Equitable Education
As our time in Peru comes to an end, I begin to reflect on the various schooling systems we have experienced and the different schools we visited in both Lima and Cusco. We have had the opportunity to interact with multiple grade levels, subject areas, and teachers, all of which I learned so much about and how the role of education plays in the lives of students from various backgrounds. In our past seminars we have been discussing how schooling is a political, cultural, and social process in which educators should incorporate these on top of an intellectual process as well. We have been able to observe this while in Peru and talked about how we can make these more equitable in our classrooms.
We spent the last couple of days at a public school in Cusco where it had primary and secondary grades and we spent two days in each type of classrooms. The first day we arrived, students were out in the open area playing soccer, volleyball, and mingling with their friends while wearing colorful ponchos and hats. We first sat in on the primary grade with 5 year olds who were eager to learn and enthusiastic to answer questions from the teacher. They had a collaborative activity where each group was assigned a word and each student had to take letters from their workbooks to form their specific word and then paste it on a poster. When we observed the older grades, they had a question and discussion type of class among their peers and with the teacher. Taking into account all the processes that schooling seems to look after, I reflected upon how we have seen all this during our time in Peru. In the upper levels, I have seen various subject area classes where teachers guide students through the learning process by promoting critical thinking problems, encouraging collaborative work spaces, having bilingual programs or celebrating culture days, and relating the context of what they are learning with the world around them.
Looking back at all the past schools we visited and observed, I began to understand the deeper meaning behind what an equitable education really means and how to incorporate it into the processes of schooling. From our readings and our seminar discussion, we talked about how it could possibly start with celebrating diversity and including a multicultural curriculum that looks past the surface level of cultural relevance and in a more meaningful way. The difficulty though starts with a teacher’s understanding of the effects of inequality and injustice of different cultures and the biases that surround them. By understanding these effects, educators can create environments within their classroom where students appreciate diversity and recognize the importance of equality and share this knowledge with their students through subject areas. By incorporating “equity literacy” as one of our readings called it, into the learning process, students widen their horizons on various topics around the world and how they can connect their learning with the understanding that they can address this inequity as well. It is a beginning to integrating into our mentality the understanding of how cultural differences can be a strength rather than a weakness, and is a beginning and end to a truly meaningful culturally relevant curriculum that includes principles of equity. I have learned that making various processes more equitable means getting a closer look into each individual students’ talents and takes into account the knowledge that they bring into the classroom. It has also taught me the importance of trying to understand the experiences the student has outside the classroom and how their strengths can be brought into the classroom, because every student is intelligent in their own way and incorporates education into their own lives in various ways.
Getting a closer look into the different schooling systems in Peru, interacting with students from a wide variety of backgrounds, and talking with some of the teachers into the type of pedagogy they preach, has broadened my horizons in how I can use what I have learned here and bring back to the US. Because there was such an array of experiences and reflections that were so different, I was able to reflect upon the idea of privilege as well and the meaning of education that differs from student to student depending on the school and the area they lived in. Most of the schools we visited stressed the importance of equity alongside social justice which was great, but I still found it surprising that only the school in Fe y Alegria in Cusco included it specifically in their mission statement. Overall, my experience in Peru has been incredible and I have learned so much about the diverse aspects that go into being an educator and how we can help our students thrive in school settings and as participating citizens that are culturally and socially aware of the world around them.
