Supportive Methods of Teaching

After reading through Ward's "Racial Identity Formation and Transformation" I began to realize how hard it is to be not only an adolescent but an adolescent of color. You have to go through every other horrible stage any other teenager has to but you also begin to see how society really is. When children are young, they do not see color as adults do. Children openly play with each other not knowing there is anything weird or groundbreaking about what they are doing. We teach our children about colors of the rainbow and also about colors of skin. Hopefully, parents are doing this unknowingly but nevertheless it happens as we grow older. We begin to realize that hanging out with people of a different race makes people look at us a little differently. I believe that this realization comes alongside puberty during adolescence.

In our classrooms, we cannot simply celebrate race once in awhile but rather foster positive self-images of all students by teaching equally to all students. We cannot always talk just about slavery from the point of view of the white people, but we cannot also only talk about slavery from the black perspective. There needs to be a constant balance of content and discussion in the class that creates an open and welcoming environment that students feel comfortable in. I see middle school as a very important time in a child's life where they are truly coming into their own as young adults. It is very important to foster a positive self-image of themselves and their culture that they can carry with them for the rest of their life.