While reading Dear Paulo for Sara's class something in one of the letters was brought up that made me scratch my head and made me stop what I was doing and come post hoping to get some insight from some of you.
It brings a dilemma of teachers being political as well as educators and of a teacher wanting to break down the barriers of race, gender, sexuality, etc... in schools in regards to discrimination. They felt it was their duty as a teacher to inform and educate the children that these discriminations are wrong and people should not be looked down upon for these reasons. Not the dilemma came into light because they are teaching in a high Catholic population area and many of these kids are learning through their family and religion that homosexualy is a sin and wrong in every sense of the word. So, how do we as teachers respect the family religion and culture instilled by the Catholic church as well as bring to light equality among everyone?
Some cultures and religions have very specific views against people and other cultures that are discriminitory but have always been a part of their culture and background. It feels like a contradiction in terms that we in a way would be saying, your culture and religion are wrong. Think this way. Obviously in better words, but still... Any thoughts?
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Hi Dylan,
ReplyDeleteI have a similar question that came up after reading in the Gallas book for Science class. In one discussion on Metaphysics, a student said that the universe was created by God (page 46). The teacher told the student that the discussion would be more productive if the student left religion out. Also, the teacher could not talk about religion in the class. The student agreed, and became part of the engaging science talk.
I was really curious about this. What do you do when you have religios beliefs become part of the discussion? At such a young age, this student was expressing his belief in creationism. I'm concerned that the student was silenced in this situation from expressing his personal belief.
I think that religion and values of acceptance in the classroom is going to be a hard issue that we will revisit.