Service Learning Prompt #3

Question: The culturally competent teacher should be able to use a variety of assessment techniques appropriate to diverse learners and accommodate sociocultural differences that affect learning. How might the teacher be responsive to the linguistic, ethnic, and sociocultural characteristics of the students in his or her assessment practices?

     The children of today's society are engulfed in a sociocultural tornado that shapes and personifies how they see the world. Children in the classroom depend on the media to understand how to project the images of cool and not cool onto those that are supposed to be their classmates. When children are taught from the media that seemingly improper ways of speaking are considered cool, it is clear to see why some children would attempt to emulate such. In my service learning experience, i found it impossible to misconstrue the fact that most children in the classroom were thoroughly involved, and henceforth shaped, by the use of video games, television, and computers. Their dialect is seemingly derived from a mixture of television shows like "Jersey Shore" and  what can heard by common rap music. In my opinion, in order to most adequately reach the children of today's society, we should attempt to level with them, in order to teach them in a way they can more easily understand. of course, this would be a very difficult thing to do, as oftentimes curriculum's are a preconstructed existence that is developed by school districts.
     One example that i have found in my particular classroom that i found of relavance, was used by the reading textbook that was used in the classroom. The text depicted a journey of a boy, his friend, and an old man of a toy store. The old man had magical powers, and would take the boy and girl on trips around the globe into different places. The old man would teach them something new every time, and the children would pay for the trip by taking a test about what they had learned. The text book was a perfect example of inclusion, because the races of the three people in the book were, Latino, Black, and White. I thought this was a perfect way for the curriculum to help include various forms of culture in the day to day learning processes of the class.
     Another thing that i noticed was a very interesting way of interacting with the children on a social level, was the teachers use of an Easter Egg Hunt as a way to distract children from the everyday stresses of the classroom. This helped to keep them behaved, because their eligibility to participate in the hunt was granted by their ability to remain well behaved. I thought it was clever to almost kind of bribe the children into behaving, because it helped get them to learn in a more organized fashion.
     All in all, i feel that various techniques can be used in order to more accurately reach these children on an ethnic and social level. We need to stop seeing these children as objects of learning, and instead see them as human beings who are doing their best as a product of their society. We are making steps in the right direction.