Blog response for September 10 reading assignments

From the Moll, et al article "Funds of Knowledge for Teaching"
"We have learned that it is feasible and useful to have teachers visit households for research purposes..."
Is this why we are being asked to go to a student's home and study their literacy for this class?

"...These are neither casual visits nor school-business visits, but visits in which the teachers assume the role of the learner, and it doing so, help establish a fundamentally new, more symmetrical relationship with the parents of the students."
I find this to be a particularly interesting thought. My first thought is, "Well duh, of course visiting with parents outside the school would establish a better relationship." Then I think about how none of my teachers ever visited my home, and how distant the relationship between my parents and my teachers was. As a highly self-driven student with a great interest in learning, this likely wasn't a huge issue, as my teachers never had to call my parents or rely on them for help in getting me to succeed. For struggling students this could make all the difference. Education of a child relies on the collaboration of teachers, students, and parents.

"It can also become, as illustrated above, the catalyst for forming research teams among the students to study topics of interest to them, or important to the teacher, or for achieving curricular goals."
My first thought on this was "student-driven" instruction. When you take all of this into account, it's really about learning what is important to the student and the parent without having to explicitly ask them. We've done a lot of talking in my classes about student-driven instruction, and while that's all fine and dandy, I often wondered how to create student-driven instruction without explicitly asking the students. This could be a way. I quite like this point though, because it again illustrates how instruction of students is a team effort.


From the Rubenstein article Conversing with Miguel:
Miguel's portrait may also serve as a reminder that "labels... carry with them the baggage, or connotations, that people ascribe to them"
Reading about intelligent students getting labeled as a troublemaker or a student with a disability really breaks my heart. It's concerning to think that even I, who has had a class on second-language acquisition, can still be blind to this issue at times. I try to do my best now and believe everyone has intelligence of some kind. From that perspective, I quit thinking someone is unintelligent. Even my value of intelligence as a worth has changed. Just because a student is three or four grade levels behind, it doesn't mean they aren't capable of learning. It just means that there is a lot of work to do.