Area of Focus - Topic: Culture Share. I am currently working as a PE Teacher in a middle school where we have a very diverse student and teacher population, including myself being from Spain. Many countries and cultures are represented in my school and I see a great opportunity to share our backgrounds and embrace every culture within the school community promoting respect.

My first thought is to bring this idea of sharing our cultures and backgrounds to our climate and culture committee and then decide if this is a good idea to execute in our school. In my opinion, it would be a great opportunity to build a stronger school community by getting to know each other more through sharing different cultures represented in our school. I am hoping that by implementing this innovation, students and staff become more aware of the importance of respecting every member in the school community and make them understand that we need to be proud of who we are, celebrate it and embrace it.

In regards to the format, my idea is to implement this innovation through an Advisory class. I will provide more details when I present my action plan in part 2.

I am hired in a Charter school compromised to domains of anti-bias education such as inclusion of diversity and justice. This shared vision is a good start point for me to encourage K-5 teachers in a leveled team workshop for selecting LGTBQ books in order to address and to discuss this progressive social issue in the classroom. This discussion invites teachers to do some extensions, for example word gendered problems in math, critical conversations with children in reading class, or any teachable moment that help us as a team to deconstruct the gender dichotomy to rebuild the Gender Identity Spectrum. Believe it or not young children may identify as LGTBQ at elementary grades (2006) and “it is our job to provide a safe space and role model for them as they age [...] to operate in accordance with justice (France, 2019). 

Cowhey, M. (2006). Black ants and buddhists: thinking critically and teaching differently in the primary grades. Portland, ME: Stenhouse .

New Day Films. (2010). That’s a Family! https://www.newday.com/film/thats-family

France, P. E. (2019, June 1). Supporting LGBTQ Students in Elementary School. Edutopia. https://www.edutopia.org/article/supporting-lgbtq-students-elementary-school

In addition, the program itself ends up being more of a “work group” and does not actually help students hone in on their leadership skills. Most of the work these students do is help the counselor count food and clothing drive items, make posters, and a small amount of recess duty. There have been efforts in adding leadership training, but every year it gets put on the back burner and the group ends up falling back into the same routine they have had in years past.

Innovation: Shifting the focus of our student council. Putting an equity lens on the application process, I would like to see as much representation as possible. We should be putting together a program that teaches leadership skills and utilizes members to do equity work in the school. I also believe students should be more involved in decision making, when it is something that will affect them.  

In order to gauge how others are feeling, I could put together a Google Form survey for staff and PTC members, asking specific questions regarding the student council’s role in the building/community. I think the best way to share this innovation, once complete, would be in a staff professional development scenario. This would allow adequate time to discuss, hear staff concerns/comments, and begin the process of bringing awareness to this potential change. 

The outcomes I am hoping to achieve are receiving whole staff “by-in” or at least from intermediate teachers whose students will be applying, either purchasing or creating a leadership program to be implemented, and beginning the process of determining decisions with which students could be involved.

I must start these conversations with my administration and colleagues that we must seek to do more for our students. I a, personally on a committee in my school where we are attempting to create lesson plans to teach about anti racist curriculum. Through my lesson planning I will also be searching for picture books as well about these topics. On top of that I would also like every library to have a collection of BIPOC centered literacy. Also of other people in the world. LGBTQ centered books as well.

As a teacher leader I would like to start by working closely with the Parent Teacher Association to increase their effort to recruit more BIPOC folks into their meetings. Currently there is little to no representation. In addition to that I would like to motion to the PTA to allocate their fundraising for BIPOC centered books for our classrooms if possible. In order to do this I need to attend meetings regularly and engage with other parents about how we can get them to attend the meetings. 

Action Plan:

As I mentioned in my initial research, my first step would be to bring the idea to our culture and climate committee. The purpose of this committee is to make sure that we provide our students a safe and welcoming environment, so I think they will be pleased and will support this initiative. The following step would be to talk with our fantastic admin and decide when and where I could present this innovation to our staff. I am thinking maybe to present this information during one of our PD sessions.

In our school, we have a very diverse group of teachers from different cultures and backgrounds so I am hoping that they can see the potential of this opportunity. I truly believe that by sharing our cultures with our students and staff, we will have a better opportunity to connect and build meaningful relationships with our students and colleagues. Going into the details on how this innovation works, my idea is that every teacher creates a 5-8 minute screencast including all kinds of information about their cultures such as place of birth, traditional foods, most popular places to visit, different traditions, memories of how they grew up, etc. They are free to present whatever they want and they can use different computer programs and apps if they prefer. 

