WATT: What are They Thinking?
Conversations with Students
Reflection
ASSIGNMENT GOALS: The purpose of this assignment is to help you ground your curriculum planning in the prior knowledge and lives of your students, to encourage dialogues between you and your students about their thinking, to challenge our assumptions about what kids know and think about, and to lessen any fears about addressing controversial issues with children in age-appropriate ways.
My Term: Native Americans
Alternative terms were/could have been:
My Assessment: After I wrote my reflection about whitewashing history and reflected on the terms Native Americans and American Indians, I definitely would use the term American Indian first since that is the term that the students in VA may be more familiar with. The SOLs have the term American Indian listed, but I had changed it to Native Americans after my assessment and differentiation class professor had suggested to. I looked into what the politically correct term was, and other than the American Indian people preferring to be named based on their tribe, the two names seemed to be interchangeable.
The student responses based on the definition the word native, “a person born in a specified place or associated with a place by birth, whether subsequently resident there or not,” makes more sense if that was the definition they were using; yet, I cannot verify now that students were using this definition.
Students seemed to have a very basic grasp of American Indians, such as saying “people who made history,” “They were in America first,” and “People from the past.” Some of my questioning seemed to be too leading; I asked questions that in hindsight were actually "fishing" for the term colonists because I thought that students may have associated them with Native Americans. A few of the students seemed too have little to no grasp of the culture, saying “make buildings like Abraham Lincoln.”
I was pleased to hear that they could name several important figures in American history, such as Christopher Columbus, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Thomas Jefferson. They did however not have the facts around these figures a little mixed up. Also, the jumping from the American Revolution to the Civil War and confusing which figures were associated with which time period indicates that they may need more support with sequencing time and events.
My favorite part that I heard one student say to another, “You talk too much; I’m trying to learn.”
My Term: Native Americans
Alternative terms were/could have been:
- American Indians Colonists
- Europeans
- Resources (Natural, Human, and Capital)
My Assessment: After I wrote my reflection about whitewashing history and reflected on the terms Native Americans and American Indians, I definitely would use the term American Indian first since that is the term that the students in VA may be more familiar with. The SOLs have the term American Indian listed, but I had changed it to Native Americans after my assessment and differentiation class professor had suggested to. I looked into what the politically correct term was, and other than the American Indian people preferring to be named based on their tribe, the two names seemed to be interchangeable.
The student responses based on the definition the word native, “a person born in a specified place or associated with a place by birth, whether subsequently resident there or not,” makes more sense if that was the definition they were using; yet, I cannot verify now that students were using this definition.
Students seemed to have a very basic grasp of American Indians, such as saying “people who made history,” “They were in America first,” and “People from the past.” Some of my questioning seemed to be too leading; I asked questions that in hindsight were actually "fishing" for the term colonists because I thought that students may have associated them with Native Americans. A few of the students seemed too have little to no grasp of the culture, saying “make buildings like Abraham Lincoln.”
I was pleased to hear that they could name several important figures in American history, such as Christopher Columbus, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Thomas Jefferson. They did however not have the facts around these figures a little mixed up. Also, the jumping from the American Revolution to the Civil War and confusing which figures were associated with which time period indicates that they may need more support with sequencing time and events.
My favorite part that I heard one student say to another, “You talk too much; I’m trying to learn.”