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Princess Culture and Early Childhood Education: Application
In my last post, I ended with some questions about what we, as teachers or early childhood educators, could do to combat the racialized and gendered messages that our
“Disney princesses” Photo credit: Ricky Brigante via Flickr
students are being bombarded with in their Disney princess/superhero culture. We need to remember that racial understanding makes its way into our classrooms without effort. “Race is a structuring principle that must be interpreted in classroom interactions, not as a naturally occurring phenomenon but part of the assumptions that ultimately inform how people construct their world” (Leonardo, 2009, p. 233).
Our students have racial constructs already formed by the time they get to school, and many of those constructs have been influenced through their parent’s opinions, and the movies and shows the children have been exposed to. Unfortunately,
Photo credit: Disney UK
we can’t wait for Disney to change their ways and disrupt the dominant discourse, because even though they are starting to try, by releasing movies like Moana, there are still many issues with movies like these portraying Indigenous people. It is going to require educators to take a critical look at the hidden and lived curriculum students are stepping into school with, and learning how to deconstruct these narratives with their students.
In my grade one class last year, we had talked a lot about male and female ‘gender roles.’ I didn’t have to give many examples before the students started chiming in with what the “world” tells boys and girls they can or can’t do. During our talking circle, students were giving examples such as, “People say boys can’t have long hair,” or “Girls like pink.” I don’t think there was one student that day who didn’t participate in the talking circle; every child had experienced some type of gendered scenario where they knew how boys and girls were supposed to act. It was neat watching them agree and sympathize with each other as each child gave examples of what they knew about gender and how it didn’t sit right, even in their little six year old bodies.
I decided to take this lesson a step further with my students because “to children, the boundaries between reality and fantasy life are often unclear (van Wormer & Juby, 2015, p. 591). Kids don’t always understand that the behaviours on TV shows or in movies shouldn’t be imitated in their own lives. I wanted to try and help my students look critically at the gendered and racialized scenarios they see in movies, and deconstruct the message while relating it to their own lives.
The first clip we watched was Gaston’s song from Beauty and the Beast. Take a look if you need a little refresher.
When I chose this clip, I knew it would have a lot of the gendered physical characteristics of males, and I was hoping the children would notice. After we watched the clip, I asked the kids what Disney was telling them about men/boys. Sure enough, the kids picked up on so many of the physical qualities.
“Boys have to be strong.”
“Boys have to have big muscles.”
“They are hairy.”
“Boys eat a lot of food.”
“They drink beer.” (Oops, I may have forgot about that part of the movie!)
Then one student pointed out something that I hadn’t really thought about, but was so prevalent.
“Boys like to fight.”
Wow. How had I missed that obvious behaviour from the clip? Clearly Gaston was fighting with the men in the parlour, but I was more focused on the kids finding physical characteristics of what men “should be like.” This led us into a great conversation about violence and how boys are pushed into more of a violent social construct than girls.
We then looked at a couple other princess clips; one of Snow White, and another of 
Cinderella. The students were even quicker to find gendered stereotypes of women which included body image, a woman’s “roles,” and standard of beauty. Unfortunately we don’t have to look far to see the media pushing women in one gendered 
direction, and it mostly has to do with the beautification and sexualization of girls/women. Our class had a really good conversation around this topic, and it even led into how they can be safe/protected online. Many children recognized that inappropriate images of women are scattered everywhere on the web, and many children openly admitted to seeing these while they were using the internet in their own home. We discussed how “the world” sometimes treats women’s bodies as objects, and that is not fair or right. I reminded them of what they could do if they ran into inappropriate images/videos while online (close it immediately, tell an adult etc.) I try my best to incorporate digital citizenship lessons throughout the year as we use quite a bit of technology in my class, and I know students run into these situations at home as well.
