Last year I worked in a
primary school with children between the ages of 6 and 12 years old. I was an Auxiliar de Conversación in the art
classes. One of my goals while working with children was to incorporate some form
of multicultural awareness because I think it is important for children to know
that the world is a diverse place and that diversity is a beautiful thing to
learn from. I wanted the children to see
the world through different lenses and from different perspectives. I did this
through a few classes in which we learned about the Harlem Renaissance, Dream
Catchers, and Native American Shields.
Each of these projects was meant to show the children something new and
interesting about the culture and allowed them to express themselves through
art.
This post will be about ways
to take these complicated ideas and simplify them for a younger audience. The aforementioned projects involve the
Black American population and the Native American population in the US. Both of these populations come with difficult
histories and it is difficult to try to simplify the ideas and the culture so
that a child can understand it. Hopefully at the end of this post, you will
gain my perspective on the matter of how to try to do exactly this.
Step 1- Time and
Communication
I
would not recommend delving directly into a project involving multicultural
awareness if you want the children to learn something. It’s easy to just hand
the children something to color and not mention anything about what they’re
coloring. The problem with this, is although whatever they are coloring may be
something from another culture, the kids aren’t learning anything. They’re just
coloring; something they do often in art classes.
If you want the children to learn something and have a
take away message then you need to start preparing the class at least a month
out. You should let the teachers at your school know as soon as possible that
this is your plan so that they can help you with the idea and give their
input. You definitely want their input,
because these teachers have taken classes in education and they know different
strategies for exposing the children to the content. The teachers might also
tell you that it may be better to tie in your lesson into another part of the
year when the children are discussing something in their English classes they
may be pertinent to your project. For example, the Harlem Renaissance involves
a lot of artwork, so perhaps it would be better to do your project around the
time that the children are learning about art and how to describe it in their
English classes. This is also a way to avoid scheduling conflicts with other
projects the other teachers are planning on doing.
PS: Definitely consider
timing if you need students to purchase materials for your project.
Step 2- Start Small
There’s a quote from themovie Inception where one character explains to Leonardo Di Caprio how to implant an idea into someone’s head. He mentions that you need something
simple, small, and basic. Then he
continues to explain how the idea will grow by itself afterward. That’s the
case here. You want to think of something concrete that you want the children
to learn. The idea can be as simple as “Native Americans are people” or “Christopher
Columbus did not discover America” or “Native Americans made weapons with
pictures”. You want a simple idea. An
easy way to determine this idea is to ask yourself “Why is this important to
me?” “Why do I think this is important for other people to know this?”. Once
you ask yourself these questions, think of your responses, and you will start
seeing a trend amongst your responses and that will typically lead you to your
“basic idea”.
Then you let that idea
grow. The importance here is that you
have this basic idea that is the concept you want the children to understand
when everything is all said and done.
It’s your bare minimum. You work
with that idea and try to make it work for your classes. Step 1 is important here because you give
yourself time to allow this idea to grow.
Sometimes it is possible you
may have multiple basic concepts you want to get across. In those cases, I
think it is best to grow each of the ideas and see which one is the one easiest
communicated and choose that one.
Step 3- Growing the idea
This step is the most labor
intensive. Once you have your basic idea, you want to brainstorm the idea. While in this step, I normally plan out
different lesson plans, research information, and make sample projects for the
children to later see.
I
plan out the different lesson plans to think of how to best present the
information. While doing this I think of the following questions:
-
Do I want an
interactive presentation?
-
Do I want to do a
PowerPoint?
-
Do I want to do a
poster?
-
How will the
younger kids respond to chosen method of presentation?
-
How can I adapt
the presentation to the age groups?
-
How much time
does it take to give the presentation?
-
What questions
might the students have? (Research potential questions)
-
Will I best be
expressing my simple idea?
-
What problems may
come up in the presentation?
-
What images can I
use to communicate my ideas to the children?
-
Will the children
like the presentation?
-
Will the children
be bored in the presentation?
-
Can I use literature,
music, or art in this presentation to make it more effective?
