Heather-Contextual/Cultural Literacies

Since I took my multicultural education class, and now with the reading, I have been thinking about how to incorporate other cultures into my classroom. I’m planning to teach in California and there is so much diversity in the schools there. There are very high numbers of Hispanic students and I don’t want them to feel left out in my theatre classroom or program. What I’ve thought is that it is important to study many cultures and many different types of theatre pieces. Not just American, not just Hispanic, not just African American, but a good mixture of all of them. I think that in schools, and diverse schools especially, it is so important to study tons of types of theatre, not just western traditions that we are used to. I really loved this quote from the supplemental reading: “[The teacher] must create a new community with her students drawing from the student culture—“their interests, needs, speech and perceptions—while creating a negotiable openness in class where the student’s input jointly creates the learning process” Rather than only study the plays I love, and the ones I know and have studied, I want to draw from my students’ experiences, their cultures, their passions, and then choose texts and apply literacies that they will be able to connect to, that they will be able to learn from without feeling separated. I think that there will always be times when the student feels they are the minority, but in my classroom I want to let every type of student have the chance to study something where they are the majority. I want each student to have the chance to explore what it’s like to feel on the outside of things, but also what it’s like to feel on the inside of things. With a diverse student population, I want to create a diverse curriculum, where we all have new things to learn and enjoy.