During our stay on the small island the importance of nature to the local people was visible on the smiling faces of the school children who were on a field trip to the sea. It’s absolutely terrible to know that this, once incredibly beautiful island, will no longer be there in the future due to our way of living. 

We have been snorkling on several spots enjoying the interesting marine life.

We enjoyed a great lunch prepared by our guide: ti- punch, grilled fish, chicken and a delicious banana desert with rhum and chocolate. 

After a day in paradise you really feel humble to make part of nature and you feel the urge to tell children how important it is to acquire knowledge about other cultures , knowledge that creates a certain kind of self-transformation in order to be( come) a good global citizen.

In the afternoon we had a delicious lunch. To become a global citizen, it is important to first experience. How and what do the people eat? Are there any habits? Each country and culture has different habits. I really like traveling, seeing other cultures, learning from other cultures. 

In order to learn something, you do not always have to read books, but you can learn a lot by simply living a country's daily life. Learning is not only studying but also to experience.

Quote of the day; "I think that we need to know, to care, and to act, because I think in that way we can help transform ourselves and help transform the world.

 

'The teacher has a culture, and the teacher and students learn together, share their cultures and construct new knowledge in the classroom. That's how I see teachers reconceptualizing their role'. (Dr. J.A. Banks)

Before today I was hard pressed to mention what exactly it was I did to make sure my multicultural students felt at home in my class and felt accepted. My objective is to make students feel welcome and seen. This means that you interact with one another and have conversations about topics that matter boh to the students and myself. Rationally I know that I work in a school with a lot of 'foreigners' but it is only when I have a critical look at a student register that I become aware of the extent of our multiculturalism. I see individuals with their own stories and backgrounds and do not think in terms of 'black', 'white', 'poor' or 'rich'.  What matters to me is mutual respect and understanding. Understanding comes from talking and listening to each other. My students can tell me anything they like as long as they are respectful. In a previous course I was taught the seven values of effectiveness. One of them is 'trying to understand before being understood yourself'. I think that taking this principle to heart in any social situation will go a long way towards a more pleasant social interaction. If my pupils feel seen and heard then as a teacher I feel I have done the better part of my job. On a personal level I would love to continue with the exchanges since I too can keep learning from interacting with different cultures. My personal goal is to accept things as they are without labelling. So not 'The Italians are so lazy' (labelling), but rather 'We started our days later than we had planned'. I try to teach my students to keep an open-mind and relish the experience. Our students shouldn't want to try and conform others, thinking that their way is the (only) (right) way. 

After all: 'Before we can transform the world, we must first transform ourselves'.

Today we’ve been learning about the five dimensions of multicultural education. 

Ø  Content integration

Ø  Knowledge construction

Ø  Equity pedagogy

Ø  Prejudice reduction

Ø  Empowering school culture and social structures

I was actually quite surprised to find in the article many practices that the author qualifies as aspects of multicultural education, I already know as general good teaching practices. 

It seems that the interviewed author has made the mistake of assuming that the current way of teaching is actually the best way to learn for students of the dominant culture and that it’s just Mexican students (for instance) that benefit from cooperative learning. I think this premise is wrong, and this has been shown quite extensively by amongst other things Hattie’s metastudies of education interventions that work. 

Of course Mexican students benefit from cooperative learning, because all students benefit from cooperative learning. What the author (at least judging from the interview) failed to show is that Mexican students benefit more from cooperative learning than children from the dominant culture.

I like the idea of thinking more about equity pedagogy, whenever we explain something we always seem to pick examples of things close to us, or from popular culture. We probably often fail to account for how western centric that makes our lessons. It’s going to be hard to get examples from cultures you’re less familiar with yourself, but perhaps it could be a good start to use examples that are less explicitly and clearly western/Christian/white oriented, especially when trying to explain a difficult subject to a student from a different background.

Classroom question: What do you notice about the dolls shown in this picture?