The last part of the student’s assignment was to re-iterate a stereotypical message they knew about boys and girls, and then offer an alternative. For example, “boys CAN have long hair,” or “girls can wear blue and boys can wear pink” etc. The students left empowered, and I had a student come back the week after and tell me how his sister was telling him something about a “girl colour,” and he told her there was no such thing as girl or boy colours! What a precious example of social/gender de-construction.
Unfortunately, I did not dive into an extension of this lesson that included race… but I wish I would have. I think deep down, challenging gender constructs was more comfortable for me than challenging racial constructs, and so I left it at that. Now that I have more anti-oppressive grad classes under my belt, and feel a little better versed in my understanding of Whiteness, identity, and erasure, I am willing and hopeful to tackle more lessons of this sort when I head back into the classroom after mat leave.
However, Leonardo (2009) does warn us that “whites must learn to be racially sensitive about contexts when race seems a legitimate theme to invoke and ask why it was relevant to them then and not other times… Whites can participate in building an antiracist pedagogy against white mystifications, and displacing white racial knowledge from its privileged position of classroom discourse” (p. 239). This makes me wonder what it looks like to challenge the “princess/superhero” culture in specific lessons, but support it on something like a school dress up day.
Last year we had a dress-up day called “Disney Day,” where, you guessed it, students were encouraged to dress up as their favourite movie character.
Not surprisingly, all students either dressed up as a character, or wore a shirt that had a superhero logo or character on it. Looking back, I’m again reminded at how prevalent and engrained the Disney culture is in these children’s lives. I would never consider boycotting the Disney day, as I know these types of days are extremely fun for students. But if I could do it again, I would choose to have some critical discussion around gender/race as a reminder before the day. The children can learn to spot Whiteness, erasure, and cultural appropriation. This type of day would be the perfect time for them to practice their awareness in this area.
Furthermore, an asset-based, positive way teachers can disrupt the princess/superhero 
culture in their classroom is by offering other cultural/linguistic alternatives. Mary Caroline Rowan in her article, ‘Resituating Practice through Teachers’ Storying of Children’s Interests’ explained how she used Aotearoa/New Zealand learning stories to impart traditional Inuktitut words to preschoolers. It “could serve as a means of first recognizing and, second, deepening Inuit cultural and linguistic approaches to early childhood education” (2013, p. 180). Incorporating First Nations, Inuit, and Metis languages through storytelling is a valuable pedagogical tool teachers can use to help combat ‘White ways of knowing.’ Rowan emphasizes that using Indigenous methodologies
“facilitated the development of a practice of making learning stories that I hoped would make Inuit knowledge(s), patterns, and meanings accessible and, in so doing, make spaces in ECE practice for Inuit ways of knowing and being” (2013, p. 180).
In what other ways can we make spaces in ECE practice for Indigenous ways of knowing and being? How can we disrupt the dominant discourse of princess/superhero culture and acknowledge the ways in which it directly influences student’s understanding of themselves and each other? I am only entering the beginning of this journey, and am hopeful to walk beside other early childhood educators who believe in this work as well.
References
Joseph, A. (2016, Dec. 2). With Disney’s “Moana,” Hollywood almost gets it right: Indigenous people weigh in. Salon. Retrieved from: http://www.salon.com/2016/12/03/with-disneys-moana-hollywood-almost-gets-it-right-indigenous-people-weigh-in/
Leonardo, Z. (2009). Reading whiteness: anti-racist pedagogy against white racial knowledge. In B. Ayers, T. Quinn, & D. Stovall, (Eds.), Handbook of social justice in education. (pp. 231-248). New York: Rutledge.
Rowan, C. (2013). Resituating Practice through Teachers’ Storying of Children’s Interests in V. Pacini-Ketchabaw & L. Prochner, Resituating Canadian Early Childhood Education (172-188). New York: Peter Lang Publishing.
van Wormer, K. & Juby, C. (2015). Cultural representations in Walt Disney films: Implications for social work education. Journal of Social Work. 16(5), 578-594
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 1 so far )Princess Culture and Early Childhood Education: The Research; Over-representation and Erasure
In my last post, I highlighted some of the problems with having a Disney infused culture.
