meet her yet. I have been away from most of them their whole lives because I moved to Georgia but I always strive to relate to them and to connect with them. These pictures show the connect that I have made with these children and how they love me and the connect that I hope to make with my future students and how they will love and respect me the same. It took a lot to relate to my nephews because I am not constantly there and not constantly around but I worked at it and learned about what they loved and was able to. I want to be able to do this with my students as well and learn about them and relate to them but I fear that is the biggest struggle that I will have is how to do that.

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Strength on Teaching Culturally Diverse Students

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Strength on Teaching Culturally Diverse Students

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My strength that would support me in working with culturally diverse students is my empathy. I may not be the same, have the same experiences, live the same life, or understand the same ideas but I work so hard to have empathy with everyone and in everything that I do. This will help me to understand and work with culturally diverse students and hopefully integrate a culturally responsive classroom. This will help me advocate for students and work for them because I will work to understand them and work with them not try to work against them. I will listen to what they have to say and their voices and stay empathetic at the same time. I chose to do a word heart about being empathetic and all that it takes and words that are associated with empathy and reasons we should be empathetic. I chose this strength because I think that it is a large reason why I am going to be a good teacher, or try to be, and why others should do the same. I think the world needs more empathy because that is something that we all are lacking.

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This is my selife of who I am and who I see myself as. I am hard working and happy but I also love to be silly and play around. I try so hard to put on a face or be someone else for others so its always very refreshing when I am able to go home, which is where this picture was taken, and be myself. I don't have to worry about people judging me or looking at me like I'm "too much" because there I am just enough.

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I am ME.

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According to Judy Marquez Kiyama, funds of knowledge is bodies of knowledge that are made over time based on a person’s cultural influences and are essential for a person’s wellbeing. She talks about a child learning this at a young age from family and can help in how a child learns. What "funds of knowledge" entails as I understood it is the experiences and knowledge that a student has prior to coming into the classroom that they learned at home or in life. This is also referred to as the information that a child knows from home life or community that they use to survive, get ahead, or thrive. This is to be used because it is very important and can connect learning for a student as stated by Wiltse in her “Not Just ‘sunny days’: Aboriginal Students Connect Out-Of-School Literacy Resources with School Literacy Practices” article. Based on these definitions of funds of knowledge it is aware from my cultural selfie project that a lot of my values and “funds of knowledge” do indeed come from my childhood. As a child my mother would read to me and buy me books and this is what cultivated my love for reading and writing which is pictured. My father was big on being hard working and working for what you want and working hard. He was big on being strong, as was my mother, and these characteristics have stayed with me as an adult because they were taught to me as a child. My important object was one that was given to me as a child and shows compassion and love and caring which is how my mother raised me. My other important object is a show of love and how love is important which is something that my mother instilled in me as a child. My photograph of traveling as my privilege came from my childhood and how my parents would take us on huge vacations so now as an adult this is a necessity to me and something that I want to be able to continue. My bias is something that I experienced both of my parents do as well and this has been passed on to me. It is evident that a lot of who I am and what I believe in and think comes from my “funds of knowledge” and my childhood and the family I was around and the culture I was brought up in. A lot of my family and everyday literacy practices have influenced my education and my literacy as an adult. I learned a lot from my mother and the social up bringing that I had and this has been shown in my literacy as an adult. I speak a lot like how my mother speaks and I look at education and reading as she does because I learned from her. My father was not as literate as my mother so I sometimes see things differently then he does and I have learned other things from him, like literacy and social literacy when it comes to interactions with others and how to work. This project integrates a multimodal approach to literacy in a way that there is literacy in reading but also integrated into the images as well. I learned a lot about myself and about my literacy and how it came from my family as apart from this project. Knowing all of this helps me to use my funds of knowledge to become a better teacher. My faculty supervisor is always telling me that much of who we are and our classroom management and our interactions with students and relationships come from our childhood which makes sense because that would be our funds of knowledge and how we see things. Knowing what I am good at and the good parts of myself and my fears and being able to self-reflect I can become a better teacher and use my funds of knowledge to help students with their funds of knowledge. It is very important to consider the identity of oneself in relation to the teaching process because our identity comes into how we will teach and interact with others and even how we will live our lives. It is very important that a teacher can identify and see an identity that students aren’t illiterate but to use their funds of knowledge to build on and to help them pass and not fail. A teacher who doesn’t see this identity will not be a good teacher because they will write off students. That is a big reason why I feel empathy will help me become a great teacher. As a teacher I do not believe that it is my place to change a child when they come into my classroom but it is my place to change FOR the child coming into the classroom. In knowing this I can use children’s cultural experiences to build an education for that child so that there is no mismatch in my ways and in theirs. This class has taught me to look at literacy in a different light and not just one single way. It also has taught me different definitions for literacy and how to use literacy and what good literacy is and how to integrate picture books in different ways. To promote equality and better my students I will teach them empathy. I will teach them love for others. And I will teach them that no matter what judgement is never good. I want a classroom of children who love and are the future of the world because I showed them how to do so. It is so often I see a teacher walk in front of a child and never say excuse me. This baffles me because those children are learning from you and you are teaching them that authority has no manners. We are role models for the future generation and I hope to show my class a role model of equality and love that teaches empathy and compassion for others as I would want to be treated.