Voice Blog Post
Hello friends!
This week’s post will be similar to last week’s, because I am writing for a class.
And I need grades, good ones would be preferable. Because I pay a lot of money for classes.
Excuse the aside.
So I’ll be analyzing the voice/narrative/personality that I see from a blog I have been reading.
And by reading, I mean I had to scramble over the internet to find someone who posts more than 1 blog about this topic. (I cannot say how many dead ends I met or PTA websites I found)
My blogger identifies herself as Maggie, and has absolutely no additional information on her profile page, except for a blurry photo, which I assume is for privacy reasons.
In her blogs she talks about multicultural education and how she is processing it/wanting to use it in her class, not necessarily to reach a broad audience and educate them on the subject (she briefly mentions in her last blog about her own classroom, making me safely assume she is a teacher). It seems like she’s organizing her thoughts on the topic, while bringing in excerpts from books, articles and news reports she hears on NPR. They are very short, easy to read and feel like a ‘snapshot of the mind of a teacher’.
She does this in the majority of her blogs, and brings outside anecdotes and information as examples of what she’s thinking or processing. Like in “How Can Teachers Change Their Expectations” she writes about a study done in San Francisco by psychologist Robert Rosenthal, who randomly picked students from the class, telling the teacher that according to a “special test from Harvard” (just a regular IQ) test that these students were going to have a dramatic growth in their IQ, and at the end of the year they did have a growth in their performance in class because of these expectations the teacher had.
She uses this as an example to show how the expectations thing is self-fulfilling prophecy because of the extra attention given to the students that the teacher considers ‘special’, which does give them a boost in their performance. She then shows the flip side of how detrimental it can be when teachers consider kids to be ‘bad’ right off the bat. Her course of logic that you see in her blog, and her slight ‘matter of fact’ tone make it really obvious that she is an educator. Also, since she admits upfront that she too is guilty of this, it is easy for the reader to assess that she is a teacher.
(link here: http://mdowe.blogspot.com/2013/10/how-can-teachers-change-their.html )
In a different blog post called ‘Teaching Critical Thinking’, she does something very different by summarizing a chapter from a book “Affirming Diversity: The Sociopolitical Context of Multicultural Education”.In addition she talks about a critical thinking/empathy exercise a different teacher does in his 4th grade class. It doesn’t end with a ‘lesson’ or much, but more so an organization of her thoughts on the topic and she gives her opinion on how teachers should approach teaching critical thinking. It mostly feels like she’s learning and journaling about the topic, rather than giving a power point presentation on what she knows and why she wants other teachers to do these exercises too.
(link here: http://mdowe.blogspot.com/2013/09/teaching-critical-thinking.html )
Overall, its an easy read, a nice introduction to what multicultural education is and what it tackles, and how she is processing/reacting to what she is learning on it.
She only has 7 posts, which is a bummer, because I would really like to know how she feels about it now, 4 years later in comparison to when she first was learning on the topic.
Anyways, that’s all folks!
