Social Responsibility and Releveance

This chapter began with one of my favorite quotes by Gandhi, "You must be the change you want to see in the world." This is so trueand as a teacher you have the opportunity to be an agent for change and to pass on these crucial words of wisdom to live by. There are many reasons people go into teaching and this was mine. Everyday I strive to be the change I want to see in the world and hopefully be a good role model of this for the students I have every year. I hope they in turn apply this and can make a positive impact in the world. To do this though, you have to have the ability to think critically and question the status quo when appropriate, so you can be that change. In terms of education and educational reform, I always ask myself, "Whose interests are being served?" And when I think of the Common Core State Standards, I know it is the private sectors interest being served under the mirage of a few good reasons. Teachers as a whole have not risen and questioned who came up with these and what philosophies of education do they fall in line with. No, the majority of teachers have merely taken them and started blindly implementing them. This ties in very nicely to Chapter 11 of Kumar, "The insistence of English only in the classroom 'rests on unexamined assumptions, it originates in the political agenda of dominant groups, and serves to reinforce existing relations of power." (p.254) Our classroom mirrors society and we must prepare students to be critical thinkners and to realize the impact they can make. I will end my reflection with another excerpt I loved from Brown, "You are not merely alanguage teacher. YOu are much more than that. You're an agent for change in a world in desperate need of change." (p.520) My question is how can we as teachers be agents for change in educational reform or policies within the districts in which we work? For example, in a district wide meeting Friday, they discussed implementing standardized quarterly testing, which does not account for our CLD students and matching the differentiated instruction they recieve to the assessment. I voiced my opinion in a room full of monolingual first grade teachers. I was met with silence and confusion as to why I was opposed to this and didn't just go with the flow. What are the right avenues to take when we want to make a change in our schools?