apa style

Case Study 4 Samantha Carter’s Diversity Class Samantha Carter wants to be a teacher. She has wanted to be a teacher for almost as long as she can remember. Called “Sam” by her family and friends, she has worked in local recreation programs, summer camps, and in neighborhood parks, sometimes coaching younger kids in volleyball and tennis. She has heard all the arguments against teaching as a career: It’s a difficult, and sometimes even dangerous job; it’s only moderately well paid; she could do more with her skills and abilities. But she really wants to be a teacher, and that’s all there is to it. Sam is also a volleyball player. She has a full athletic scholarship to the university and hopes to coach volleyball in the high school where she has already been hired to teach social studies in the fall. She has it all planned out: graduation in a few months, spend the summer using her new iPad (an early graduation present!) to design websites and interactive assignments and to record podcasts for the classes she’ll be teaching, and finally, start her new job in a suburban school system just far enough from her parents’ home to give her a real sense of independence. American history... World history... Economics... Government... and, of course, volleyball! She can hardly wait! Except... except, here she is, sitting in a required diversity course, wondering why in the world everyone is making such a fuss about all this “diversity stuff.” Haven’t we gotten past all that? On the Internet, after all, no one knows what your color is, or your religion, or your gender. Indeed, she and her friends often use “alternate” personalities while surfing the Net, and clearly, people on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media can also give themselves “other” faces and personalities. The important thing is what people have to say, not what they look like! Still, she recalls that the superintendent told her that the district she will be teaching in is changing rapidly in terms of race and social class—did he tell her that because it might be a problem? Well, it isn’t as if she has never spent any time with people who are different from her. Her high school volleyball team looked like the United Nations, and they all get along fine. She knew all their parents and siblings, and they will be friends forever. And it certainly isn’t as if she doesn’t already know that some groups of people still suffer from discrimination— some of her college community service credits were spent working with kids in a low-income urban neighborhood, and she spent one whole summer volunteering in a community development project in Appalachia. She really liked the people she worked with and wished she could have done more to help them. Why, Sam thinks to herself, she could probably teach this course! And anyway, she thinks, teaching social studies will give her great opportunities to introduce her students to issues of difference. Yet, she thinks with a little pang of doubt, the urban kids she worked with had zero interest in history. And some of the people in Appalachia spoke with such an accent she could hardly understand them. And she doesn’t feel too well prepared to deal with children with disabilities either, and no doubt there will be students with both medical and developmental disabilities in her classes. Sam is learning that society is changing—in lots of ways. If there is one thing she has found in the past few years, it’s that schools aren’t like they used to be, even when she was in school. Her older brother teaches sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade social studies in a school not too far from the district where she will be teaching, and one half of the students in his classes live in families headed by a single parent (some of them, fathers), one third are reading below grade level, and two thirds are eligible for free lunches. His classes are far from being all white or even all native-born: he has African American students, East Indian, Vietnamese, and Central American students, as well as students who are the children of immigrants and refugees from various countries in the Middle East and Africa. His students include fundamentalist Christians, some are Catholic, a growing number are Muslims, several are Jewish, and one is a Jehovah’s Witness. He has one student in a wheelchair after surviving a bad automobile accident, two students with breathing apparatuses because of asthma, and at least six who are waiting (after 6 months) to be tested to determine their eligibility for the newly-created severe behavior disorders program, which is to be housed in a separate school on the other side of town. Other changes are taking place as well, both for her brother and for herself in

