This past Saturday, I attended a workshop inspired by Paulo Freire's pedagogy of culture circles and literacy at the IUME (Institute of Urban and Minority Education) in Harlem, NYC. The workshop was Culture Circles: African-American Literacies led by IUME Graduate Assistants Crystal Belle and Jamila Lyiscot. It focused on language and using literacy and dialects as power and how society can sometime view the different use of "ebonics", "spanglish" and other dialects in educational settings. 


Over the course of this program, we have been discussing many many issues that focus on the "right" language, and especially when referencing the different minority groups such as people with disabilities, people of color, immigrants, etc. This workshop was especially important to me because it addressed issues of different dialects used in a classroom by students, which are often looked down upon. 


The beginning of the workshop was introduced with spoken word and poetry by the coordinator, which set the tone of the workshop and how amazing it was. After the introduction, we were broken up into culture circles to discuss the readings done previous to the workshop and the poetry presented, which were all around the issue of language. During this workshop, I was able to work with people that I did not know, even though I attended with several of my colleagues from the UTR. This was a great opportunity to work with people from other ethnicities, backgrounds, education backgrounds and experiences. I worked with a Mexican-American female, an African American male and a white male. During our culture circle, we were all able to contribute to several aspects of our discussion since there were so many different people in the conversation(see below chart of discussion). We flushed out many of the issues at hand, and I thoroughly enjoyed hearing other's points of views and experiences. 

 The diversity in the room was rich, from age, to ethnicity, to educational background, to gender, to experience and career. I enjoyed the culture circle more than I imagined, I guess because I felt like I related to a lot of the people in the room and I really felt a sense of belonging. 


I loved the experience of culture circles and would really love to try this with my students in the future. This sort of work can promote so much language, acceptance, exploration of self and others, acceptance, anti-bullying, on and on. Discussion is a way I really enjoy teaching, and culture circles can be a great way to incorporate more of this method into my classroom. I know that right now there is a lot on my plate and Jane's, thus I would love to try doing culture circles after the NJ ask test, and see if it can be a literacy club-type thing.