“Princess Birthday” photo credit: Cat via Flickr
There are many racialized/gendered messages being sent to children, and “the racial innuendos and insults typically are beyond the level of conscious awareness (van Wormer & Juby, 2015, p. 591). Many young children, especially pre-school to grade one
age, are captivated by Disney characters. They have the movies, the costumes, the dolls, and the Disney themed birthday parties.
Many of us grew up with Disney movies/characters didn’t we? What’s the problem? Is it really a big deal? Well, the problem lies when there is an over-representation of Disney
knowledge and an almost erasure of Indigenous knowledge/ways of knowing. I am the perfect example. Did you know that I made it all the way through elementary school, high school, and my undergraduate University degree before finding out about the real
Photo Credit: The Media Project
horrors of Canadian history in my grad classes? I wouldn’t have been able to tell you about residential schools, Treaties, the TRC, Indigenous languages, or any real information about Indigenous peoples other than they used to make tipis, they used
arrowheads, and they helped the ‘Pilgrims’ when they came to North America. I didn’t ever learn how Treaty 4 affects me, and how I benefit from the Cree and Saulteaux peoples being removed from their land. Parul Sehgal (2016) of the New York Times “describes how inconvenient people are dismissed, their history, pain and achievements blotted out” (par. 3). Indigenous stories were not something I was taught or even had access to, really. BUT… if you had asked me about a specific Disney movie, I could probably sing 15 Disney songs word for word. We even watched Disney movies in school for classroom parties or during the lunch hour. Clearly one type of knowledge was over-represented in my life, and one was erased.
I did, however, have some opinions on “Native people.” One of them was that they were so lucky because they got their University for free, and that just didn’t quite seem fair to me. (Read more about other Treaty misconceptions and facts here.) I want to be clear that the issue was not that I watched Disney movies when I was growing up, it was that I was so surrounded by my White culture (including Disney) that I didn’t ever need to challenge the status quo or question my Whiteness. The media I was attracted to erased certain populations of people, and presented others in a less than positive light. Fryberg & Stephens (2010) suggest that “American Indians are so underrepresented in various contexts (e.g., media, school) that they experience an extreme form of colorblindness; they are invisible,” (p.115).
Disney is easy to pick on, but the fact of the matter is that all mainstream media dictates one message and ignores another.
“Media images can serve a deliberate purpose in maintaining the dominance of our existing societal gender, race, and class hierarchies. The motivation for movie production, for example, may be to incite patriotism, ethnic pride, and/or the assimilation of minority groups into mainstream culture. The most common motivation… is to reproduce whatever images dominate within the ‘whole white supremacist capitalist patriarchy’ to which films in the global market must appeal” (van Wormer & Juby, 2015, p. 582).
These ideologies affect and inform our students, and it then becomes our job as educators to disrupt these ways of thinking and offer other stories. “A critical reading of Whiteness means that White ignorance must be problematized, not in order to expose Whites as simply racist, but to increase knowledge about their full participation” (Leonardo, 2009, p. 231). It wasn’t until I understood my place in Canadian history as a White settler woman that I was able to comprehend the depth of that identity and my role going forward.
“School appears to [be] a key site for racialised (and national) subjectification” (Phoenix, 2009, p. 18). In many cases, students are coming to school and not escaping the
Photo Credit: Patrick Feller via Flickr
hegemony of culture, but their classroom experiences demonstrate “the ways in which they… recognise western representations that [construct] them as inferior” (Phoenix, 2009, p. 18). Even the youngest of students can tell when they are “othered.” Children do see race and gender, and their little identities are already quite developed when they arrive at school. If they are familiar with the princess/superhero stories of Disney and the like, how does that influence their classroom and school interactions?
What can I (we) do as early childhood educators to disrupt the dominant story being told? What experiences can we share as a classroom that can challenge the hidden curriculum the students are learning through the princess/superhero culture? How can we help such young minds grow in critical awareness of their favourite princess/superhero stories? What alternative stories can be shared to counteract the dominant racialized/gendered messages the children are receiving?
