Christopher Reyes WRJ #9

In the reading, Vivette Blackwell is a third grade teacher in Percy Julian

Elementary School who teaches a class of African-American majority. Over the two
years that this reading's classroom observations took place in, Vivette is examined on
how she manages to teach a classroom with high motivation, lack of discipline
problems, and high student achievement. Specifically, this examination focuses on how
Vivette places students' learning objectives in a variety of contexts which include the
children's background, the community, and the parents.
As this study takes place in Vivette's eighth year teaching in this community, she
is familiar with the community norms. This helps her design activities and assignments
that include the community and the students' parents, as well as use some of those
familiar cues within the classroom with the students. Vivette also engages the students
to read and write about this familiar music. Additionally, she engages her students to
read, discuss, and write about current events in the national, state, local, and classroom
communities in order to connect the students with their communities.
In the sciences, Vivette incorporates the same knowledge into her teaching in
order to best teach her students the subject matter. For instance, for a classroom of
African American majority, she links science to the African American experience, noting
Percy Julian, the scientist for whom the school is named after. Here, also, Vivette
makes attempts to dole out family assignments for the students to complete with their
families.
As the reading observed how Vivette connects the sciences to the children's
backgrounds and community norms, it is states that "Vivette explicitly links science to
Christopher Reyes WRJ #9
the African American experience" (Foster & Peele, 2001, pp. 32). One of the examples
given is studying the life of George Washington Carver, an African American botanist,
throughout the year. In a classroom where twenty out of the twenty-five students are
African American and the rest mostly minorities, I believe it is essential to contextualize
their learning objectives, especially ones such as dense and straightforward as the
sciences, with familiar background connections. Enabling the students as many
opportunities to make personal connections with the learning material is an excellent
way to keep them engaged, focused, and interested in subject matter and learning in
general.
From third grade to seventh grade, I attended Robert Waters Elementary School
in Union City, NJ. Just like the city's population, the school's student body was
composed of about 92% Hispanic students. As such, my classrooms were very familiar
with Vivette's classroom of large African American majority, just with students of
Hispanic backgrounds. Similar to some of the teaching methods used Vivette, a few of
my teachers would make connections to our various Hispanic backgrounds, sometimes
even gauging the students' ideas on how to incorporate the different types of Hispanic
dialects we came each came from. In one of my reading classes, we studied Hispanic
poets for a whole marking period as part of our prose and poetry curriculum. Because of
my Peruvian background, the one I remember most clearly is poet Pablo Neruda,
whose name I actually still making headlines today.

Christopher Reyes WRJ #9
References
Foster, M. L. & Peele, T. B. (2001). Ring my bell: Contextualizing home and school in
an African American community. In E. McIntyre, A. Rosebery & N.Gonzalez
(Eds.), Classroom diversity: Connecting curriculum to students' lives (pp.27-36).
Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.