Unit 5: Addressing Diversity

1. Unit 5: Addressing Diversity Joselin, Tabinda, Jess, Anthony, Rachael, Maggie, Mutsumi

2. Terminology • Comprehensible input: • strategies that enable ELLs to understand the essence of a lesson by means of context or visual cues, clarification, and building background that draws on students’ experiences • Code-switching: • switching back and forth between two or more languages in the course of a conversation • Metacognition: • The knowledge about ones own thinking process • Culture of Poverty Myth: • the idea that poor people share more or less monolithic and predictable beliefs, values, and behaviors

3. Article 22: Meeting Students Where They Are: The Latino Education Crisis Latinos on average perform much lower than any other ethnic group regardless of the fact that they are the largest growing minority group in the U.S. The Latino public school population doubled from 11%-21%. Young Latino children are more than twice as likely to be poor as white children and are even more likely to be poorer than the poor. Latino children are also most likely to have parents that are not educated or cannot speak English. 40% of Latino mothers lack a high school diploma compared to the 6% of Caucasian mothers. 60% of Latino children attend hyper segregated schools, which means that they do not get the cultural norms, standards and expectations here in the U.S. They don't come in contact with anyone who has attended college or intends to even go; therefore their aspirations for attending college were never developed. To have a successful future, K-12 schools will be monitored. For example project GRAD is helping students since day one to prevent them from falling behind in any subject. There has also been drop out prevention programs.

4. Article 23: What Does Research Say about Effective Practices for English Learners? • Academic language is one of the most pressing needs faced by English Language Learners (ELLs). • Academic language refers to gaining access to and an understanding of content taught in English. • Academic English is different and similar to conversational English. • Academic English is formal, used in academic and explicit teaching/learning situations, and more demanding cognitively. • Conversational English is relatively informal, contextualized, cognitive less demanding and used in most social interactions. • Yet, students can learn academic language using their everyday experiences. If they put the formal English in a context they understand, it will be easier for them to learn. • It is important to have both explicit language instruction and content area instruction.

5. Article 24: Becoming Adept at Code-Switching African American students are in lower reading groups and/or being diagnose with a reading deficit Puts African American students below their white peers on every measure of academic achievement Teachers lack linguistic training that is required to teach these African Americans students from dialectally diverse backgrounds Traditional correction methods fail to teach students the Standard English writing skills they need Negative attitudes about stigmatized dialects, lower teacher expectations for students who have them and lower academic achievement Traditional correction methods fail to teach students Standard English writing skills they need Teachers built a code-switching chart Exploring the changed difference between the Informal English sentences and the Formal English sentences Consciously reflect the dialect differences and use them in the appropriate way These techniques are highly successful in fostering the use of Standard English and boosting overall student writing performance among urban African American students at many different grade levels African American Students did as well as white students and even outperformed them in math and science

6. Article 25: The Myth of the “Culture of Poverty” • Oscar Lewis • coined the term “culture of poverty” • Studies later found that it was a myth • Example: • Myth: Poor people are unmotivated and lazy. • Truth: Many parents in low income families have multiple jobs and work more • We tend to suffer more from “culture of classism”

7. Article 26: Books That Portray Characters with Disabilities • Top 25 children’s and young adults’ books portray characters with disabilities.      Ex. The ADDed Touch, The Alphabet War, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time • Those books are selected based on the Dyches and Prater’s guidelines. • Guidelines      1. Literacy Quality      2. Illustrative Quality      3. Characterization of the characters with disabilities          a. Accurate portrayal of the disabilities          b. Exemplary practice          c. Realistic sibling relationships, if depicted          d. Appropriate emotional reactions          e. Accurate illustrations of the disability or assistive devises being used • Appropriate book should be selected for each individual and for their each situations.

8. Discussion Questions What are some strategies that will help better the education of Latinos as well as other ethnicities for public school systems? In what other ways can we try to change how teachers and schools view children from low-income families?