African American students' views

Student-centeredness is an ambiguous word. It could be thought of as students’ freedom in decision making. The example of such idea is the Free school that we watched in the video. Students can learn anything they want to and deal with problems that they face with the support from teachers, who are not above them in terms of authority. Student-centeredness can also mean another condition where the schools have ‘traditional structure’ yet schools and teachers work to provide the best tools and conditions for students to actively learn.

I wrote this somewhere before, but when I hear student-centeredness, it reminds me of “shared governance.” It’s obvious that students are not the only entity that decides everything about school education. Many parties are involved in running a school. However, if all those people concern students’ learning foremost, the education can be called student-centeredness.

Wiggan contrasts interactive teaching/learning and disengaging pedagogy and illustrates some examples of teaching methods. However, this doesn’t mean that if teacher exerts the method of self-direction, students would feel motivated to learn. The core of successful teaching methods lies in the care for students. All those examples of going above and beyond, caring about personal life, encouraging teamwork in classroom can stem from the care for students.

In terms of how the discussion of race relates to these two articles, I can’t be sure whether the results are particular to African American students because the research results of other ethnic groups are not provided. However, what’s interesting for me was that Guiffrida’s research only examined African American students, and they expressed that African American professors are far more reachable and supportive than white professors. Guiffrida relates this phenomenon to African American’s culture of othermothering. However, the relation is still under assumption. To clarify, the researcher has to compare the results with those of other ethnic groups.

My guess for the relation was that because you share a lot with other members in your ethnic group (physical traits, values, history, and racial struggles in society), especially if you are minority in the society/school, you feel much closer to and secure with your ethnic members. Therefore, students also might have had bias or unconscious favoritism.

Another thing that I felt interesting was that the respondents in Wiggan’s study expressed the importance of extracurricular activities. This reminds me of the active involvement of Japanese junior high and high school students in extracurricular activities. The intensity of the activities differs from club to club and from school to school, but Japanese students in general are very concerned about the club activities. That’s where a lot of lifelong lessons are learned, you find friends, and you learned how difficult it is to strive for a goal and how rewarding it is to accomplish it. I guess the extracurricular activities positively affect learning because students can pursue whatever they’re interested in, because they find friends whom they can share similar values with and therefore they can encourage each other, and because they learn things that cannot be learned in classrooms and the knowledge sometimes help to improve their academics.