Thought on Sonia Nieto's Article

After reading Nieto's article, "Solidairty, courage, and heart: what teacher educators can learn from a new generation of teachers," I started to have some thoughts of what my goal is for this ED350 course. Growing up in middle to upper class schools my whole life that had very little diversity, almost none in fact made me realize that I want to learn more about multicultural education and how to be an effective teacher in a diverse school or classroom. I found this article to be very interesting and the teacher's experiences and personal stories made it all the better - it really made me think about what types of experiences we may face once we hit the teaching job market.

The four questions that the author gives on pg458 are ones which all educators should take the time to consider - teachers should have some knowledge of how to run a classroom with diverse students. An educator should also know how to handle things in an appropriate manner when a situation arises to his or her attention or when discussion of diversity or multiculutral education comes up. I did agree with Nieto's comment on the "achievement gap" and "resource gap" - these two are very much alike in the sense that these can belittle and actually harm the chances of diverse students getting a decent education.

There were also some pretty shocking facts that I found interesting in this article - that here in the U.S. "20% of new teachers leave during the first three years of teaching" (pg459) and that there are an increasing number of dropouts and lack of school participation when diverse students are having to take high stakes testing (pg460).