Write a paper describing and reflecting upon your cultural heritage. The project asks you to reflect upon your cultural, ethnic, racial, gender, religious/spiritual, and socioeconomic experiences. Critically examine the impact of these factors on your values/worldview, teaching/counseling style, and how you might work with families at your school. Identify areas that your personal biases may impact your professional practice when working with families who have different cultural, religious/spiritual, socioeconomic, or racial backgrounds. Include specific life experiences that you consider relevant. Reflect on your experiences in light of class material.
California Teaching Performance Expectations.
This assignment is intended to partially address the following TPEs:
1.1 Apply knowledge of students, including their prior experiences, interests, and social emotional learning needs, as well as their funds of knowledge and cultural, language, and socioeconomic backgrounds, to engage them in learning.
6.2 Recognize their own values and implicit and explicit biases, the ways in which these values and implicit and explicit biases may positively or negatively affect teaching and learning, and work to mitigate any negative impact on the teaching and learning of students. They exhibit positive dispositions of caring, support, acceptance, and fairness toward all students and families, as well as toward their colleagues.
NASP Standard 2.7 Family-School Collaboration Services
This assignment is intended to address the following skill:
Identify diverse cultural issues, situations, contexts and other factors that have an impact on family-school interactions, and address these factors when developing and providing services for families.
Learning Objectives
Students will write 3-4 paragraphs about their life experiences in view of at least 3 of the following: personal, cultural, religious/spiritual, socio-economic, or racial background.
Students will write 3 paragraphs that critically examine the impact of life experiences on a) their values/worldview, b) professional practice (e.g., counseling, teaching, etc), and c) work with families in the K-12 system (or equivalent if in another field).
Students will take the Harvard Implicit Association Test (IAT) on Race. Students will write 1-2 paragraphs reflecting on their score and their experiences taking the assessment.
Students will identify 3 areas where personal biases may impact professional practice when working with others from diverse backgrounds.
Students will identify 3 reasonable actions steps that they will take to address personal biases.
