Essay on Teaching Children

Children are committed to fairness. They give importance to fairness in daily life. In schools, I have met a number of young children who had issues of frustration and stress because they were continuously interacting with unfair situations. In this chapter, authors have raised the same issues that we face in our teaching experiences while handling students of early education classes. In classrooms, students expect to have fair and just treatment by the teachers and other classmates. Therefore, whenever they feel something unfair they directly comment on that situation.According to the author’s opinion, children call out to their teachers and mentors to when they observe an unfair situation. Their minds raise questions regarding those issues and create a disturbance. Thus to make themselves satisfy they ask questions about the unfair situation. The author presented an example regarding this “Why do we have to clean up?” and “How can we change it?”

During my early childhood teaching experienced I learned that students start learning about culture and multi-culture by dialogues and negotiation having an emphasis on questions starting with "how" "why" and "what".According to the information presented in the chapter, culture circles are the way of teaching multi-culturally. Teachers start teaching with cultural circles and make students familiar with the cultural circle. Meanwhile, students ask questions from them regarding anything that seems conflicting and unfair to them. Later on, teachers draw the attention of students about multicultural books and content. In my opinion, cultural content learningis easy for children when they are familiar with the culture. Therefore, during teaching, I ever prefer to start with familiar concepts and gradually leads to complex and unfamiliar concepts.

There are several ways through which culture circles can be used with multicultural literature. While writing on the culture circles the author clearly stated that implementation of culture circlesdoes not have any predetermined formula although it gets influence from different aspects and phase. Five major phases concerning with the implementation of culture circles are generative themes, problem posing, dialogue, problem-solving, and action.Following my experience, sometimes students follow up all these phases and sometimes they just skip one or more. Although, in most of the case I found that children followed up all these phases unintentionally. Young students were not capable to solve their problems in the first phase as they only had an only limited idea about the situation and what was happing around them. However, when in the next phase when a particular situation was decoded through their questions then they were capable to understand more about that situation. The third phase of questioning supported them to develop a plan to solve the problem in the 4^th phase and take action. Additionally, in my opinion, teachers can encourage or discourage a student in these culture circles by using appropriate tools or developing inappropriate plans for the use of multicultural books. To assist student learning teacher needs to pay attention to the content and quality of the suggested multicultural book. As the author wrote: “As a teacher, it is important to consider who wrote the book.” (Souto-Manning, 2015, p. 60)

According to the literature and chapter analysis, the key point behind exploring possibilities for culture circles is that multicultural books and teaching methodology should encourage problem-solving skills in young students. Culture circles are grounded in some phases which includes problem-solving phase, dialogue phase, and problem-posing phase.

        Following my learning, during teaching, it can be stated that the teacher has the critical and leading role in student’s learning about culture circles. Teachers are the person who takes the responsibility of learning for students and try to provide them with the opportunity to learn what is taught to them. However, the role of the teacher regarding culture circles is not quite simple. Teachers also face a critical and challenging situation in this process. Pre-school teachers teach simple points about culture but make the foundations of the students that benefit them in future while learning multi-cultural books in the formal classrooms.Somehow, for this purpose, teachers need to have a better understanding of the concepts and books they teach to their students. Unclear concepts and poor understanding of teachers about culture circles mislead students. Teachers must have enough capacity to understand what kind of questions are coming in the mind of the student and how to satisfy his questions? As the author stated that "One of the challenges of engaging in cultural circles is that teacher does not know exactly where the dialogue is headed”. (Souto-Manning, 2015, p. 63)

In this book, the author also raised an important point about student’s families.According to the author's views, parents and family members draw important on student’s performance about culture circles. The student directly takes positive influence from family members when they are supportive of their multicultural learning. Therefore, the author suggested that parents and family members should be informed about classroom happenings through the use of emails and telephones. I also applied it in my classroom. I sent emails to the parents and guardians of the children about classroom activities and participation of their child in different activities related to culture circles. I found that parents and families were glad to learn about these activities and classroom happenings. Moreover, I also noticed that the student's performance and interest in cultural circles were enhanced because of my step. Concluding this discussion, I would suggest that teachers should focus on problem-solving skills development, understanding of appropriate tools for multi-cultural books, and proper communication system with families of their students.

Reference of Teaching Children

Souto-Manning, M. (2015). Multicultural Teaching in the Early Childhood Classroom: Approaches, Strategies and Tools, Preschool-2nd Grade. Teachers College Press.