Week #6 Assignment (due Nov 10)

This week's blog assignment will look at various issues in education--Diversity, inequality, impact of language, and many others.

Your assignment should be posted in your blog by 6am Thursday, Nov 10th. Please respond to the following as three separate blog posts, using the same titles I have provided.

1. Title: Conversations with minority parents: Discourse in Diversity
This particular article focuses on a school district's attempt to create relationships with diverse families. (I will send you the article as an email attachment). Please read carefully to discover what the researcher asked families, what the families reported experiences were and importantly, what surprised the researcher. If the researcher had conducted this research project in the United States, what might he have found? Would the results have been different? Please comment on at least 3 other points that caught your attention. Provide numerous examples in your blog post (this is your evidence that you read the article).

2. Title: The Economics of Inequality
This is a very recent publication in the American Educator. (I will send you the article as an email attachment). It is an excellent overview of the importance of investing in early childhood education. Not investing in young children has serious repercussions. Please read the article carefully and provide answers to the following questions the author poses in the article (your answers should be based on the article):
1. When does inequality start?
2. Is it worthwhile to reduce inequality by investing in education?
3. How best to invest limited resources to create more productive human capital?

Please comment on your early childhood experience--did it feature some of what the author talks about? Did it differ?

If you were king or queen of the United States, how would you insure that all children had the opportunity to live up to their full potential?

What other issues, raised in the article, caught your attention?

3. Title: Representations of Native Americans in elementary school social studies
This is a very thought provoking article written last year for the publication Multicultural Education.
While the article is coming from a teaching strategies perspective the content alone is valuable for our discussion here. (I will send you the article as an email attachment). Please keep in mind the authors are describing a research project they conducted in elementary classrooms.

Please comment on how your experiences in elementary school were similar or different from many of the points made in the article. Additionally, please provide in your own words, what you think critical awareness of diversity means, and why it's important for educators (frankly, anyone living on the planet) to be aware of and to utilize. And, what do they mean by "the other" in terms of language use?

This article focuses on American Indians. Which other diverse groups would benefit from critical language discourse in the classroom? Include in your blog post several other points raised in the article which interested you, or that you disagreed with, or that made you think differently about the topic.