References
Ball, J. (2009). Supporting Young Indigenous Children’s Language Development in Canada: A Review of Research on Needs and Promising Practices. The Canadian Modern Language Review. 66(1), 19-47
Fryberg, S. & Stephens, N. (2010). When the World is Colorblind, American Indians are Invisible: A Diversity Science Approach. Psychological Inquiry. 21(2), 115-119
Leonardo, Z. (2009). Reading whiteness: anti-racist pedagogy against white racial knowledge. In B. Ayers, T. Quinn, & D. Stovall, (Eds.), Handbook of social justice in education. (pp. 231-248). New York: Rutledge.
Phoenix, A. (2009). De-colonising practices: Negotiating narratives from racialised and gendered experiences of education. Race, Ethnicity and Education, 12(1), 2-22.
Sehgal, P. (2016, Feb. 2). Fighting ‘Erasure’. The New York Times. Retrieved from: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/07/magazine/the-painful-consequences-of-erasure.html?_r=0
van Wormer, K. & Juby, C. (2015). Cultural representations in Walt Disney films: Implications for social work education. Journal of Social Work. 16(5), 578-594
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( 2 so far )Princess Culture and Early Childhood Education: The Issue
It all started in the last couple months when I decided to go on a Netflix Disney movie spree. I was getting sick of the large amounts of drugs, sex, swearing, and violence in the “regular” adult TV shows and movies, so I wanted to take a break and indulge in
Photo credit: Global Panorama via Flickr
something more ‘innocent.’ Now, hear me when I say that a “spree” for a mom of a six month old is watching bits and pieces of these movies every few days/week. But that said, so far I have watched Tangled, The Jungle Book, Finding Dory, Ella Enchanted, (I watched this thinking it was the musical Enchanted. It wasn’t) Big Hero 6, Enchanted, (the correct one) and I am currently watching Maleficent. It was during Enchanted (the musical) that I started to really recognize the Whiteness that is infused into the movie.
It was during the above clip that I was awakened to the stereotypical race roles that the movie portrays. First of all, the initial men of colour introduced are assumed to be Caribbean, as they play steel drums and shakers, and they are wearing traditional cultural clothing. (Although to be honest, I’m not even sure it’s accurate Caribbean traditional clothing… but it does have patterns and beading, which in the dominant viewer’s mind fits the role of traditional Caribbean culture, therefore does not get questioned.) These men are immediately racialized as their purpose in the movie is to represent culture and add an ethnic flavour to the song. The men follow the characters (the two white, heterosexual leads) who walk through the park singing about love. The next obvious men of colour introduced are Mexican men in sombreros playing their guitars on a boat. Their apparent purpose is to support the two White leads with some added guitar music. The last noticeable man of colour, (I won’t even get started that there were no obvious women of colour even in the song.) is a black man in a bandana, and a loose jersey. Since the song is apparently trying to include all different cultures, he most likely represents black culture as a whole;
“Black men are also featured as tough and aggressive. Many videos rely on hip hop style fashions, such as multilayered oversized shirts, sagging jeans… tattoos and bandanas, in order to evoke images of controlled aggressiveness.” (Asamen, Ellis, & Berry, 2008).
The massive amount of cultural appropriation that is happening within this short song is disturbing. According to the Intellectual Property Issues in Cultural Heritage Project (2015), appropriation “means to take something that belongs to someone else for one’s own use. In the case of heritage, appropriation happens when a cultural element is taken from its cultural context and used in another” (p. 2). The entire song took race and gender stereotypes and expanded on them to the nth degree. This is troubling for me because while I was looking for an innocent escape in children’s movies, I was actually bombarded by hidden racialized and gendered constructions that shape my ways of knowing without me always realizing it.
