The idea of cultural capital as it applies to the classroom imposes limits on what any one student can achieve. Cultural capital is defined as the social assets a person has in order to promote mobility socially. For students, they need to have a high intellect, good speech, and proper attire. This idea of proper attire and good speech is arbitrary as these standards tend to favor white students, as it does not value the culture that minority students bring to the classroom. The cultural capital view of education also leads to ascribed statuses, attributes assigned to people based on their race, socio-economical background or gender. In this model of education, you only can become successful if you assimilate into what the dominant culture
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Walking around campus, people often approach me saying, “Are you on the basketball team?” Although sports have always been a big part of my life in order to be a well-rounded individual, my involvement left me with the assigned status that I was no more than a “dumb jock”. My peers did not know that I was a 4.0 student throughout high school, who took 9 Advanced Placement classes and was part of the mock trial team. This left me with a sense of emptiness that people only knew me for this superficial aspect but not my intellectual attributes. Experiences like this only caused me to strive to do even better academically, as I finished in the top 15 in my class in high …show more content…
I will not hold my students to an educational ceiling by virtue of their ethnicity or background. If anything I want my students to take the negative things they experience, to empower them to be better than those who doubt them. I want to give all my students the resources to be successful and leave it to them to take advantage of the resources to attain their dreams. As I hope to teach in a diverse classroom, Banks referenced that one goal of multicultural education is “An empowering school culture” that allows education to embrace the different culture brought to the classroom. I hope to embrace that goal and make my students not feel disenfranchised and that they will try to surpass the barrier that society has put on them since they do not come from the “ideal culture”. I want my students to not lose a sense of what makes them unique and the point of view they can bring to the
Walking around campus, people often approach me saying, “Are you on the basketball team?” Although sports have always been a big part of my life in order to be a well-rounded individual, my involvement left me with the assigned status that I was no more than a “dumb jock”. My peers did not know that I was a 4.0 student throughout high school, who took 9 Advanced Placement classes and was part of the mock trial team. This left me with a sense of emptiness that people only knew me for this superficial aspect but not my intellectual attributes. Experiences like this only caused me to strive to do even better academically, as I finished in the top 15 in my class in high …show more content…
I will not hold my students to an educational ceiling by virtue of their ethnicity or background. If anything I want my students to take the negative things they experience, to empower them to be better than those who doubt them. I want to give all my students the resources to be successful and leave it to them to take advantage of the resources to attain their dreams. As I hope to teach in a diverse classroom, Banks referenced that one goal of multicultural education is “An empowering school culture” that allows education to embrace the different culture brought to the classroom. I hope to embrace that goal and make my students not feel disenfranchised and that they will try to surpass the barrier that society has put on them since they do not come from the “ideal culture”. I want my students to not lose a sense of what makes them unique and the point of view they can bring to the