How Can A Students Cultural Knowledge and School Knowledge be Contextualized Within the Classroom? :: Teaching Education

How Can A Student's Cultural Knowledge and School Knowledge be Contextualized Within the Classroom? Anne, a 15 year old Vietnamese American student stared out the window while the teacher droned on in the background. Her thoughts centered on lunch and her friends, and family. On a deeper level, her thoughts were about friendship, loyalty, kinship, and how children gain status and acceptance in the social structure of the school. Anne's attention was brought back into the classroom when the teacher announced that "this information will be on the test". Mechanically, Anne began to write as the teacher dictated notes. When the teacher had finished dictating the notes, Anne's thoughts wandered back to her own concerns. This true story is about me as a young girl trying to identify with the experiences of school knowledge and real life knowledge. Most of us as students have been in my shoes can readily identify the occasional moments of boredom and daydreaming in an otherwise interesting and engaging school experience, and in other occasions, this is the main reality of the classroom life. Traditionally, the educational community has tended to view culturally diverse students as coming from a deficit model, that somehow these students lacked the right stuff, the educational experiences for success in school. Rarely have schools and educational institutions viewed culturally diverse students as being culture rich and not at risk. When children are not allowed to incorporate their prior knowledge with new experiences provided in the classroom, learning is slowed and the child constructs a disjointed view of the world. This paper explores the multicultural and diversified world of the students and juxtaposes it along the knowledge the students are encountering in the classroom. It explores knowledge in respects to the traditional notions of commonsense knowledge of school, and knowledge that centers on the interests and aims of the learner. Multicultural learning needs to build on student's regenerative (prior knowledge) along with their reified (school knowledge)knowledges, the knowledge must be in relation to the student's home and community, the information must be personally familiar to the child, the understanding must come through a connection with culturally familiar stories and materials, knowledge needs to create a meaningful linkage to give children control over their learning, and multicultural knowledge needs to address the histories and experiences of people who have been left out of the curriculum (Dewey, 125). What I experienced as a little girl was a conflict between two different kinds of knowledge, which R.B Everhart has distinguished as reified and regenerative knowledge. Regenerative knowledge "is created, maintained, and recreated through the continuous interaction of people in a community How Can A Student's Cultural Knowledge and School Knowledge be Contextualized Within the Classroom? :: Teaching Education How Can A Student's Cultural Knowledge and School Knowledge be Contextualized Within the Classroom? Anne, a 15 year old Vietnamese American student stared out the window while the teacher droned on in the background. Her thoughts centered on lunch and her friends, and family. On a deeper level, her thoughts were about friendship, loyalty, kinship, and how children gain status and acceptance in the social structure of the school. Anne's attention was brought back into the classroom when the teacher announced that "this information will be on the test". Mechanically, Anne began to write as the teacher dictated notes. When the teacher had finished dictating the notes, Anne's thoughts wandered back to her own concerns. This true story is about me as a young girl trying to identify with the experiences of school knowledge and real life knowledge. Most of us as students have been in my shoes can readily identify the occasional moments of boredom and daydreaming in an otherwise interesting and engaging school experience, and in other occasions, this is the main reality of the classroom life. Traditionally, the educational community has tended to view culturally diverse students as coming from a deficit model, that somehow these students lacked the right stuff, the educational experiences for success in school. Rarely have schools and educational institutions viewed culturally diverse students as being culture rich and not at risk. When children are not allowed to incorporate their prior knowledge with new experiences provided in the classroom, learning is slowed and the child constructs a disjointed view of the world. This paper explores the multicultural and diversified world of the students and juxtaposes it along the knowledge the students are encountering in the classroom. It explores knowledge in respects to the traditional notions of commonsense knowledge of school, and knowledge that centers on the interests and aims of the learner. Multicultural learning needs to build on student's regenerative (prior knowledge) along with their reified (school knowledge)knowledges, the knowledge must be in relation to the student's home and community, the information must be personally familiar to the child, the understanding must come through a connection with culturally familiar stories and materials, knowledge needs to create a meaningful linkage to give children control over their learning, and multicultural knowledge needs to address the histories and experiences of people who have been left out of the curriculum (Dewey, 125). What I experienced as a little girl was a conflict between two different kinds of knowledge, which R.B Everhart has distinguished as reified and regenerative knowledge. Regenerative knowledge "is created, maintained, and recreated through the continuous interaction of people in a community