Photo credit: Barb Watson via Flickr
I think most people are aware that the older Disney movies often promoted racism, sexism, and even domestic violence, but “the newer Disney animations continue to play ‘a substantial role in reaffirming, even constructing, an uneven social hierarchy that privileges the status quo and subjugates marginal populations” (Gutierrez, 2000, p.10). With that in mind, it brought me to question how the dominant discourses of media culture influence early childhood education. In what ways is the ‘princess culture’ of today affecting our children’s ways of knowing and being? If it took me, an adult finishing her graduate degree focusing on anti-oppressive education four consecutive Disney movies to really notice the hegemonic practices that were being showcased, how long, if ever, does it take children to question the message they are receiving? In what ways do schools perpetuate princess/superhero culture and preserve the dominant discourse?
My next post: Princess Culture and Early Childhood Education: Over-representation and Erasure
References
Asamen, J., Ellis M., & Berry G. (2008). The SAGE Handbook of Child Development, Multiculturalism, and Media. Thousand Oaks, California: SAGE Publications.
Broadnax, J. (2015, Nov. 18). The Hollywood Reporter’s New Cover Shows Hollywood Continues to Erase Women of Color. Retrieved from: https://www.themarysue.com/hollywood-reporter-cover-erasure
George, K. (2015, Jan. 9). The Disney Movies You Grew Up with Are Incredibly Racist. Retrieved from: http://www.vh1.com/news/310/racist-disney-movies/
Gutierrez G. (2000) Deconstructing Disney: Chicano/a children and critical race theory. Aztlain 25: 7–46.
Intellectual Property Issues in Cultural Heritage Project. (2015). Think Before You Appropriate. Things to know and questions to ask in order to avoid misappropriating Indigenous cultural heritage. Simon Fraser University: Vancouver.
How Indigenous Learning Stories Can Combat Colonialism
Mary Caroline Rowan discusses Indigenous learning stories in her article, “Resituating 
Practice through Teacher’s Storying of Children’s Interests.” Rowan believes that learning stories can be a device to impart Indigenous knowledge and practices. The “learning story” derives from Aotearoa/New Zealand and is a structured, narrative style observation story that documents children’s actions and incorporates them into a story that walks through a child’s interests, ideas, and emotions. In her chapter, Rowan uses the learning story model, and incorporates Indigenous vocabulary words that support Inuit culture.
(Warning: understatement of the year…) Colonization has had a strong impact on the Canadian Inuit’s culture. Through strict policy and violence, the Inuit people were forced to attend Residential schools where they were taught White ways of knowing and denied access to their language, culture and families. “Inuit approaches to living have been systematically undermined in relationship with a southern society that believed that it knew best how to use the north, how to develop its economic potential, and how to improve the moral, intellectual and material lives of its inhabitants” (Rowan, 2013, p. 175).
The Inuit language and culture have been silenced through years of colonial policy and forced assimilation. Rowan’s approach to her research is rooted in the understanding that “locally based social and cultural knowledge(s) provide a foundation for meaning, understanding, and strength at the community level” (Rowan, 2013, p. 174). She journeys down the path of decolonial theory to find ways to incorporate this local knowledge and disrupt hegemony in her early childhood education action research. Through the practice of transformative pedagogy, “which recognizes the value of home and community knowledge” (Rowan, 2013, p. 180), Rowan chooses to write two learning stories that use traditional Indigenous knowledge and language.
Rowan uses Hugh Brody’s research (1975 & 2001) many times in this chapter. 
Brody was a British anthropologist that visited the Canadian Arctic in the 70’s. Much of his work influences Rowan’s theoretical approach. Brody (1987) wrote, “The voices of the people must be heard; their words breathe life into our understanding. We cannot know other cultures by looking at them; we must hear their accents, absorb their intonations, and enter their points of view” (p. xv). This is vital to Rowan’s work with Indigenous children. In her learning stories, she enters an Inuit child’s world and writes about kamiik, (sealskin boots) illu, (a snow house/igloo) and a play structure on a local playground.
