All posts by Claudia Giribaldi

Sometimes you Need to Find a Community Outside your Neighborhood

Blurring the In-School Ouf-of-School Line

Goodman, 2018, pg 26

Community and neighborhoods is the new theme contextualizing the new language unit in my classroom. As I read Goodman, I started reflecting what could that possibly look like for my students. So far from what I’ve gathered in my survey, my students come different cultural backgrounds, and some have other languages spoken at home. However, rethinking on how I am going to teach this unit is going to be challenging. I don’t even know if some of my students grew up all of their lives in their neighborhoods, I don’t know if they’ve been displaced or if they feel a sense of community where they live. One of my challenges as a teacher is rethinking the idea of community and neighborhood. Community doesn’t only have to represent their neighborhood where they live—even though it should be the place where they start—a community can also be found in all of the places that you frequent everywhere in the city, where you feel comfortable, be it a restaurant, a park, school group or a classroom. As a person who has lived in different places, your network of friends, teachers and/or families also represent your own community, even if they aren’t in the same place. It’s fundamental for them to find stability in those community spaces inside or outside their neighborhoods for their social and emotional well-being.

Differentiation and Learning Strategies MVP#8

Differentiation as an Approach to Teaching Diverse Learners

(Smith, 2012, pg. 173)

Learning differentiation is something that I’ve tried to implement in my classroom. I’m constantly learning how to scaffold activities so low-performing, average performers, and high performers take advantage of the learning environment. It’s not easy to engage all students at the same rate, making sure they’re also helping each other. Other things that I always find important to differentiate is making different types of activities based on learning styles, be it using visuals, audio, writing, and how I organize information on the board, color code important grammar changes, etc., as a future Spanish teacher. It’s also key to reach a balance understanding not just students’ academic performance, but also different learning styles and strategies, which can be also be implemented with different types of differentiation. For this reason, thinking about using different types of modalities like visual, kinesthetic, auditory in classroom activities and lesson planning will help students reproduce authentic material that represent different structures of the Spanish language and its culture—be it by writing, speaking, drawing, pictures, etc.

Digital Empowerment: How Students Can Use Twitter to Manage and Challenge their Representations

eLiteracy and Social Media(tion), Media and Technology Critiques

As I started browsing through social media platforms, I became interested in exploring how teenagers use Twitter. At first, I wasn’t too familiar with how teenagers use the social media platform.  But according to the Pew Research Center (Anderson & Jiang, 2018), teenagers now use Twitter more frequently than Facebook. MacArthur’s article (2018) that highlights the use of social media for black girls’ empowerment also caught my attention, since he describes how these students use social media to fight against stereotypes, partial stories about their misrepresentation, and other institutional inequalities that exist in their own communities. As a woman of color, and a future Spanish teacher in the United States, I became very inspired after reading a Twitter campaign that rallied against the injustices in a school. The campaign was led by a female black student as part of an empowerment program that uses social media to promote media literacy. As I reevaluate the use of Twitter in my classroom, I want to explore different ways I can incorporate it in my lessons to relearn about what kinds of discourse is narrated in Spanish speaking cultures.

As a platform, Twitter has made a difference around the world by enabling its users to promote political and social campaigns. It allows people from different socioeconomic backgrounds to work together towards a mutually-shared belief or vision. As adolescents start using social media, they realize that people are watching them; they become aware that their own friends are following what they are doing.

Re-purposing Twitter for positive and impactful changes in the classroom can be difficult. Once a tweet is out in the world it cannot be edited; therefore, users have to more careful about what they express to the world. Since teenagers are still developing their own identities and image, they want to be seen by their friends while they are judging each other. However, I think Twitter can be a more powerful platform because it is based less on physical appearance than doing something “cool.”