-
Is this relevant
to the English-speaking world?
-
How can this be
used in Spain?
-
How can children
use this in their own lives?
All
of these questions can be answered during the research phase. In the research
phase, I take the time to sift through information on the Internet. It’s during this moment that I tend to think
critically about how to adjust the ideas to the different age groups. For little children, what’s the most
appropriate way to introduce them to race and not bore them or scar them at the
same time. I research games and activities for children to let them explore the
ideas of race. For example, based off of
a video I saw from the 1970s about a teacher separating her class by eye color,
I did something similar with my students (with the permission of the teacher). The video is below, if it doesn't appear search youtube for "Jane Elliot blue eye brown eye segregation" and it will appear. I entered the classroom one day, and I told the kids with brown eyes to stand
in one corner, kids with green eyes in another, etc. I segregated the classroom
by eye color. Then I said the kids with
brown eyes could sit down because they are good because they have brown eyes.
(You can make up anything arbitrarily).
This continued for a little bit longer until one kid said it was unfair.
Then the teacher and I discussed with the children how they felt and why. Then
we asked how would they feel if someone treated them like that only on their
eye color. We asked if they felt it was
nice to treat their friends that way. With
that discussion we introduced the idea of the problems that Nelson Mandela had
to face.
When
planning your examples of race and problems with the children, it helps when it
is something that they can see. So try to plan your examples to include the
students and their friends in the classroom.
Step
4 Make Presentation
After
doing Step 3 and researching your information, you can now start making your
presentation. While making the presentation keep your “basic idea” always in
mind and make sure that each part of your presentation is a stepping stone
toward your idea.
I
normally make the most difficult presentation first for the children in the 5th
and 6th grade. These are the
children that tend to understand the most English and can more easily grasp
difficult ideas. Then I begin to take away slides with information that maybe
isn’t as relevant as other information in my presentation for the 3rd
and 4th graders. After that I remove more information to make the
presentation more accessible for the 1st and 2nd graders.
As
you reduce the difficulty of your presentation be sure to add more multimedia
resources. For example, during the Harlem Renaissance I wanted to talk about
the different musicians and the styles of music. For the older children, this was more
important, for the younger levels, I removed the historical part discussing
music and I added more clips of people singing and dancing. I also added in more active activities for
the younger kids to let them practice drawing dancing body parts.
Step
5 Communicate Again
Teachers
are busy people and sometimes things slip your mind. With this in mind, it is a good idea to
remind the teachers of your project and to show them your presentation to see
what they think about it. The teachers
will give you advice if they think it is too hard for the students or too long.
Listen to their criticism and try to mold your project accordingly. If it’s the
case where one of your teachers is just a hater for unprofessional reasons, let
them hate.
Step
6 Show Time
This
is the moment to have your lesson with the children. Be sure the teachers are
present in the very beginning to help facilitate activities. If you have
decided to do an activity to show “racism” to the children, you need to
coordinate it with the teacher. While
talking about the topic, continue to ask children how they would feel if they
were in a similar situation. For example, after discussing the Great Migration,
I asked students what they would think if something like this happened in
Spain. How would they respond? How would they feel? How would their parents
feel? If your conversation goes off on a tangent because students are
interested (and assuming it is still relevant), go with it. Let the children ask questions, and try to
answer the questions to the best of your ability. Be sure to keep an open mind, if you don’t
know an answer, it is okay to say, “I don’t know”. When that happens, ask children what they
would say or think. For example, while presenting about the Americas having
different names before they were called “America”, the children inquired about
the names for South America and North America. I told them, that I didn’t know
and that I’d get back to them next week.
As
you give your presentations, be sure to adjust them to each class as you see
fit. For example if you have 4 different
6th grade classes and you see after the first 6th grade
class that a certain slide was too much, perhaps you can trash the slide, and
give your presentation without it. If you see an activity that worked really
well, you can hone it for the next 6th grade class.
I
hope that this post helped a bit on how to go about multicultural activities
with children. If I missed something, or
if you have a comment, please leave it below.