Prompt #3 Shor

When we as teachers are assessing or evaluating the student’s progress towards their goal we must keep in mind that not every student is the same. In order to properly evaluate them we must keep a few things in mind including the student’s sociocultural characteristics, linguistics, and ethnic background. For instance, if a student is an English Language Learner you cannot expect that student to perform as well as a student whose primary language is English. However, some teachers choose to ignore this fact and simply say that the child is not performing as well as others.

Ms. King is not one of those teachers that ignore the student’s background. When I first went to the classrooms library with Brandy to choose a book to read I quickly noticed the variety of books. There were many baskets full of books and they all had a letter on the front of them. These letters ranged from A-P and as the letter got higher so did the reading difficulty. After Brandy chose her L book we went to read it at a nearby table. Upon sitting at the table I couldn’t help but notice another basket behind Ms. King’s desk; this basket said “ELL” on it.

Later in the day, when the students were using the bathroom, I asked Ms. King what exactly the ELL books contained. She was telling me that there were a couple of students in the classroom that were still struggling quite a bit with English and there were several different ELL books she had. She went on to tell me about some of them, saying the math book just breaks down how to read and interpret the math textbooks and the vocabulary book is just some basic vocabulary words spelled out in both Spanish and English. I was both surprised and happy to see that Ms. King didn’t just let the English Language Learners fall behind in class but, she took the time to sit down with them individually and help them progress toward their goal.

A theorist that I thought of after leaving the school that day was Ira Shor. In Ira Shor’s article Empowering Education he says that a critical-democratic pedagogy is a student-centered program for multicultural democracy in school and society. He goes on to say that “the goals of this pedagogy are to relate personal growth to public life by developing strong skills, academic knowledge, habits of inquiry, and critical curiosity about society, power, inequality, and change.” I feel that a student that is an ELL is directly relating their personal growth to public life because as their knowledge of the English language grows so does their public life. I believe Shor would be quite impressed if he came into Ms. King’s classroom and watched the ELL students learning. Not only are they improving their academic knowledge but they are also posing many questions and doing all that they can to learn as much as possible.