Rationale
Prior to the organizational session for Literature and Information, the seminar read The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down by Anne Fadiman. This book largely focuses on the disconnection between the Hmong and American medical cultures. Initially, this book was very difficult for me to link to the teaching of kindergarten. However, I was struck by the sense of culture in the narrative, and began to focus on the idea of culture.
Culture is abstract and difficult to explain to a kindergartener. It is also easy to spot when a culture is different from your own. A student might notice that someone is wearing something that doesn’t match their own clothes. They may not recognize an item that someone is eating. These differences can be used to highlight the concept of culture. Why is culture important to kindergarteners? It is important because many different cultures dovetail in my class. Just as multiple cultures come together to form a community in a neighborhood, so to do they combine to make my class. My students are learning to function as a school community.
The concept of community flows through most everything that we do in kindergarten social studies. For example, Delaware Geography Standard K.G3a requires that students will be able to identify types of human settlement, connections between settlements, and the types of activities found in each. This geography standard is addressing community. When the standard refers to “activities found in each” it could be focusing on elements of culture. One way we differentiate between human settlements is to examine what makes them different from one another. When cultures do not align it is easy to see. This is a way to contrast communities.
Many of my students have never left Delaware. Some have never left their home town. They have a rudimentary concept of what their community is like, but no idea that other communities are much different from their own. They cannot envision different communities for they have never experienced that difference. Culture is an easy way to get children to see a different way of life and therefore see differences in their own and other communities as well.
This brings me back to the idea of culture and the book by Anne Fadiman. I had no knowledge of the Hmong culture and only an outsider’s view of the medical culture. Yet after reading and experiencing The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, I felt a familiarity with both the Hmong and medical cultural viewpoints. I thought to myself that it would be a wonderful way to explore community with my students, if we were to focus on cultures that were different from the one we experience every day in and around Wilbur Elementary.
I will focus on the study of Chinese and Mexican cultures. The reason I selected these particular cultures is that my students will likely have some familiarity with them, but will not know them well. Another reason that I chose to explore Chinese and Mexican culture is the availability of children’s books that would be beneficial for my unit. When I teach culture I introduce it to the children as a “recipe.” To explore a new “recipe” they will need to look at the different “ingredients.” I use this analogy because children will be familiar with the concept of a recipe. They have likely helped their parents prepare some sort of food and recognize that different ingredients go together to make the recipe. The “ingredients” that I choose to focus on are the clothing, music, food, language, and celebrations of the culture. These are relatively easy for the kindergarteners to understand as they experience these “ingredients” in their own culture regularly. I also selected these “ingredients” because they are easy for kindergartners to see and hear. Whether we are reading about the Spring Festival, the Day of the Dead, or Thanksgiving, the students will relate to eating special foods with the people they love. For example, on Thanksgiving we may eat pumpkin pie but on the Day of the Dead Mexican children may eat candy skulls. The bulk of our readings and our lessons will center on these special aspects of culture that are unique to Chinese and Mexican cultures.
I believe through the reading and sharing of quality literature and nonfiction texts written for children, the students will be able to “see” and “feel” other cultures. I have written how children can recognize differences in cultures. They will also find similarities between cultures through making connections. Children can easily connect to the Day of the Dead because it is like Thanksgiving in many respects. Both celebrations focus on family and friends. The connection will tie the concept of Thanksgiving to the concept of Day of the Dead and the children will use that link to remember details about the new concept.
Through this sharing of reading, I will guide the children to develop our own class definition of culture. This can be done by comparing and contrasting the “ingredients” of different cultures. Just as one can describe a recipe by focusing on ingredients, we can define a culture by sharing a similar focus.
The final pieces in the process will be to involve the class in telling stories about these foreign cultures. They will also incorporate details pertaining to the cultures from the stories we read together in a story of their own. This process will strengthen student skills in the areas of social studies, reading, and writing. As we do-si-do through this unit amazing learning is taking place. Yee Haw!
To prepare myself for the teaching of this unit I knew that I would need to strengthen my own understanding of Chinese and Mexican culture. To learn more about the cultures I decided to mirror the journey my students will soon be undertaking. I have chosen novels and informative texts about both cultures to read. Obviously they are books for adults, but I found my research to be instructive. I now have clearer background knowledge of the cultures. While I am certain that some student will bring up some detail I am unprepared for (they always do), I feel much more comfortable going into this unit. Because of mirroring the kids’ experience (both in seminar and on my own), I am confident that this twining of fiction and nonfiction can help my students gain knowledge of other cultures and deepen their understanding of their own.
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