Noyce Summer Institute Notes
Here are some ideas and rationales that I thought about and discussed with other Noyce Master Teaching Fellows and professors at UMASS on May 2 and 3.
Idea: What does our school do to help parents navigate social services? How can we identify families that need this help? This could be an amazing Senior Expedition or senior crew service project!
Rationale: This would make school even more of an ally than it already is for our families, and possibly increase the quality of life for our students’ families
Idea: Teaching and Reading Chapters 8 & 9 from Paul Gorski’s Reaching and Teaching Students in Poverty: Strategies for Erasing the Opportunity Gap.
Rationale: Ch. 8 discusses the benefits of the list below. It provides the research-based justification for why our school is focused on them. Chapter 9 zeroes in on how to work with rather than on, poor and working class people
- incorporating arts across the curriculum
- having high expectations for all students
- the importance of rigorous student-centered pedagogy
- making curricula relevant to students’ lives
- teaching about class and race bias, and analyzing curricula for these
- promoting literacy enjoyment
Chapter 9 asks that educators make four commitments to our work
- Choose a resiliency view, rather than a deficit view, of poor and working class people, focusing on student and family assets
- Engage families
- Build relationships with students
- Ensure that opportunities for family involvement are accessible to poor and working class families
And that was just Friday morning. In the afternoon we participated in a poverty simulation, in which a groups of people were divided into families, given a scenario typical of a family living in poverty, and then told to do what we could to pay the bills, hold our family together, and just generally struggle like the 46 million people living in poverty in this country (about 1 in 6 people, the highest proportion since the 1930’s) do every day. I’d be happy to talk with you about it, but for now let me just say that it gave me great pause and I will be reflecting on it for a good while.