Truth be told, if these books and journals were around when I was in middle and early high school, maybe I would have enjoyed learning. Cate Denial’s A Pedagogy of Kindness was a book that I was deeply interested in since the first day of this course. I have always been an advocate of teaching with a sense of kindness or empathy as I come from a very different up bringing as a first generation Bangladeshi who went to school in such a fast paced environment as Queens, New York. Cate said that “My job, as I see it now, is to make my classroom accessible to everyone. I’ve begun the long work of redesigning my lessons and assignments so that everyone is a full participant, and no one needs ask for extra time or a note-taker, because those needs have already been addressed”. As a prior educator myself, I had made it my goal to set the rules and expectations in my classroom based off of the insights of my students. As students, how would they want to be graded? What can I do as a teacher make this experience comforting for them? I am fully aware that equators have their own ideas on what works for them in classroom settings however, as someone who hated being in a classroom as a student and then noticed my own students feeling the same, I wanted change. I feel that perhaps many educators who have gone through a rougher academic upbringing may have a little more empathy with their teaching pedagogies.
Now, Asao B. Inoue made such strong points that I hope to carry on in my academic career. How can we teach English without creating a sense of division in the classroom. Our current state of academics has a standard that ignores backgrounds and experiences of their students. These experiences are major contributions to education, yet they are not considered. Inoue emphasizes that “Our students learn how to judge their world by the practices of judgment they experience as they move through their world”. This is the key element for students to become strong readers and writers. Through the use of their experiences and exploration of the world they are able to provide crucial literacy.
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