Group 1: Agnes, David, Judy, Leyi Revised by Judy Huang

(Revised)Culture is like molecules, an individual's self existence and the outside world react and recreate with each other.

ls4000_2 — 2024-04-07 03:01:36 UTC

Just like the different molecules that serve distinct functions, they can exist by themselves, but also exist with the combinations of others. For individuals, we have our own identity and background. But with the environmental factors, we change our thoughts and involve with others.

(Revised) Dynamic Interactions: Each individual's cultural funds of knowledge independently exist and reciprocally interact with and influence each other.

ls4000_2 — 2024-04-07 03:01:36 UTC

Molecules are independent of each other while at the same time interacting with and influencing each other. To better improve one's instructional pedagogy to create an equity of teaching and learning, one should be open-minded to use students' diverse funds of knowledge as resources with self-awareness of their identity and possible biases.

(Revised) Transmission and Communication: Both molecules and culture can be transmitted or communicated across generations.

ls4000_2 — 2024-04-07 03:01:36 UTC

Molecules can be passed down through genetic inheritance or chemical processes, while culture is transmitted through language, education, media, and interpersonal interactions.

(Revised) Influence on Behavior and Function: Culture influences and guides how we behave, perceive, and navigate in the world, just as the human body consists of countless molecules.

ls4000_2 — 2024-04-07 03:01:36 UTC

As a product of learning(Goodenough, 1981), culture is created by human beings and further shapes their categorical perception of and navigates how people react to the outside world. People generalize the rules of the world from their past experience and logical rationalization and use this "grammatical formula" to predict and guide their actions when dealing with unpredictable futures.

(Revised) Structural Complexity: Just as molecules are composed of atoms arranged in specific structures, cultures are comprised of various elements such as language, customs, beliefs, and values, arranged in complex patterns.

ls4000_2 — 2024-04-07 03:01:36 UTC

Within a molecule, different atoms take their own role of function, just as the elements also take different roles to serve the prosperity of human culture.

(Revised) How can educators effectively integrate Critical Race Theory into their instructional philosophy beyond celebrating cultural diversity to benefit students' inner knowledge construction?

ls4000_2 — 2024-04-07 03:01:36 UTC

Curriculum Progression with MCE

ls4000_2 — 2024-04-07 03:01:36 UTC

Geneva Gay's proposition of "[building] a sense of community among students and create a classroom ambiance characterized by inquiry, discourse, personal involvement, novelty, and reciprocity" embodies the framework of smaller atoms bounding together to form a molecule, through which students' holistic development can be achieved among building and sustaining process (Gay, 2018). Sonia Nieto's discussion around Power and Privilege emphasizes the unequal distribution of power and resources in education and society, and it is bilingual educators' obligation to hold a critical perspective towards the existing educational practices and policies. Observing students' representation of their cultures can help educators analyze relevant sociocultural and sociopolitical factors that may affect individuals’ educational experiences, formation of policies, and application of multicultural education (Nieto, 2017).

(Revised) How does the deliberate focus on harnessing students’ diverse cultural assets not only enhance their holistic development based on their funds of knowledge but also equip them with the skills to promote meaningful changes that transcend the confines of standardized curriculum?

dx2237_1 — 2024-04-07 03:01:36 UTC

ls4000_2 — 2024-04-07 03:01:36 UTC

(Revised) An Equity Pedagogy

lh3216_1 — 2024-04-07 03:01:36 UTC

Five dimensions are mentioned as content integration, knowledge construction, prejudice reduction, equity pedagogy, and an empowering school culture and social structure(Banks, 2021). Banks(2021) and Nieto(2017) described MCE similarly in many aspects. They both emphasized that educational equity should be accessible for every group including all the minority groups. They also mentioned the significant role of schools in this reformation, as a medium between students and society, which owns a bigger power and wider influence. To me, power is necessary especially when pushing an institutional reformation in education systems. However, it cannot stand alone, since the cooperation from all the participants - teachers, students, and families - is more indispensable.