Through her stories, children were spurred on to wonder and question about other traditional cultural practices. One child “really wanted to see the quilliq (stone lamp) lit.
This eventually led to an important event that involved the lighting of the quilliq” (Rowan, 2013, p. 182). I believe this is the magic that an engaging story can hold for a child. It begs them to enter into the story, and wonder and question in much deeper ways. The amazing thing about a learning story is that the children reading it are the centre of the story. It is their behaviours and actions that are documented.
When I decided to write my own learning story, I decided to centre it around my five month old daughter. I am currently on mat leave, and do not have a classroom where I can use my students in the story. I decided to take pictures of important events in Adelyn’s day where I saw her learning and engaging with her environment… AKA my home. Because I didn’t want it to only be applicable to our family, I tried to use objects or experiences that could transcend culture. I openly admit however, that by being a White female settler, I am already working within a privileged, dominant discourse.
However, I tried to write the learning story in a way that allowed the opportunity for other languages and cultures to insert their own local vocabulary/understandings. On each page I underlined a word that I thought could be traded out for something more culturally appropriate or local if applicable. For example, I wrote about Adelyn sleeping in her crib. I know that many other cultures use moss bags, boxes, bassinets, parents bed, etc. Those reading/translating this story are encouraged to switch the vocabulary when necessary.
On the topic of translating, I guess I should mention that I had some friends/family translate the learning story for me into their own language. I am so privileged to have acquaintances from many cultural/linguistic backgrounds, and thankfully many of them were willing to help me translate the story into their own tongue. By the time the story was finished, it was translated into 7 (almost 8) other languages: Inuktitut, French, Korean, German, Mandarin, Spanish, Swahili, (and Cree is on the way). But considering Brody’s quote about “hearing their accents and absorbing their intonations” (Brody, 1975, p. xv), the story was not finished yet. Through technology, we now have the capacity to actually HEAR other languages being spoken. I asked each friend to also record themselves reading the story in their language so I could import the recordings into the ebook. This was successful, and now beside each translated line, there is a button one can click to hear the sentence being read in the corresponding language.
Again, I know there are still many faults with this process and product. By inserting other languages over a White, privileged experience, I am inviting minority groups into my dominant narrative rather than the reverse. I realize that this project is occurring because of a chapter I read while taking my Masters degree at a University. (The ivory tower image can’t be much stronger than that.)
“Ivory Tower” photo credit: Billie Grace Ward via Flickr
I also realize that it is quite problematic that the book I have made is available in ePub format which is best read on an iPad, eBook reader, or a computer with the correct software installed. I know this type of technology is not accessible to everyone, and by doing this, I may just be perpetuating a very privileged group’s access to these materials.
That said, in offering this story in more than one language, I hope to accomplish some inclusivity. I am sending a copy of my story to each of my friends/family that helped me translate it, and I hope it will be read to their children and children’s friends in their home language. I am also hopeful because of my story’s ebook format. Because it is an ePub, it can be opened in the Book Creator app so that the pictures can be changed. Perhaps someone would like to take out the picture of my daughter, and insert one of their own child in their own environment. This ePub format also allows the story to be printed for those that may not have access to an iPad, ebook reader or computer. It does lose the ability to hear the languages being spoken, but the written text in the different languages will still be there.
I will leave you with a few questions that I have pondered throughout this work.
- How can I (you, we) ally with other Indigenous peoples who are wanting to “breathe life into their understanding.” What does it look like for me (you, we) to support the amazing work already being done by Indigenous people who want to keep their traditions, culture and language alive?
- In what ways can I, as a white settler woman help disrupt hegemony and colonial thinking among settlers? In what ways can I infuse Indigenous ways of knowing into my teaching, or my every day life? What stories will I read to Adelyn that don’t have her (or people like her) as the central focus?
Bound by the Clock
This week’s reading talks about how since the clock has been invented, people, families, institutions- including schools, have been bound by time. I have felt this in my own life, and in my own classroom, and I know others feel this tension as well.
