Throughout the observations of five different academic settings, three secondary education classrooms, one college class and one museum, various themes emerged. All of these classes were different subjects and, with the exception of two 7th grade classes, different grade levels. The major commonality between classes was the fact that over half of each class was comprised of ethnic minority students, with the exception of the museum tour. Some of the themes that emerged encompassed the teacher’s classroom management skills and within that, the lack of culturally responsive classroom management and how teachers respond to students changing needs. Other themes included the teacher’s content knowledge and the use of feminist pedagogy. The academic …show more content…
Within this theme is the way teachers manage their classrooms and students, or lack there of. Also, how they interacted with students, especially those who needed more attention. The lack of classroom management was mostly prevalent in the middle and high school classes. In both the middle school and high school classes, teachers attempted to get students to settle down with the counting down from five method. This proved ineffective as the students continued to talk over the teacher every time they did this. This method most likely would’ve worked on much younger kids, but it proved ineffective with the older kids. In addition to that, in all of these instances the teachers were white while over half of the class was comprised of ethnic minorities. This reflected the demographics of both the public high school and the charter school. In both of these schools over 75% of the students are ethnic minorities. In these instances the teachers could’ve employed culturally responsive classroom management (Bondy, Ross & Gallingane, 2007). Culturally responsive classroom management applies aspects of culturally responsive pedagogy, specifically to classroom management strategies. Within CRCM, one of the most important parts is setting expectations for the classroom, and what happens when those expectations are broken. Because of how many times the teachers tried and failed to get their students attention, …show more content…
In the museum tour, the collection manager made sure that the group understood that everybody’s opinions mattered and that how we interoperated art was valid. Even though it was obvious that he was the teacher in the situation, he shared the power with the students by allowing them to develop and express their own views on what art is. Across all of the classrooms the teachers employed some of the aspects of feminist pedagogy, such as allowing them to choose how long they get to have silent reading time for or adjusting reading schedules depending on reading level to make the assignment fair for everyone. The use of democracy is critical for feminist pedagogy to work, since in order to empower everybody in the class, everybody needs to have a voice. However, neither the public or charter school demonstrated one of the most important aspects of feminist pedagogy, which is thinking critically about social or power structures. It makes sense that in the classroom setting it would be hard to critique structures because of the inherent structures of schooling. In public schools, the teachers have to work within the system and it can be hard for them to employ this aspect because of their district or even the parents of the students. Since charter schools get their funding from private sources, and thus have their curriculum dictated by their funders, it can be especially hard for them to employ this