Act

    For my equity audit I chose to look at my classroom library. A good amount of my books featured straight, white characters. I feel like I chose these books because some of these books were books that I loved as a child. I saw myself reflected in these books but did not consider that many of my students may not have grown up the way I did. After a professional development I attended a couple years ago, I have made an effort to include more diverse books in my library. I have a decent amount of black representation as well as people with disabilities and some LGBTQ+ representation. I am lacking in any books representing Middle Eastern characters, and have very few Latino characters. I know that I still have a very long way to go, and I need to make a very conscious effort not to simply add books because they are nostalgic for me, but to instead think about the diversity in my own classroom.

Our 4th grade texts are a diverse collection of characters and topics. There are privileged, oppressed, wealthy, poor, disadvantaged, and culturally diverse characters that the students learn about. Our third module focuses on the idea of fighting for what you believe in and why perspective influences beliefs and actions. The students get a good idea of why people act because of a belief. We also compare different cultures in module four. Students see that different cultures believe similar things and have similar values despite their diversity. The themes and essential questions of our curriculum bring about excellent conversations that can bring light to marginalized or targeted groups. 

My district uses Wit & Wisdom for out language arts program. I feel that it is culturally responsive because the modules talk about different racial groups and the inequality and racism that these people faced throughout history. My district is not very diverse and this gives my students a great opportunity to study and learn about the inequality that different groups of people have faced in our country. 

I am currently working as a TA so I do not have a classroom curriculum, materials or a classroom library to audit.  I have experienced ELA teachers using a variety of titles within their curriculum over the years.  On the elementary level, we have spent time reading and discussing titles such as Nya's Long Walk:  A Step at a Time which addresses life in South Sudan and the job that families have gathering water for their families from a remote hole, as well as Nasreen's Secret School which addresses the schooling of girls in Afghanistan.  We have several short stories in our English class in 10 th grade that reflect the lives of oppressed characters within the curriculum.  The bulk of my teaching career has been in the sciences where the curriculum does not lend itself to diverse issues as such.  

Over the years of teaching, I have collected many books in my classroom library.  While looking them over for this task, it was apparent that almost all of them were about white, middle class children.  I teach 5th grade and while on the verge of having more "mature or grown up" books, what is available are mostly pretty tame.    Most of the books in my class library have come from Scholastic and through book clubs with points to get free books.   This task makes me aware of that I need to seek out more culturally diverse books.    In recent years, I do believe our new Language Arts program definitely does a better job of this.  Our class novels are about a young Native American girl during the Westward expansion or a family during the Civil War that isn't sure of the color of a new member in their town.   This is a step in the right direction. 

I do not have a classroom or a curriculum that I follow as a TA, however, if you read my comments on the other parts of this badge, you will see that I have already identified that we are missing multicultural literature from most of our curriculums. At the high school in which I work, which is predominately white and affluent, we have few students in our district that would fall either at or below poverty level as the real estate in our district is very pricey. So, with that being said, there is also not a lot of diversity in student population. We have some minority students but very few. We have seen a rise in ELL students this past few years, but I'm not sure the trend will continue in this area because of the price of real estate but I could be very wrong about this. This district is not representative of big city populations for sure, so the experiences of the students coming through here are pretty limited.