In their chapter, Valuing Subjective Complexities: Disrupting the Tyranny of Time, Sherry Rose and Pam Whitty discuss how student freedom can be felt when their teachers do not strictly adhere to the clock. Even though teachers may pedagogically disagree with stringent teacher led behaviours, their classrooms tend to run strictly by time and schedules:
The schedule and its component parts become taken for granted scripts for organizing time. Passed on from one year to the next, ritualistic routines such as calendar time, snack time, outdoor time, and field trips remain embodied and unchallenged” (Rose & Whitty, 2013).
Not only is our school day run by clocks and bells, the curriculum is actually designed through subject minutes. Each subject is designated by a certain amount of minutes, and some subjects are clearly at the top of the academic hierarchy because they have more minutes imposed. This contrasts Ken Robinson’s creativity TED talk we watch last week:
Thankfully, since the Saskatchewan curriculum has moved to outcomes and indicators, I have noticed that teachers have more freedom with how their day can be organized. (Although I have heard this can change depending on which principal you have.) The principal at my school was pretty relaxed when it came to day/week/year plans. We could schedule our days pretty freely, and the only way our day was bound was to our prep times where other teachers would come and take the kids for Music, Phys Ed, or French.
On the other hand, my friend who works at a different elementary school had very strict timetable checks done by her principal. That principal wanted his teachers to tally how many minutes each subject was getting and total them at the bottom of their weekly plans. Each total had to be in line with the Sk curriculum document subject minutes, and their plans had to be handed in to the office and checked by the principal. Yikes!
I feel like Pre-school/Pre-K has a little more flexibility in how they structure their day than a grade one class, but I am going to share a couple things I do in my grade one class so that I am not as bound by the clock.
- I have a routine run by familiarity not time. Every morning, the very first thing we do is Morning Carpet Time. This title is more for the space we are using rather than the
This is a slide from my Morning Carpet Time Smart Notebook File.
structure or content of what we are doing. I have a Smartboard file called “Morning Carpet Time” that has around 30 interchangeable slides that I use throughout the year. My students get used to going through about 8 slides every morning. Sometimes I switch the slides up daily, sometimes weekly, and sometimes monthly. They range in subject matter, but I have to admit, they do tend to have a math and literacy focus. When there is a new slide, I teach them what they are supposed to do with it, and then from that day on, the helper of the day leads the class in all the Smartboard activities. This “Morning Carpet Time” does not have a time limit. Whenever we finish the slides is when we move onto our next activity.
- The students have come to learn that the bell does not dismiss them; the teacher does. Though I know young children have a desperate need for Recess, (as they should,) my class has learned that just because the bell goes, does not mean that they get to jump up and run outside… Especially when another class member is talking or sharing. The students have learned that if one of their classmates has the floor (or the teacher), they need to show respect and wait until that person, or that activity is finished. We have ‘worked’ through Recess in the past, and it is not a big deal. I can always take the students outside for a movement break later, or we can do one in the classroom when needed. Please don’t think that I am saying Recess isn’t important. I think it is vitally important. Students NEED to move, and have freedom of play, and be OUTSIDE… all I am saying is that the bell for Recess should not drive our interactions and emerging activities.
- I have mostly changed our visual schedule from subjects to activities. Rather than writing “math” on the visual schedule slip, I write “table activity.” This allows
Very similar to what my visual schedule looks like. Photo credit: Michelle, a special ed teacher
freedom in navigating the ins and outs of the day. If one activity goes really well, and I would like to continue it rather than moving to the next activity, I can use the next “table activity” time on the schedule to have the students keep working. The students are none the wiser, and I don’t have any ‘schedule loving Sally’s’ who say, “Teacher! Why aren’t we doing Health right now? Aren’t we supposed to be doing Health?” I also don’t have any times in front of each activity. The only thing on the schedule that would give students a sense of what time something is happening would be the Recess and lunch strips.
These are just a few things I have found that work for myself and my classroom. Are there any tricks that you know of that help your classroom not have to follow the clock to the minute? Please share in the comments below!
