Community Walk Assignment
I have long wanted as assignment built around each of our local schools. Our pre-service candidates often aren’t familiar with the schools they’ll student teach in and, even more alarming, often carry negative stereotypes regarding some schools. We often ask our mentor teachers to “take them around the neighborhood” and do what we often refer to as a “community walk” with them. It appears it is more of a “community drive” than a walk these days, but you catch my drift. Around your school and in the school’s neighborhood, what are the places that preservice teachers need to be aware of. Mostly when I ask this, just so you know, they only places they are aware of are the places to grab a quick lunch. That’s fine, but go beyond that. Where can they get a stamp? An ATM machine? Can they grocery shop there on the way home so as to see some of their students? Are there any shops they can shop at? What communities of faith are around them, where their students attend and worship? Are there important community organizations that they need to know about?
If you choose this assignment, you’ll build a community walk guide/map. I don’t have any examples, so yours will be the first. Impress me!
Autobiography and multicultural education
You will write a narrative inquiry of teaching and learning, identifying your cultural experience with issues and perspectives in multicultural education. During the process of writing, you will be connecting multicultural education theory and practice with your own experiences. You will connect your own knowledge base with what you have read from course assignments and learned from class participation. The process should be dialectic interplay between your own experiences and scholarly works on multicultural education and you should focus on the impact language and culture have had on your teaching and learning.
Includes three parts:
1. An autobiographical study of your cultural self, including ethnicity, language, gender, socioeconomic, disability, religion, etc. Tell your family story, the history of how you were named, as well as your development as a learner and a teacher. Try to be objective and relate classroom readings to these early experiences.
2. A cultural study of the most important teacher in your life.
i. Identify a teacher, (in school or in life), who you cannot forget.
ii. What did (s)he do?
iii. How did (s)he do it?
iv. In what ways did (s)he impact you?
v. How important is this teacher for you now, from the viewpoint of multicultural teaching and learning?
3. A study of your personal philosophy of multicultural education: What are your principles for ethnicity, gender, social economic status, disability, religion, language, dialect, learning style, etc. in your current teaching practice? How do your beliefs about these things impact how you teach?
You should use the following materials when constructing this assignment:
1. Your reflections and notes on activities from your teacher education courses;
2. Handouts given by the instructors, or your school district;
3. Other relevant references, such as Research from the Internet or professional journals, books, our class texts, etc.