Prior to this class,I had some very naive view on multicultural education. I simply thought it was acknowledging diversity in your classroom. I also thought many of the topics would not apply to my career path choice. I was schooled in a district that was 99% white and I have wanted to return to that school and teach there. I didn't think I needed to learn about multicultural education. I was completely wrong. Multicultural education is so much more. I learned that multicultural isn't just teaching about different cultures, although that is an aspect of it. I learned just how important it is for me as the teacher to understand my students cultures so that I can effectively teach them. I learned about the importance of recognizing that all my students will identify differently with different aspects of their culture and it is incredibly important for me to tailor my teaching to that when at all possible. I also thought that multicultural education couldn't really be incorporated into that math classroom because math and numbers are a universal language, but I learned how to incorporate different cultures into the math curriculum and I even learned different ways to instruct ELLs so they can actually understand what I am teaching. I also began to understand some of the legal aspects of multicultural education. Sadly as a teacher II must deal with the politics involved in education and it is incredibly important for me to understand the laws that dictate my teaching.
In terms of improvement, I feel this class is on the right track. Our class seemed to be dominated by discussion. I love discussion classes, but I felt like many of our discussions got very off topic from the assigned readings and a lot of the comments seemed redundant and not really pertinent. I feel this could be improved by more structured discussions. I guess I would like the professor to keep us more on topic so I could learn more from the readings. I enjoyed the key assessments and I learned a lot from them, but I would have liked a little more feedback on the things I wrote. I also liked the idea of the Twitter page being used, but I felt like it wasn't a part of the class because it was never really brought up and I would have liked more inclusion of that page.
