This I Believe [About Teaching & Learning] Students can Create and Learn Cultural Tolerance

"My belief is that all students have potential to change the world, and it may just take a Macbeth or Claudia to give them that push."

 

     My belief school is that gateway for students find connections with their literature; to their world, their community, their home, their school, their peers, and to themselves. Perhaps, my students will find a character they can relate to, or a situation. I believe that students can take these connections and construct beautiful poetry: well thought essays, RAFT assignments that speak to them, constructive arguments, and, eventually, find books that speak to them on their own.

     Often times, I forget that I am teaching students to read again, but learning to read with different lenses on. I want to teach students about different cultures, different genders (or lack of), different languages, different but still beautiful. While writing some ideas for my Practicum Unit on Macbeth, I wrote a sentence that seems to cover exactly what I want my students to leave my class with, “Students will be able to create a cultural tolerance in the classroom as they continue to compare the text to their own and others’ cultural beliefs.”  

     I have told many people now within this past year how much I have actually moved. It was not a subject I brought up often beforehand, but it is certainly one that has continued to stick with me. It was from living in three different states, each with their own cultural norms and rules that I quickly discovered how, even within the United States; it is not difficult for someone to experience a culture shock. How else can I explain the transition of trying to communicate with my Spanish speaking classmates to explain to my friends that I saw a hunter walking on the side of the road in New Hampshire with his gun over his shoulder and that being completely normal!

     I suppose that what I am trying to say is that each and every single student is going to walk in from some kind of culture, and it will be different than your own and it may be different than a lot of their classmates. Yet, so often, in 2013/2014, I still hear about students and teachers bullying one another for racial, cultural, sexual, or gender differences. How is it, that after Martin Luther King Jr., after Susan B. Anthony, etc., how are we still stuck in this muck of intolerance, especially in public schools? What I want to teach my students is that all cultures have something to offer. My belief is that all students can walk away learning something, especially about one another. 

     My belief is that I will find texts and outside sources that help students find a cultural connection. My belief is that they will find a connection within a story to their own culture. I want students to also see other people within a text and learn about a culture outside of their own. I want students to build lasting positive impressions upon one another and increase this knowledge and tolerance that they will pass on to their friends, family… My belief is that all students have potential to change the world, and it may just take a Macbeth or a Claudia* to give them that push. 

*Main Character for The Bluest Eye