Post 11: Cultural Sensitivity and Social Relevance in the Classroom

Blog Post 11

Kumar chapters 11-12

Brown chapter 26

Kumar’s chapter 11 discusses the importance of ensuring social relevance in teaching.  In order to make our L2 teaching socially relevant, we need to recognize that the “broader social, political, historical, and economic conditions that affect the lives of learners and teachers also effect classroom aims and activities” (239).   Kumar covers the concepts of the status of English as a global language, the role of the home language in the learning and teaching of English, and the use of appropriate teaching materials.    English is now a global language because it has developed such a special role that is recognized in every country.  It has been recognized for many reasons such as science and technology uses, the internet, commerce and communication uses. 

            I found the section on the politics of standardization very interesting because I never realized how much of a controversary this topic really is.  Take the section on Oakland California, for example.  The school realized that the majority of their students use AAVE.  They wanted to treat it as any other language or dialect by making it accepted within the school discourse.  They ran into some trouble, however, when they put out a statement saying that they would be using it while teaching and would teach it along side standard English.  After that caused some problems, they retracted that statement and said that they really just want to foster the language because it does have such strong ties with the students’ home life.  If a student is discouraged from using AAVE in school and if they are told it is “wrong” they then feel a rift between their family and the school, thus making the student feel as if they need to choose their family or school.   That is something we never want students to have to consider, even subconsciously.  Kumar states that when teachers were made aware of the effects of taking notice AAVE has on their students, and how acceptance of AAVE can lead to a more stable platform in which to learn standard English, the students were more successful.  My question is this, how do teachers do this?  Do they include the use of AAVE in their lessons? It says that teachers changed their teaching strategies; in what ways did they do this?

            Brown discusses how to be socially responsible and socially aware while teaching.  This mirrors Kumar’s chapters by talking about how politics and culture play a role in teaching another language.  We of course, need to be sensitive to all of our students and realize the ties they may have with their L1.  By engaging the class in everyone’s L1s, we create a nice blend of diversity.  By being “agents” of change, we can change the classroom dynamic.  Something that was an issue in my high school was the tension between cultures.  My high school was 53% Hispanic; we also had a large Polish, Russian, and Ukrainian population.  There was tension between the Hispanics and Polish students.  This lead to many, many incidents and was an obvious tense atmosphere for everyone.  It never hurts to let students talk about their culture so others can learn about it; they will see that we aren’t all that different, people are people. Culture and nationality is only part of who you are, and a lot of cultures are the same in many ways.