Tuesday, April 22, 2014
My field project
It's really amazing considering many little and big things that have happened throughout this semester since I registered for the class called 'Sociocultural Influences on Learn.'
- The house where I've been living happened to be very closed to Joslin Elementary school.
It's a walk of 5 minutes.
- The ALD course that I've been taking is mainly about Mexican American education, and most of the kids at Joslin have Mexican ethnic background.
- I met the sister working in that school at the very beginning of the semester in a saint's house when we were having the college outing; there were dozens of other houses that I could've been assigned to.
- A few weeks ago, my host grandpa told a story about how people (related to Austin ISD) never could change the neighborhood about re-drawing the boundaries regarding racial integration. That added a new dimension in my understanding the community I was interested in for my project.
- I went to another home meeting for Friday and met two kids that go to Joslin there. They live right next to the house where the home meeting was and they always come over to the house to play with their American grandpa and grandma. The host family told me how they began to pick up a burden to take care of them becoming their grandparents.
- I went on a blending trip with the Monday night home meeting members to Mission and Edinburg which border Mexico.
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You went to Mission and Edinburg? Or you met with people who went there on a mission trip? I went on a Mission to Mission a few years ago, and it was a really awesome experience. It's a really fascinating place. If you went down south, did you go to the border itself to see the fence and the river?
ReplyDeleteYour experiences with Joslin Elementary School are really interesting! I haven't visited that school, but the experiences the grandfather alluded to are very familiar to me. Austin experimented with a lot of different models to try to integrate, but when you look at the demographics, the schools are persistently very segregated. The Title 1 money (federal assistance) that goes to schools with lower socio-economic status is helpful, but it doesn't make up for the overall feeling of separateness and inequality among the schools. Don't get me wrong, many of the low SES schools in Austin do amazing work! But there is a sense that staff at low-SES schools tend to be scrutinized, "walked through" (visited by central administration), and even closed down if test scores get low. And the test scores correlate closely with SES. Complicated stuff!
Rather than the generalizations I´m giving, I think it is so much more important to get a human, real understanding of the people in the schools, which it sounds like you had a great opportunity to do! Thank you for sharing!