2/16/2021 Week 7: Cross-Cultural Students in the Classroom

As my future classrooms fill with students in the coming years, I must be aware of the cross-cultural students that are present. It doesn't matter if there is one or if there are many. Things will be different for them. 

As a teacher, it is my responsibility to make a whole hearted effort to make the process of learning easier and more accessible. WhenI am teaching students from the same or similar cultures, this will be easier to navigate. We will view the world with a similar paradigm.  When teaching students from different cultures, they will have different paradigms and figuring out how to navigate that will be something that I will need to do. 

I believe it is important when teaching cross-cultural students to understand who they are and where they come from. Then I can begin to understand things from their perspective. Once I can see things from their point of view, I can make adjustments to help facilitate learning. 

This afternoon, I was discussing cultural differences with my sister and she told me about a class that she took when studying for her Masters in Education Administration. The class was about biases in curriculum.  She gave examples of math word problems that used city blocks to figure out a distance. Having city blocks in a word problem makes the assumption that the student knows what a city block is. Someone from rural Kansas would be far less familiar with this than someone from Manhattan, New York. Another example she shared was doing probability for how many times you would draw a king out of a deck of cards. Again, this places assumptions about the student. If the student doesn't know that there are 52 cards in a deck with 4 kings, this would be a near impossible problem to solve. 

This example makes me think about my future classroom and what assumptions I might make about the students that walk thru the doors. I hope that I can remember these ideas and take with me the things I am learning. I hope that I take my assumptions and question them. I want to understand the perspectives of my students and do what I can to help them succeed in the way that benefits them.