Australian Professional Teacher Standard: 1.3 – Students with diverse linguistic, cultural, religious and socio-economic backgrounds.
My placement school was made up of students who mainly had English as a second language and were born overseas. Their lives and cultural beliefs were different to mine and therefore something I did not know much about. This was something I needed to think about when planning my lessons and creating activities. This was evident particularly in one of my English lessons.
The students were learning about Shakespeare whose background is different to theirs. One of my lessons went over Shakespeare’s background and introduced the students to the play ‘Romeo and Juliet’ There were some things regarding Shakespeare and the play eg the marriage of people of such different ages, Shakespeare’s education tat they were confused by. There were points in the class were the students would ask me questions regarding these things which threw me off guard because I was naive to assume they would just understand.
I got the students to complete an activity where they used the information they had learnt about Shakespeare to create a Facebook profile for him. I thought that this would be a good interactive way to help them learn, retain and exemplify their knowledge of this content. When I planned the lesson I thought that it embodied the socio-cognitive and constructivist approach, and it would have if the students could have related to the task that I was getting them to complete.
I explained the task to the students and then started to walk around while they were completing it. As I was walking around majority of the students stopped me to ask me to explain to them what they needed to write. I soon found out this was because they do not use social media. Once again this was something I assumed they would have based off my other placements and my own personal experiences. As the students did not understand what I wanted them to do because they could not relate to the task, while I aimed to incorporate certain learning theories, they got somewhat lost in the confusion. In some sense however the constructivist theory was still able to be explored from the little understanding the students did have of Facebook. This is evident as ‘There is no one constructivist theory but in its simplest terms constructivists assume that learning is a process of constructing meaning and much of this is derived from how individuals make sense of their experience.’ (Merriam, Caffarella & Baumgartner 2007). Therefore, the students were still able to construct meaning from the task from what they did understand, however they would have been able to take more away from it if the task was more reflective of their culture and socio-economic background.
After stopping the class to explain what I meant by creating a Facebook profile they had a better understanding of what I required them to do and were able to effectively complete the task, however the class would have run smoother if I had been able to incorporate a more relatable cultural approach to the task.
Next time I can either provide the students with options of activities to complete that achieve the same goal or do more research in their backgrounds in order to ensure that the activity I create can be understood easier the first time I explain it and is more relatable.
It was disappointing that the lesson got lost and did not work out as well as well as I had intended but it was eye opening and I was able to learn a lot from the experience that I probably would not have if I was otherwise.
EDFX348 Reflective Blog 