Content integration: Capitalizing the household of knowledge

ls4000_2 — 2024-04-07 03:01:36 UTC

How the implicit cultural assumptions, frames of reference, perspectives, and biases within a discipline influence how knowledge is construed within it(Banks, 2021). As a dynamic process, culture is written and constructed by who has the power, where the voices of minority groups are neglected. To deconstruct and then re-construct that, teachers need to use examples and content from a variety of cultures and groups to illustrate key concepts, generalizations, and theories in their subjects. Counter-narratives and stories from diverse minority groups should be integrated with the standardized mainstream course content.

The relationship between cultures and languages is intertangled in bilingual education, so how should we leverage student language skills to bridge the cultural gap in an educational setting?

ls4000_2 — 2024-04-07 03:01:36 UTC

Critical Multilingualism

ls4000_2 — 2024-04-07 03:01:36 UTC

Fostering critical awareness of language, identity, and power dynamics can help students jump out of the confines of standardized curriculum. According to Bucholtz and Hall , individuals' language usage can infer their social class, ethnicity, gender, religion, or regional background. Through the lens of practice, performance, indexicality, ideology, etc., individuals' identities can be discerned as intelligible from one another because some linguistic features are associated with particular social identities (Bucholtz and Hall, 2004). Encouraging classroom practices which uncover the relationship between language and identity--for instance, discussing how language is used to construct identities and shape social realities or critically analyzing texts, media, and language policies--can promote not only the recognization of certain languages' power or weakness in the school's curriculum but also the incorporation of new pedagogical approaches who invite more languages to represent multilingualism.

Code-switching in the classroom

ls4000_2 — 2024-04-07 03:01:36 UTC

In the Mandarin Dual Language program I was doing my observation, I found the teacher usually explains and demonstrates a concept in Mandarin first and then asks a question. If there is no response at the moment, she will explain the question again in a simpler language but still in Mandarin. Body language is often applied when explaining certain concepts. For example, when learning the concept of “比较(comparison)”, the teacher asked students to line up and compare their body height. Usually, when answering the question, students tend to speak English since that is the language they are more familiar with. The teacher will either ask them to change to Mandarin(for more advanced language learners) or paraphrase the student’s answer in Mandarin as a model and ask students to repeat it(for less proficient language learners). In this way, compared to the direct translation between English and Chinese, the teacher serves as a scaffolder rather than just an instructor by bridging the gap between students’ linguistic proficiency and tasks. Besides, language instruction is also well-elaborated and explicit enough when it comes to grammar methods or communicative language learning(Reyes & Kleyn, 2010, p.88).

Community Based Learning

dx2237_1 — 2024-04-07 03:01:36 UTC

Traditional Classroom Learning

dx2237_1 — 2024-04-07 03:01:36 UTC

Shifting

dx2237_1 — 2024-04-07 03:01:36 UTC

Definition of Culture

jh45871 — 2024-04-07 03:01:36 UTC

📹Yellow Question

dx2237_1 — 2024-04-07 03:01:36 UTC

(Revised) Teachers' exploration of self-identity

ls4000_2 — 2024-04-08 15:22:51 UTC

Teachers should comprehend students' identities by integrating and re-learning about their identities first and then bridging their own ethnic identities with teacher identity, which will contribute to improvement in their instructional philosophies(Riojas Clark et al., 2011). The four stages included in this transformation - dormancy, exploration, crystallization, and flight - demonstrate the process one may experience during this ideology transformation. The key question raised by Clark and his colleagues on "Who am I", questions people's existing cultural self-recognization and leads people to reflect on how they perceive other cultural groups(Riojas Clark et al., 2011, p.32). Exploring one's cultural identity as a way of seeing and understanding is significantly important for educators to intentionally broaden their perspective on culturally related events and thus improve their instructional practice. Only by understanding oneself better, can one eventually understand others in a more rounded way.

(Revised) Self-Reflection: What means by Being White?

ls4000_2 — 2024-04-08 15:28:56 UTC

Personally speaking, I am aware of the privilege of the White group in Western society and acknowledge that it should be a cooperative effort to advocate for groups of color and other minority groups. However, as an East Asian whose living experience was limited to American school lives, I regarded myself mostly as a bystander and subconsciously considered the racial issues are far from my life. The change started this semester when we talked about Goodenough's article(1981) about how culture shapes one's behavior and perception of the world both in a macro-scope and microscope. Culture, as a tangible form of human heritage, can also be invisible and usually neglected by the public when coming to the discussion of societal reformation. I was touched by the idea that what educators need to do is far more than introducing students to "multiple cultures", but to help students to construct their understanding or the world with a more diverse perspective.

