When it comes time to introduce culture into the classroom, it can be very challenging. Students may be in a state of vulnerability that they are not quite used to, or they may feel uncomfortable discussing such a sensitive topic with peers. There are many different strategies to adapt to your classroom that can help with these feelings. Some include offering consistent and open discussions as a class, acknowledging and respecting every student, practicing cultural sensitivity, incorporating diversity into lesson plans, and much more. For this particular post, I am going to choose a lesson I found online and evaluate its criteria to see if it is suitable for use in my future classroom!
The name of this activity is titled, “Native Americans Today,” and this is a 3rd-5th grade lesson that should take about two 50-minute sessions to complete. If you would like to read through the complete lesson in detail, I will include a link below to check it out! The objectives of this lesson state, “Students will:
- participate in critical discussions about their knowledge of Native Americans, understanding that Native people are part of contemporary America.
- work cooperatively in small groups.
- access and gather information about Native Americans from Websites.
- share information with others through discussion.”
Overall, I think the lesson does address the objectives because the students are required to use their background knowledge to participate in a class discussion revolving around the terms, “Native American,” “American Indian,” and “Indian.” They are then supposed to research each term and compare/contrast them collaboratively. This is a great technique that requires students to make connections with their peers while also having to create a product that reflects these connections. I also believe this lesson helps students reflect on stereotypes, although, I am not sure if it helps challenge stereotypes. The beginning of the lesson instructs students to make generalizations or assumptions about three different cultures, even though it doesn’t say that specifically. If I were to adapt this lesson in my classroom, I would not include this part of the lesson and would instead provide a brief description of each term that students could then compare/contrast with one another. I would also include a section that evaluates their learning in addition to the Venn Diagram they will need to fill out. Besides that, I think this is a great lesson to incorporate into an upper elementary classroom, and I believe students would develop a better understanding of these specific terms after completing this activity. There is also a lot of variety with this lesson because you can switch out the terms for other similar groups of individuals that tend to be generalized into one group.
According to Why Race and Culture Matter in Schools: Closing the Achievement Gap in America's Classrooms, Howard states that a strategy for teachers to use in their classrooms in order to use students' cultural knowledge in a meaningful and personal way is called cultural modeling. This is a framework used to "address the demands of complex problem solving in the various subject matters," (Howard 52). This lesson also incorporates cultural modeling which is something I completely side with!
Posted on July 20, 2023 at 9:46 p.m.
References
Lesson: https://www.readwritethink.org/classroom-resources/lesson-plans/native-americans-today
Howard, T.C. (2010) Ch. 3 Culture Why Race and Culture Matter in Schools: Closing the Achievement Gap in America's Classrooms.
Hi Sydney! Personally I didn't love this lesson. As you said, I wouldn't want my students to come up with stereotypes either, especially if there were native kids in my class. I also don't like that this lesson kind of lumps all Native Americans and Native tribes together and doesn't necessarily touch on the history of why they have been lumped together or called the wrong name. I think it could be an interesting way to introduce what stereotypes are, but there are a lot of ways this lesson could go wrong or send our students the wrong message, and I think there are a lot of better ways/lessons that introduce the same concept. I do like how you mentioned that the lesson would use cultural modeling and connected it to the reading.
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