her new school. The principal of her new high school announced proudly that every teacher will have a Smart Board or SMART Board by fall. He also mentioned, though, that the needs and expectations of students seem to be changing, even from just a few years ago. Growing up with technology as they have, today’s students seem easily bored, have shorter attention spans, want things done quickly, and don’t like to read long assignments, even if they are good readers. What’s going on here? In addition, since the No Child Left Behind Act was replaced with the Every Student Succeeds Act in 2015, the performance of students, teachers, and school districts is being measured as never before. “The good news,” says her professor, “is that the proponents of accountability really want all children to learn and all teachers to teach well. The bad news is that we have never before really tried to educate all children to the same standard, and we are still not altogether sure how to do that—nor can we all agree on what it means to be a good teacher!.” A classmate raises his hand. “What,” he asks, “about kids with really bad family problems, kids whose parents aren’t even there for them, or the growing number who are homeless? What about kids with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), or kids who just hate school? What about kids who are working 20 hours a week, or kids who just can’t ‘get it’? What about kids who don’t speak English? What about kids who act out in violent ways?” Another student, Joanne, raised her hand, asking, “How can teachers really go about preparing young students for a globally- connected future if they, themselves, have little knowledge or experience of the broader world in which we exist?” She went on, “Last summer I was lucky enough to spend 4 weeks in Australia on a study abroad program designed especially for future teachers. This is something most teacher education students don’t do, by the way, which I highly recommend! We spent a day with a group of Australian high school students who were part of a Global Futures Club in their school. One student in particular, a 15-year-old girl stood up and challenged us with some ideas I’d never thought about before. This really got me thinking. I was so impressed with what she had to say that I asked her if she could write it down. She had already done that as part of her club’s activity, so she gave me a copy. I still carry it around with me, and if you don’t mind I’d like to read it as I think there are some really important messages for us. Here’s what she said... ” ©asiseeit/Getty Images RF (continued) work, I will certainly be mixing in a multinational, multifaith, multicultural setting. During my lifetime, a planetwide economic system is likely to operate. It will be controlled not so much by big nations but by big business networks and regional centers of trade like Singapore, Los Angeles, London, Tokyo, and Sydney. By the time I am 35 years old more people will live in Shanghai, just one city in China, than in the whole country of Austraila. Most people will be working across national borders and cultures, speaking more than one language—probably including an Asian language. That’s the kind of job for which I need to be prepared. Because I am growing up in Australia, the Asia/Pacific area will be a strong focus of my world. There are three billion people in Asia alone, and that number will certainly continue to grow. The Asian continent (from India to Japan) already accounts for half of the world’s population. The world’s largest Muslim country is here, too, in Indonesia, just north of Australia. With a population of over 220 million, Indonesia’s population is larger than that of Japan and Russia. People the world over will have to learn about Islam at school and to respect Muslims—even in the face of all the challenges present today.” “But it’s not only happening to those of us in Australia. More than half of the population in many of the world’s developing countries is under the age of 25. Think about the consequences of that! These are all potential partners and competitors of all of us young people around the world, and they’ll all want the good things they see that life has to offer. It will not matter what nationality any of us have. Because our world is smaller, people move about, and most workplaces will be internationalized. Our world is likely to become borderless. We are more than likely to be employed by an internationally owned firm, and it is likely that in our homes someone will speak Japanese, Korean, Spanish, or Chinese.” “Our environment, too, will continue to be changed—and challenged. In

the 1950s, when my grandparents were born, only two cities in the world, London and New York, had more than 8 million inhabitants. In 2015, there were 42 such cities—more than half of them in Asia. Environmentally what happens within the border of one country is no longer solely that country’s business. Environmental responsibilities will be enforced internationally. By the time I am 50 years old, the world could be threatened by “green wars” or “water wars” unless my generation learns to do something to balance the unequal access to clean water, good soil, food distribution, and climate change.” Joanne continued. “The more that I think about it, all of our future students are like Sophie. A lot of our schooling, from the way people look at things, and even many of the textbooks used around the world, are Eurocentric in their thinking and orientation, and are really out of date. Schooling today must teach young people about living comfortably and successfully in a multicultural world. What skills and understandings will people living and working in the near future need? Do we know what an international curriculum looks like, and how it can be taught? Most schools today say that students need to be global citizens. But do they know what to teach?... And do they know how to teach? Are they confident that they can design and deliver a curriculum that will equip today’s young people to live in a complex, intercultural world?”* “Yes,” says another classmate, “how are we supposed to teach everyone?” “Perhaps,” says the professor, “we’d be better off asking it another way: How are we to think about our practice of teaching so that everyone learns and that they learn what they need to learn given the times in which we live? The scene has shifted in schools today from an emphasis on teaching to an emphasis on learning. This change in focus makes it all the more important that we understand differences among students—all kinds of differences, visible and invisible, because those differences may influence a student’s learning, and our job is to create classrooms in which everyone learns.” Sam sighs. She really does want to be a teacher, but it seems to be a lot more complicated than she thought it would be. As the world around her changes, perhaps she, too, will have to make some significant changes if she is going to be as effective an educator as she hopes to be.