Reflecting upon Social constructivism and the school literacy learning of students of diverse backgrounds

Social constructivism and the school literacy learning of students of diverse backgrounds
By: Au, Kathryn Hu-pei

I chose to reflect on the chart from p. 307 of the article because I felt it could be easily transferable to classroom teachers teaching implications. (The article can hopefully be accessed through the following link, for readers who do not have access to our class’ classweb: http://vnweb.hwwilsonweb.com.eduproxy.tc-library.org:8080/hww/results/getResults.jhtml?_DARGS=/hww/results/results_common.jhtml.7)

The article was geared toward making educators aware of the gap that exists between the achievement of students from multicultural backgrounds and the ‘mainstream’ background. It was brought to light that a lot of this gap is occurring and continuing to widen due to social structures in schools and educators assumptions that their students similarities and commonalities are greater than their differences the gap is. The chart on p. 307 is the proposed framework for improving the school literacy learning of students of diverse backgrounds.

I found this chart to be a tool educators could use that illustrates the contrast between a school context that teaches to the mainstream and students from diverse backgrounds. It helps me to see the two paralleled, so that each context was compared among each of the seven elements (goal of instruction, role of the home language, instructional materials, classroom management and interaction with students, relationship to the community, instructional methods, and assessment). This added to the success of this charts ability to be ‘picked up’ by nearly any teacher and spark thought about how their structure could be creating this noted achievement gap. These elements are what teachers are considering and working with on a daily bases (or should be). I think the chart could be used as a teacher self assesses their practices, coming away with a sharper awareness of areas they may be marginalizing students in their class.