Small Bites Friday Five 9-17-21:
Musicians – Check out this blog post from All Classical Portland to learn about well known classical composers of Hispanic heritage.
Mathematicians – Want to highlight Hispanic mathematical perspectives? Lathisms has a great collection of resources and podcasts– great for this month and next month. And the next…
Historians – There is an African proverb that says, “until the lion has his own scribe, he will always be the villain in the story”. The American Historical Association’s Perspectives on History online magazine offers an alternative to the perspectives we often see with articles about Hispanic and Latinx people by Hispanic and Latinx people.
Scientists – Postdoc fellow Christina Termini gets the win for her Cell Mentor article featuring 100 diverse Hispanic scientists. The article gets bonus points because they are all living! Alive means they can lead seminars or maybe that your students can follow them on social media. And maybe a couple of them would even have time to speak to your class.
Writers – The Palabras archive at the Library of Congress has a stellar collection of interview recordings and podcasts, as well as useful links like the Hispanic Reading Room. The Hispanic Reading Room provides resources from individual Afro Latinx countries. Diversity is better when it values and validates specificity.
Before the Pandemic, I was working intensively on my Spanish. Serving my student population well meant communicating directly with my families and that meant being able to talk to them. I already speak 2 languages and butcher a couple more, but this would be my first time learning a language outside of an immersion situation.
Learning Spanish made me see my students differently. It changed how they viewed me as well. When I responded to side conversations about “mi novio” or stopped to sing the chorus of a song they played at lunch, I was building a bridge, one that connected their home culture to the school culture. In me, they saw a teacher who cared enough to try–and fail.
Building that bridge allowed me to critically re-examine inclusion in my classroom. A 7 hour school day’s to do list holds a limited amount of time for good differentiation, even for the best teachers. Seeing ‘boys and girls’ or ‘Black and Brown’ kids helps teachers to file kids into groups in order to make academic and social sense of concepts like ‘differentiation’, ‘inclusion’, ‘diversity’ and ‘culturally responsive’. Teaching in a school with ‘Black and Brown’ kids is one thing. Teaching Black kids, Pakistani kids, Kenyan kids, Peruvian Kids, Mexican kids, etc., is different. That kind of “seeing” kids, means the difference between celebrating diversity and creating an inclusive learning environment.
Including monthly highlights is good. Integrating cultural differences and diverse stories all year is better. Remember the ‘all about me’ you did last month? How can you use that information to highlight diverse stories that are relevant to the kids you teach? How can you promote diverse heroes, scientists, mathematicians, writers, musicians, etc.? Hopefully the resources above will help.
I am glad that we highlight diverse contributions during #HispanicHeritageMonth and I will always be here for the resources. I will be, however, happy when the diverse greats are a part of our daily lessons so that the need to celebrate months slowly melts into the pot.