Hi! Meg and Laurie, thanks for your thoughtful and helpful posts. To sum up, as I understand it, your ideas for supporting students from a variety of cultural backgrounds and literacies include:
- philosophical, school-wide approaches such as: 1. offering PD to increase faculty awareness and understanding of racial /cultural issues and to create a climate of openness and trust 2. helping brainstorm ways for students to deal with racism, which whether or not it is overt, is inevitable in our society 3. study curriculum to ensure the diversity of student voices and heritages are heard and represented - classroom-specific approaches such as: 1. graphic organizers 2. Project Read 3. structured formats to "set up inferential skills and subsequent written responses" Meg, what are some of the specific techniques your school has come up with to meet your three goals above? Laurie, could you provide an example of the formats you use to help your students learn and use inferential skills? At Stoneleigh-Burnham, we have a diversity committee for faculty and staff, and three clubs (Diversity Club, SOC [Students Of Colour], and International Club) for students. These groups, which know they need to be interacting more frequently than they currently do, work primarily towards the first two goals listed above. At a departmental level, we do think about diversity, to varying degrees of success. I think radically different ideas of what "multiculturalism" means and what its value is or should be are currently impeding our progress, and until we are speaking a common language it will be slower going than we might want. In my classroom, I don't necessarily have all the scaffolding techniques in place I might should have for our international students, but I do have the advantage of having my three ESL students in a separate, supplemental, sheltered class. There, we can focus on reading skills for Science and Humanities, or work on writing techniques, or do whatever they need. With only three kids in the class, they can get a lot of attention and I can ask questions or offer suggestions pretty much throughout the process of whatever they are doing. The point about all this becoming integral to each of our schools so that we no longer need to celebrate a designated "black history" or "women's history" month is well-taken. In our middle school, we have consciously decided not to celebrate those months, and to work hard to ensure we meet the goals of those celebrations in our standard curricula. I think we're actually doing pretty well. Take care, Bill Ivey Stoneleigh-Burnham School _______________________________________________ The Literacy Workshop ListServ http://www.literacyworkshop.org To unsubscribe or modify your membership please go to http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/options/lit_literacyworkshop.org. Search the LIT archives at http://snipurl.com/LITArchive
