Teaching Students Who Are Socially Disadvantaged

The Situation

Suppose you are assigned as a student teacher to a school in a low-income neighborhood. Most of the students are from minority groups, and their backgrounds often include one or more of the social disadvantages identified in Chapter 9. In your first class, you give your best lesson: challenging, upbeat, informative, imaginative. The students pay attention and several participate, responding to questions and asking their own. You feel you've done a good job. But as the students leave the room, one of them-a quiet, rather thoughtful young person-stops to say this to you: "I can see you're tryin'. But pretty soon you'll quit on us like others do. We're the wrong type or the wrong color, and some of us don't talk your language. Everybody knows we ain't going anywhere but out on the streets."

The comment upsets you. You want to respond that it's not true: these students can go somewhere. You feel challenged by the student's bleak outlook.

Thought Questions

The following questions should be useful to keep in mind as you read not just this chapter but subsequent chapters in this book.

1. To what extent is it true that middle-class student teachers do not "speak the same language" as students from low-income families? Should teachers try to do this? How might doing so affect the teacher's relationships with his or her students?
2. If you were to face a situation like this, what would you say or do to reassure the student?
3. What would your reaction be if most of the students in the class indicated they were not interested in the lesson you had worked so hard to prepare? Who might you turn to for help?
4. How might the teacher in this latter situation (question 3) try to modify his or her lesson to stimulate more interest among students?
5. What are some of the things you might do to ensure that all the students in your classroom have an equal opportunity to achieve?