(Revised) Advocating for students' identity to promote their learning motivation.

ls4000_2 — 2024-04-08 15:48:12 UTC

People usually consider motivation as a psychological construct while regarding investment as a sociological framework. However, these two are actually connected with and interact with each other since language learning may contribute to a change in an individual's identity(Norton, 2010, p. 354). Thus, it is also important for educators to differentiate whether students are unmotivated in language learning or just not invested due to objective limitations. Additionally, the more access one can get to an imagined community, the more investment one may put in language learning because the imagined community is not only a reconstruction of the past communities and life but also a desired community in the future.

(Revised)

dx2237_1 — 2024-04-08 16:44:19 UTC

How can teachers acknowledge the existence of inequity in the educational system and design lessons that project the voices of students from different cultural and linguistic backgrounds?

Sociocultural Mediator in MCE

lh3216_1 — 2024-04-08 18:13:31 UTC

A sociocultural mediator should “[use] students’ cultures and language to open new possibilities for them while at the same time supporting their emerging bilingualism and biculturalism. (Nieto, 2017)” In classroom practices, educators need to invite students to identify identities, rooted beliefs, and embedded pre-conceptions. The combination of recognizing these cultural elements should be valued and represented as Funds of Knowledge, which makes up the foundation of Multicultural Education (MCE) in a classroom. Drawing from self-identification by individual students and a collective comparison between different cultural assets in the classroom, cross-cultural communication empowers the students to examine some current sociocultural practices with a critical lens and propose suggestions with consideration on different stakeholders.

(Revised) Understanding Language as a Social Construct

dx2237_1 — 2024-04-08 18:55:16 UTC

As Educators, we need to acknowledge the bias and inequity entrenched in our educational system. It's almost impossible to get rid of this inequity, and we need to recognize the existence of it. This is why we should analyze the educational system from a critical perspective. In our educational system, we have students who come from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds and have different schooling experiences. Some might have intensive tutoring and abundant access to books and other educational opportunities, while other's schooling may be limited by negative factors such as poverty and discrimination (Nieto, 2017, p.3). Therefore, we need to look beyond the surface level of the diversity-related problems of multicultural education, such as limited educational opportunities and native language being the mainstream language, etc. This is cruel to a lot of students, but it is the reality, indeed, that language is a social construct. This is embedded in our sociopolitical and historical context that constructed this education system that privileged the mainstream group, such as the whites, and marginalized the minorities, such as Hispanics (Nieto, 2017, p.2). This is why, as educators, we should acknowledge this and exert agencies that can empower the students to make changes.

(Revised) visionary pragmatism

dx2237_1 — 2024-04-08 20:07:32 UTC

This mindset will greatly benefit us in teaching content that is aligned with the standard while valuing the students' diverse cultural beliefs. Visionary pragmatism is about balancing idealistic aspirations with practical realistics. In this case, we have 2 components: we need to embrace a vision, which is what we want our students to achieve. Another is pragmatic strategies; we adhere to the state standards and the inequity entrenched in the system and customize our curriculum to meet our students' needs. This mindset allows us to understand the realities of inequality in our education and still make education fair to all students in our class.

(Revised)Reflection and Adaptation

dx2237_1 — 2024-04-08 20:27:05 UTC

As educators, we need to reflect and adapt our teaching method often. Especially in an unequal education system like this, we need to reflect on our students' education often and adapt methods to further support them. For instance, Clark mentioned the metaphor of butterflies, and as educators, we need to become transformative agents (Clark 2011, p.31)). This will enable us to adjust our teachings based on the student's evolving needs. We want to teach our students to become change agents who can take part in society as global thinkers.

📹 Red Question Revised

lh3216_1 — 2024-04-09 00:25:14 UTC

📹Yellow Question Revised

dx2237_1 — 2024-04-09 05:05:13 UTC

(Revised) Green Question

ls4000_2 — 2024-04-09 14:29:00 UTC