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Deficit Thinking Results in Bio-Medical Interventions
Reading through this week’s chapters was a sobering reminder that I’m not as de-pathologizing as I would like to be. The explanations on the biomedical approach to literacy is literally how I have done my job in grade one for these past 6 years. The DRA mentioned in chapter 3 is the exact tool that we use in our division for scoring children’s reading. As I was reading their explanations of how it is used, the stories were all too familiar to me.
Screen shot from our online reading program called Raz-Kids which is a resource created to help kids achieve grade level.
The tool itself can be neutral and just another way we assess students, but the categorization, labelling, and decision making that is based on these results is troubling. In my experience, this can become the only tool that we use to gage student’s literacy. It becomes the be all and end all and we work towards hitting that numbered goal rather than looking at the child’s literacy strengths and literacy needs from an asset based approach. Because the division only looks at these ORR levels, it unfortunately drives teachers like me to work to get students to “grade level.” Don’t get me wrong, reading at grade level is an important thing, as there are statistics that show if children aren’t reading at grade level by grade 3, they have a higher risk of dropping out of school. BUT- listen to the language I just used in that sentence. It is all deficit based language.
Ways to see who is not reaching the skills required.
How would things change if I came at reading, writing, and basic literacy from a completely asset point of view? What if we built off of the children’s strengths culturally, linguistically, socially? How would my literacy instruction change if I cared less about a number and more about individual student growth? Would I spend less time testing and more time observing the student strengths and trying to work from those? How do we move past the standardized test when that IS the test that schools/divisions/governments base achievement on?
I just asked 5 questions that are somewhat rhetorical because unfortunately I cannot leave the system that I teach in. I now need to decide how to work within that system. I can’t just complain about the system if I do not offer suggestions on how to problem solve these issues. That said, here are three things I am going to try to do when I get back into the classroom after my mat leave is over:
- Use cultural language/print more effectively. I want English AND the other languages children speak in my classroom represented within my classroom. This will be done through labelling the classroom, but also through homemade books and artifacts co-created by students and their parents. Many parents/siblings will be more than willing to help bring a bit of themselves and their culture and language into our classroom. Rather than a teddy bear journal that gets sent home over the weekend, maybe a journal that encourages new vocabulary from all of the homes of the children could be sent home.
- Use more than a phonics based approach to teach reading. This is hard for me as I feel like I have done a “good job” of using reading strategies, phonics, and structures of English to help students learn to read English… BUT I know that I need a bigger representation of language in my classroom. When I taught Kindergarten, I used to use the children’s names to help them see the English language structures. For example, if Mikayla was the helper of the day, we would talk about how the “ay” in her name says a long a sound. This would be similar to the ‘ay’ in day, say, pray, spray etc. This might work for names that follow English “rules.” But what will I do when someone’s name does not fit? How can I honour a child’s name that was originally made for a language other than English? How can I use this as a chance to honour, represent and draw attention to that child’s culture, heritage and home language? Even further, how do I look at this experience for children and depathologize in my own practice?
- I will actively use more than the DRA or other standardized tests for decision making within my classroom. I think the chapters were pretty clear that most educational institutions are using the biomedical approach for decision making, understanding knowledge production, and policy creation in regards to children. There is not much I can do about that, except push back and show that I will not use those means to make decisions within my own classroom. I will show that students have value beyond the tests and constraints the “system” has put on them, and I will do everything I can to make informed decisions using the personal knowledge I have gained about my students through dialogues with them and their families. “The children of Elmwood received literacy instruction based on a single theory. When one theory is exclusively employed, only the goals of that theory can be achieved” (Early Childhood Curricula and the De-Pathologizing of Childhood, Ianacci and Heydon, p. 83). I will strive in every way possible to use more than a single approach to literacy for my future students.
What do you think? What are other ways we can teach literacy from an asset based approach? Am I off base? An idealist? Or is this something we need to strive for in our schools?
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