As I think through activities to reuse Twitter in my classroom, one teaching example comes to mind. The misrepresentations and stereotypes that media creates about Spanish-speaking cultures. One activity I can think of is to search for different representations of from a wide arrange of Spanish-speaking nationalities in Twitter. This type of activity can be introduced when we are discussing the misrepresentations of women in Latin American culture. For example, looking for #peruvians, #colombians, #dominicans. We can start by exploring first what kind of media images are shared about those nationalities and understand the similarities and differences. For the second activity, we can add #peruvianwoman, #colombianwoman, #dominicanwoman, and see if it makes a difference to express what’s out there for woman’s representation. For the last part, we can start thinking about if there are more positive or negative things as we do the search and analyze why this happens and compare how women are represented in American culture. For the final project, I will have each student advocate for a topic that they find important to illustrate women’s achievements in Latin America and create a #hashtag campaign that promotes positive representations of women and their successes from the past or present in Latin America. Each student or group of students will choose a country.

Empowering students from different backgrounds to use Twitter for social media campaigns can be a powerful tool. It allows students to rethink what they can do for their own communities that may feel misrepresented. Because Twitter is based on creativity instead of physical appearances, I believe that it is a more effective and powerful medium for students to re-create and re-conceptualize how they are represented by the print and digital media.

One drawback I can see from doing this activity is that these types of changes may not be enough to motivate students to replicate this activity in their own communities, and if they do, that it will not go beyond Twitter. In that case, students may feel powerless to be able to create any changes. For that reason, we have to recognize that Twitter is just a start to change the discourse. Students must organize themselves and engage in social and political change beyond Tweets. Being able to communicate the importance of these activities to other teachers in the school could make a difference to start developing critical and inquisitive minds in our students.

References

McArthur, S. A. (2016). Black girls and critical media literacy for social activism. English Education, 48(4), 362-379.

Anderson, Monica & Jinjing Jiang (May 31, 2018). Teens, Social Media & Technology 2018. Washington D.C.: Retrieved from the Pew Research Center:

            http://www.pewinternet.org/2018/05/31/teens-social-media-technology-2018/

 

 

 

 

 

 

What else can we do?

eLiteracy and Social Media(tion), Urban Adolescents

(Goodman, pg. 5, 2018) 

Many students have faced changes in their lives that are hard to overcome to be successful in school. Luis, as Goodman narrated his story, is another one of many who also had circumstances out of their social and emotional control. In this case, immigration laws affected greatly the family dynamics of Luis’s home by not having a father to provide emotional and economic support. A family is broken, and those barriers prevent Luis to just take care of school and persevere. I also know of a student whose parent passed away or another who has repeated a year in school, leaving heavy emotional distress and a feeling of not belonging with your friends anymore. This prevents them to be successful in school and continue to fail. It’s not just teachers, but also society teaches us to instill a grit mentality to push students and people in general to be successful, graduate, go to college, and have a job that you are passionate about. It’s look down upon when a person fails given that we have a free public education, and supposedly all of these great jobs, etc. However, emotional trauma, access to resources, and information to get those resources—economic or social—aren’t distributed equally to all of the neighborhoods in New York City. You can also think of any other city in the United States, they have similar problems. A lot of times, we as teachers feel powerless because we can’t probably bring every parent who has been deported or feel helpless because we cannot help every student that is struggling. How do we navigate these circumstances when creating safe spaces of learning in the classroom  or having programs that helps students use storytelling to retell their traumas to overcome them isn’t enough? How do we bring outside resources like professional therapy when school counseling isn’t enough?

Intelligence is Malleable

Socioemotional and Psychological Development in Adolescence
(Eccles & Roeser, 2011, pg. 228)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Academic achievement is one of the many worries for high school students. However, how we check for performance in the classroom is connected to the motivation and active engagement of the student. It’s essential to show students that learning takes time and effort and it doesn’t come right away. I think that’s why is important to demonstrate that intelligence is something that changes. It something that is malleable like a muscle and grows stronger the more we feed it with more learning opportunities (Eccles & Roeser, 2011). How can we promote that intelligence is malleable and can be controlled also by the students? What does that look like? I think one way is to promote autonomy in students’ learning to develop their metacognitive skills and check on their own academic progress. Project-based learning can also be used to encourage students to start something from scratch while teachers and peers can provide guidance and constructive feedback to demonstrate their progress.