Final Thoughts on the Course!

When I signed up for this course, I expected to hear what I've been hearing in every TE class: it's our job to educate children to be open and understanding with other cultures. I didn't think that I was going to be hearing anything new, to be honest. I knew diversity issues weren't a piece of cake, but I thought I had a pretty good grasp on how to handle certain things. I was wrong. I learned a lot, which meant that I barely knew anything to begin with.

The class that stood out to me was when we discussed Al Capone Does My Shirts. In that story, the character Natalie clearly had a disability, though the author never specified as to what she had. In my paper for that week, I had a lot of questions. I wasn't sure that the book actually portrayed Natalie correctly, in terms of creating a clear, accurate picture of a person with a disability. It was especially troubling to me because I am a special education (LD) major. This book was portraying my future student a little bit negatively. I had to question the writing in the story. After that, I looked for stereotypes in every book we read, and further questioned the story as to how the "minority" in the story was depicted. If anything, this class has made me obsessed with finding quality literature that causes me to think deeper about issues.

Another important class I can remember is when we watched "In Whose Honor?", and talked about schools using Native America mascots. I had always heard this issue, and I admit that I was a little bit stubborn in my views. After the discussion in class and the blogs I read, I started to become less narrow minded. I never thought of myself as not being able to see clearly, but hearing other peoples' opinions has allowed me to question myself a little bit more.

When I have a classroom in the future, I now realize how important issues of diversity really are. Writing the 'questioning the text' papers and having discussions over books has caused me to see that picking literature is not an easy job. There are a lot of elements to consider when building a classroom library. Hopefully I will take what I have learned in TE448 and apply it to my teaching in the future.

Thanks for a great semester!