In this episode, I am honored and humbled to be joined by 3 professors from the University Wisconsin Stevens Point to discuss and opportunity that is incredible important to me. Their passion and excitement is infectious. In previous episodes we have touched upon the increasing diversity and adding perspectives of those in our classroom and as the resident social studies teacher. That is my, my life goal. To be sure all people are heard. Amber, Stacy and Jackie provide incredible insight and resources to deliver just that. Check out their bios. Where To Start? The first step "would be to look at your social studies curriculum and see where you think you can bring in additional voices. And I would start small thinking about one unit, whether you're a third grade teacher teaching immigration and you've historically taken the perspective of the lens of European immigration and of 1800s into the 20th century or you're looking at that in a more sophisticated middle school or high school level. Start thinking about what voices are underrepresented. Then look for a text. There's amazing texts that tell the Ellis Island story and they tell multiple voices within that experience. Even now we have a much richer alternate experiences to immigration documented through text. We have access to those people through live interviews we have that we can record for our students. We have access to video. So when we talk about text sets and creating these dimensional resources, we are really looking at text broadly, including visual images, video, multimedia poetry, songs, you name it. The more genres that you can touch, perhaps the more voices you will be able to incorporate. You could even have students interview their parents or interview other community members, and bring that in to get more authentic voices represented in our classroom. Diversity - Know What You Have Get to know your students who are in your classroom. Know them inside and out. Know their backgrounds. Give them that opportunity to share their story, to bring in their experiences, and then look for how to enrich that by asking, what are my students missing? What lens haven't they been exposed to? What are the diverse voices we can bring to them? Picture Books and Where to Find Them I read the book The Journey about a Syrian refugees experience to my eighth graders. Even the nostalgia and the novelty of reading a picture book is effective. What are the resources? What are the approaches to infuse that, especially if you don't have those people to interview or those unique perspectives in the classroom to be the voice on others behalf? Illustrated texts draw the reader in and help them experience it in a different way. That ability to put yourself in someone else's shoes through someone else's narrative. Certainly a Google search is not a bad place to start when you're talking about a theme, a topic or a text. There's a lot of resources that teachers are sharing in this mode and we can see other people's evaluation of texts and whether it's representative, authentic voice. Dreamers by Yuyi Morales is a favorite of my students who have used this as a research text too. Please support TwoTeachersPodcast by purchasing these picture books now from Amazon.com. There is no additional cost to you. Thank you. Evaluation of Diverse Texts TeachingBooks.net has some questions that guide instructors in selecting texts that are authentic, texts that represent a community of voice while doing its best to avoid tokenism. Teachers might evaluate a text and talk about the pros and cons of using that text. For example, if you find something problematic, like does it turn a viewpoint of a marginalized person into a victim? There are some things like that to be careful about when we're selecting texts. This sometimes happens around the topic of the Holocaust and many other topics.
