| Diverse Populations in Today's Schools |
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| Personal Cultural Profile - Kerri Beauchesne - |
| The purpose of this assignment is to compile a webpage that indicates the personal cultural groups to which I belong and the extent of their importance in my life. I teach English I, English III, and English IV at Summit Academy in Fort Worth, Texas. I also taught Journalism last semester and sponsored the school newsletter. I live in Grand Prairie, Texas, with my 7-year-old son Joshua. Within the next five years, I hope to become certified in Gifted/Talented Education and teach some AP and pre-AP English classes in addition to the "regular" ones. I would also like to coach Academic Decathlon (once I get out of the "survival" teaching mode, that is.) |
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| INTRODUCTION |
| This is my last semester of coursework for my initial teacher certification. My goals this school year are to learn as much as I can from my classes at UTA and from my first-year teaching assignment, and to set goals for improving my teaching style, classroom management techniques, time management skills, and professional development activities. This course ("Diverse Populations in Today's Schools") will give me a valuable grounding in some of the fundamental differences between my students and help me teach them according to their needs. Understanding my own personal cultural background will give me a place to begin when trying to understand my students. This is the fourth class I have taken online in the UTA graduate teacher certification program. This medium can be difficult to get used to, but it has many advantages that I hope to apply to my own classroom in the future, as technological resources allow. |
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| MY CULTURAL GROUP MEMBERSHIPS |
| 2. EUROPEAN AMERICAN |
| 5. TEXAN |
| 1. PROTESTANT CHRISTIAN |
| 3. FEMALE |
| 4. MIDDLE-CLASS / PROFESSIONAL |
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| Christianity is a big part of who I am. It influences how I treat people, how hard I work, how I teach my students, how I approach relationships, and how I view the world. I spend several hours each week either at church, praying, or reading/studying the Bible, and I am raising my son to be a Christian as well. Positive stereotypes of Christians: Kind, generous, forgiving, compassionate, courageous, evangelistic, principled, moral. Negative stereotypes of Christians: Judgmental, hypocritical, forceful, "forcing your religion down my throat," ignorant, prejudiced, biased against women, hateful toward other religions. |
| I've lived in Texas most of my life and have a lot of pride in my state. We have excellent industries, such as oil and cattle, and we like to be the best at what we do. We have the Cowboys, the Mavericks, and the Stars, and nobody does high school football and marching band quite like we do. Positive stereotypes of Texans: Texas-sized ("Everything's bigger in Texas!"), friendliness, generosity, independence, rugged individualism, hard work. Negative stereotypes of Texans: Everyone rides a horse to school and wears a cowboy hat and boots; recklessness, ignorance, conceit, shoot first and ask questions later. |
| I am a woman, which helps balance out my culturally-dominant status as a WASP in America. I feel a constant tension between what society expects of me as a woman (submissive? feminist? supermom? witch?) and where my feelings and intellect actually lead me. I am proud to have conquered many obstacles to become the strong woman I am today, and I hope to grow in grace, kindness, and strength every day for the rest of my life. Positive stereotypes of females: Nurturing, gracious, loving, emotionally-attuned, insightful, competent, intelligent. Negative stereotypes of females: Incompetent, helpless, emotional, hysterical, nagging, PMS-ing, witchy, illogical. |
| I grew up in a lower-middle-class household. My dad spent 22 years in the Navy and was a welder by trade, and my mother alternated between being a stay-at-home wife/mother and working various retail jobs. Both parents had some college, but never had the time to get a bachelor's degree. Because of their wishes and my own, I completed a bachelor's degree and have worked in two professions: law and teaching. At all times, the middle-class work ethic and cultural values have influenced me in countless ways. Positive stereotypes of middle-class professionals: Hard-working, generous, educated, civic-minded. Negative stereotypes of middle-class professionals: Spending outside of our means, carrying too much debt, condescending to blue-collar or lower-class, blind to poverty, selfish, wasteful, insensitive. |
| As a white person with one parent from the South and another from New England, I take part in several of the white cultural groups in America. My recent ancestors were hard-working, conscientious people who believed in pulling their weight in the community. As a member of the traditionally dominant ethnic group in America, however, I have to be sensitive to the struggles and needs of people from minority groups. Positive stereotypes of European Americans: Responsible, strong work ethic, family-oriented, creative, generous, civic-minded. Negative stereotypes of European Americans: Spoiled, prejudiced, selfish, oppressive, dishonest, snobbish. |
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| My Relationship with Students About half of my students share my white/Protestant/ Texan background, and of course, about half of them are female. Some of these students are also middle-class. These students and I share many of the same cultural assumptions and familiarities, so I find it easiest to connect with them, teach them, and manage their behavior in the classroom. One of the big culture gaps I experience as a teacher is between me and my Black and Hispanic students. A percentage of both groups have different assumptions about education and behavior than I do, although this is not uniform and not limited to Blacks and Hispanics. Both groups do seem to have a larger number of poorly-educated students than the white population (look at the TAKS score gap), which I believe is the result of poorly-educated parents in most cases. Often, this is not the parent's fault, but is instead either the present-day result of generations of racial oppression or the result of poor/sporadic education in another country. I also believe minority students are under-identified for learning disabilities that may be holding them back. By the time I get my students, they've already been through at least nine years of education, and if they haven't done well, they've built up a lot of frustration and barriers to their own success. It is my job to make them feel comfortable in my classroom regardless of their race, gender, intellectual ability, socioeconomic status, or anything else. Once they feel they can trust me not to tear them down but to challenge them and help them, i can help them make up some of the education they've missed out on. Aside from learning disabilities or educational deficits, I also must deal with behaviors that I'm not culturally familiar with. For example, I find it a great challenge to manage a class half-full of rowdy black athletes. Since I didn't grow up with black culture, it is difficult to keep their behavior within reasonable limits without causing rebellion or trying to crush their legitimate personal expression. One of the ways I bridge this gap is by finding ways to bond with each individual student. I get them one-on-one in tutoring, I give them responsibilities in the classroom, I learn about their personal lives, I tease them, and occasionally, I'll let them tease me into saying words like "ghetto" and "bootleg." They think that's really funny. I still come down hard on them when they get out of hand or become disrespectful, but I'm quick to forgive. They may still think I'm really white, too reserved, and kind of corny, but we can get along at school and learn something together. |
| My Relationship with Students' Parents The main culture gap I find in communicating with students' parents is socioeconomic status. Sometimes the parents are more upper-middle-class than I am and seem to condescend to me (or is that my imagination and envy?) At other times, they are lower-middle to lower-class and poorly-educated, and they sometimes seem suspicious that I am condescending to them. If I am calling a parent I've never talked to before, I try to gauge their way of speaking and gear my speech accordingly. This isn't to say that I will imitate their accent or anything, but I do tend to match the speed of my speech to theirs and use vocabularly that seems appropriate. With all parents, I make sure to talk about the good things their kid is doing in school, even if I'm calling about poor behavior or grades. My Relationship with Peers For the most part, my peers have a similar socioeconomic status, educational background, and religion. With those similarities, ethnic and gender differences tend to fade away to almost nothing. I do find their advice helpful when dealing with students of an ethnic background like theirs. It helps to know, for example, that my rowdy black athletes give their black teachers as much grief as they do me, and that my black colleagues handle them about the same way I do. We also share our favorite foods when we have luncheons in honor of the faculty and staff members of the six weeks. This is a new dimension of cultural sharing for me, and one that I (usually!) enjoy. |
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