A Year Long Inquiry - The Basis of My Teaching Framework

When beginning my inquiry process this fall, I asked myself what I do and do not already know about representation in classrooms. The question that I based my research and reflection on was 'What are some effective ways to ensure all students feel represented and respected in the classroom community?' taking into account that tokenism is a real possibility and is not a true representation. 

As a Chinese Canadian woman, I did not often find myself feeling represented in schools. This meant that did not feel represented by the content that we were studying or the staff who surrounded me as I was growing up. I had a strong community outside of schools, where my aunties and cousins were the strong Asian role models that I needed to have. This past year, one of my professors told my class that the majority of students enrolled in education are middle-class white women. I would say this is accurate according to my experiences growing up in south-end Winnipeg. It took a while for this feeling of being unrepresented to bother me. When the movie Crazy Rich Asians came out I went to see it in theaters with my friends. I cried seeing Asian Auntie culture being shown on the screen, hearing Mandarin being spoken, and when the titles of grandparents were something other than what we are conditioned to know in North America. I was 19 years old when this happened, and that was the same year that I was formally taught by East Asian women. I was able to see people who looked like me in the fields that I was pursuing, those being race and ethnicity studies in English and Sociology. 

I was discussing with my mom at some point in the year about a book I was reading called "Empress Dowager Cixi: The Concubine Who Launched Modern China," a biography about the last Empress Dowager of China, who made decisions that changed the trajectory of the nation. Another book I have by this author is titled "The Rape of Nanking," about the invasion of the old southern capital of China, Nanjing by Japan at the beginning of World War II. While I was discussing with my mom, my younger sister's non-Asian boyfriend asked us some questions and we answered them to the best of our knowledge. His response to us was "That's so cool! Why don't they teach us any of this in school instead of Greece and Rome?" My mother and I just looked at each other and laughed, knowing exactly why East Asian history would be taking a backseat to Western Civilizations. 

Going into my first teaching block, it was the desire to feel represented that drove how I designed my units for my classes, asking my students for familial backgrounds so that I could include characters and stories from different places in the world while still ensuring that the learning objectives were being met. Moving toward my second teaching block, I designed a unit around hauntings and scary stories to ensure I reached the students who were not always engaged with more traditional English Language Arts content. Thankfully, I found my methods worked. The teaching framework I had adopted to begin with was making sure students saw themselves in what I was teaching, whether it had to do with their identity or their interests. Although this worked well for me at the time and my students were engaged, meeting the learning outcomes, and excited to learn, I know that I need to continue to develop my framework to go further than just making sure my students can recognize themselves in the content that I am teaching.

Moving into my next block, I am going to be teaching the justice system to my grade 9 class. What I have found with this class is that they enjoy "play" as a form of learning, whether that be participatory activities for them to experience or getting up and moving around. I am planning for what they have shown me works for them, which is what I had learned in my first two teaching blocks. As a social studies and English teacher, it is becoming important to me that I include the following in my approach: student choice, effective assessments that work for my class, and social action. I have not yet been able to try portfolio or inquiry based learning, although those are both on my to do list as a teacher, I believe using these methods within my approach will help to strengthen the aspect of student choice in my teaching and help to make learning more sustainable and effective. 

Social action is important to me as a social studies teacher and a person. Preceeding the pandemic, I was involved with different social action groups that advocated for different things that I believed in. Now, I find that I have less free time to dedicate to these sorts of endeavours, although as a teacher I plan to include social action into my teaching practice. One of the reasons for this is because it is meaningful for my students and our communities for them to be involved with and be informed about social causes that they believe in or may not have previously known about. Community is very important, and should be included in teaching as education does not exist in a vacuum away from the social and political spheres that exist. To be knowledgeable about different topics that are impacting people socially and outside of schools not only increases empathy but gives more opportunities for students to explore ideas and develop new opinions and ideas on their own. I have heard a lot that education needs to be relevant to students, but have not been told what relevant means by anyone. In my own practice, I have found that relevance is something that has meaning to students and when education is more than just getting a grade. There is a lot of pressure on students to get good grades, may it be from their home environment, within the school environment, or pressures of getting into post-secondary education. It can be difficult to move away from this framework of what education is.

To create meaning and relevance, my planning process includes taking my students into account and giving them a host of opportunities to succeed in different ways and explore their own abilities. My planning process includes getting to know what my students like outside of school and finding ways to incorporate those interests into my planning. My planning process includes seeing them for who they are telling me they are and working with them to find out how they can learn more than what will get them a 90% on the assignments.