Rachel S Philosophical Speech 1

Rachel Walton's Philosophy of Education SpeechEDUC 513June 2009Educating Towards Social Justice*Daily, educators make choices that contribute towards achieving equity and social justice.*Special education teachers, especially, must work towards ensuring that students are being met where they are at and scaffolded toward success.*Individuals approaching education from the dominant culture must be critical of how they perpetuate the rules and norms of this culture. They must also allow their students access to it.*Decisions made within the classroom must be viewed within a framework that accounts for global realities.Support for Philosophical Beliefs"Students must be taught the codes needed to participate fully in the mainstream of American life, not by being forced to attend to hollow, inane, decontextualized subskills, but rather within the context of meaningful communicative endeavors; that they must be allowed the resource of the teacher's expert knowledge, while being helped to acknowledge their own 'expertness' as well; and that even while students are assisted in learning the culture of power, they must also be helped to learn about the arbitrariness of those codes and about the power relationships they represent," (Delpit, 1995, p. 45)."He must survey the capacities and needs of the particular set of individuals with whom he is dealing and must at the same time arrange the conditiions which provide the subject-matter or content for experiences that satisfay these needs and develop these capacities," (Dewey, 1938, p. 58)."To the contrary, an idespensable part of learning how to teach for social justice is learning how and where to help students connect what they know to what they do not know and how to use peripr skills to learn new ones," (Cochran-Smith, 1999, p. 124).ReferencesBerk, L. E. & Winsler, A. (1995). Scaffolding children's learning: Vygotsky and early childhood education . Washinton, D. C.: National Association for the Education of Young Children.Cochran-Smith, M. (1999). Learning to teach for social justice. In G. Griffin (Ed.), The education of teachers NSSE yearbook (114-144). Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.Delpit, L. (1995). Other people's children: Cultural conflict in the classroom . New York: New Press.Dewey, J. (1938, 1998). Experience and education. West Lafayette, IN: Kappa Delta Pi.Kohl, H. (2003). Stupidity and tears: Teaching and learning in troubled times . New York: New Press.