Fairness and Accommodation

As we wrap up discussions of Ways With Words, I will add one thing that struck me as particularly relevant to taking a critical stance in the classroom. Mrs. Gardner on p. 287 says, "Also I am not sure that this taste of success was altogether fair for these children... They proved they could succeed; that should take them a long way, but will it if their future classes are radically different from that first year's experience?"

I'm sure I'm not alone when I say that I wrestle with that same kind of questioning when I want to employ a critical, accommodating stance in the classroom. I want to accept my students where they are and "come to them" rather than making them always "come to me", but I admit that sometimes it is difficult in the course of one semester - with limited amounts of time in each class meeting - to impart my attitude about the value that they bring to my classroom compared to the skills they (supposedly) need to exhibit to be successful in their subsequent college-level classes. I wish I could spend half the time teaching them the real stuff (whatever that is), and then the other half of the time teaching them the system so they can then go to battle with it and beat it. I fear that this approach will leave me far, far behind on my department-mandated Student Learning Objectives!

I guess the trick is finding a good compromise, rather than just accepting the system as a "fait accompli" - there is real danger in accepting an approach that might be summed up as "it is what it is, there's nothing I can do about it, so I guess I better just teach to it so that students can manage it in the future". One thing I am hoping to incorporate in my next round of teaching is an ethnographic approach with respect to the term paper that students are expected to produce by the end of the semester. By adding ethnographic approaches as a current, valid way to collect data for a term paper, perhaps I can steer - or at least slightly veer - in a direction that places even more value on the experiences of the students.