This week I have been thinking about two concepts I am using in my thesis and how I want to define them. The first is "development" and the second is, "cultural awareness". I am focusing my research on teacher development but I think when this is talked about the term commonly draws to mind the sort of staff development meetings that the Beloit school district creates half days for once a month. But according to my research this sort of prescribed development at a district wide level, which has been created and handed down to teachers from Kolak is the least successful approach when it comes to development. I am trying to ensure that my research embodies considerations at both the macro- and micro- levels of teacher development. Not trying to down-play the importance of these meetings, however, I want to make sure to appreciate that development includes, interactions with colleagues, reading education magazines, and meetings among fellow teachers at a school. Development can also be done at a school wide level through actions taken by the principal. The sort of development I want to focus on is also genuine, self-motivated development that teachers are open to and will experiment with in their own classrooms.
One important thing I have come across in my reading is the necessity for teachers to engage with each other continually after they have been introduced to new methods. Looking at some of the schools I have been in, isolation between teachers where they are not consistently involved in positive discussion of methods to evaluate and improve daily classroom practices is a problem.The greatest amount of teacher frustration seems to come from feeling alone in the classroom with ineffective methods to teach your students. So when I discuss issues of development in my paper I am trying to be clear on the depth and diversity of methods this topic entails.
The second focus of my research that I am just beginning to focus research on is, "cultural awareness." I am not sure if this is really the term I want to use for this, but what I am trying to convey is the fact that recently I think there has been a new focus on the, "culture of poverty," and how this inhibits a student cognitively and socially in a school. I think that there is a lack of training and development for teachers that focuses on this, and it may be one of the reasons for high attrition rates in high poverty urban schools. I am currently having trouble finding as many articles as I would like to on this topic though, it seems that a lot of the work done on it is within the past few years and it is not available on JSTOR so I have to use inter-library loan for it.
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Are you focusing specifically on students with low SES or on teacher development and the importance of all types of "cultural awareness"? I think either way as long as you, in your thesis, give cultural awareness and operational definition you are fine. I don't know if you have been looking only under education for these articles, but if you generalized the subject area, you might yield better results. The other thing to do is find one really good and recent book or article and look at their references. You might have done all of this; I am just trying to be helpful. I think it is great that you recognize that teachers are often not prepared to educate children that are "different" in some way (whether this difference stems from ethnicity, income, or ability). I guess the difficulty here is that teachers have to be prepared for so many different scenarios that it seems like an impossible task (I don't think it is though, just very difficult).
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