Next, we staff will need to decide and choose a specific day of the week and dedicate our Advisory class to show students these presentations.

Last, once all the teacher’s presentations are done, students and families are invited to participate and will have the opportunity to do the same. 

Allies and Alliances:

I have always believed that in order to achieve school transformation, it is necessary for the whole staff to “be on the same boat” by working towards the same goals as a community. With this being said, the first community partners that I need to collaborate in this innovation are my colleagues. By colleagues, I mean admin, licensed and classified teachers, office managers, custodians, etc. I would like to bring all the adults in the school first and start building a stronger sense of community. Once this is accomplished, the ultimate goal is to bring students and families on board. 

Getting to know each member in the community will allow us to expand our leadership capacity and consequently we will have the opportunity to create a stronger school community. 

Ideally and hoping that this innovation works, I would love to be able to present this idea district-wide. I think it would be wonderful if all the schools can implement these culture shares within their school communities. 

Growing up as a child in Karachi, Pakistan I went to a secular school and we had classmates and friends from similar ethnic, cultural, and religious backgrounds until my graduate studies. I was aware of only that particular pupil whom I can connect with. After studying Masters's of teaching at IOE, UCL (Institute of Education, University College London, I became aware of the shift of focus from an exclusive classroom to an inclusive classroom environment, when I got an opportunity to study with students from different countries. I understood the importance of learning with diverse students. There was too much to learn from them. Now in PSU, learning the courses of 'Multicultural curriculum design' and 'Teacher leadership' I learned more about anti-racial and anti-bias. Now I am eager to explore the benefits of teaching the idea of diversity and its appreciation and acknowledgment among students in an inclusive classroom environment. 

 
The outcome I am hoping to achieve is that students of my class would be able to:
- accept, appreciate and embrace cultural and social differences 
- try to learn from each other and create a beautiful diverse classroom
- build alliances among themselves to achieve a common goal of promoting best to the world.  

#Inclusivity, #LGBTQ-themed books, #LGBTQ school rights 

Last, something that I realized during this project is that we educators need to be proactive and pursue what we believe in. Our actions are what will determine transformation and achievement in our school community. We are in a powerful position where our beliefs and actions can change our students’ lives for the better, so let’s care about this amazing opportunity.  

The demographics of my school community is not being represented in the school. Our school needs more representation. There is a big Latinx population and black population in our school and yet they are not entirely visible in the curriculum and environment. In the past I have used fundraising sites to get materials that have representation of my students. I believe that students need positive representation to have positive space. Currently there are a lot of ‘issues’ in our school building. Students are being disruptive in school. I think if we had representation students would like to learn more about that. There has been more participation schoolwide to participate in culturally specific events. Whereas before there was an international day. Now we have shifted to being a specific cultural group and incorporating it to our lessons in the school. I noticed that many students were eager to demonstrate their learning of these lessons. 

Action Plan

I must start these conversations with my administration and colleagues that we must seek to do more for our students. We need funding to purchase books and materials that have student and people representation. Students need to see representation in other forms that also don’t cost money. Such as having student leaders in school. Opportunities for family community leaders. As a school we need to increase our family engagement and have school events where families can be given opportunities to participate and eventually support the transition to lead the events. 

Allies and Alliances

As a teacher leader I would like to start by working closely with the Parent Teacher Association to increase their effort to recruit more BIPOC folks into their meetings. Currently there is little to no representation. In addition to that I would like to motion to the PTA to allocate their fundraising for BIPOC centered books for our classrooms if possible. In order to do this I need to attend meetings regularly and engage with other parents about how we can make the meetings a valuable use of their time. To work on this I would need many teachers to be working with me on this as well. 

Reflection

From my readings in week 3 about reading that we often don’t see leaders in our students because we don’t give them opportunities to. I was shocked when I started seeing more students leading assemblies and fun school wide events. This allowed students an opportunity to be seen as leaders in our school. I have seen those same students in the school but when they were leading or teaching the younger students my perspective changed. The power of opportunity is phenomenal. By having those students up there the younger students were able to see themselves up there later. My connection is that I want to provide opportunities for our BIPOC families to have opportunities to be in leadership roles to then influence others.