In my second round of student teaching at Lexington, I was able to teach ninth grade world geography. In my own classroom, I would chose to teach Geography thematically rather than regionally. At Lexington, my coaching teacher had the class on a routine of teaching geography regionally which did allow for me to focus on the culture of South America. Teaching about the culture of South America gave me the opportunity to teach about a culture that is similar to our own and that has evolved over time due to migration and the Spanish conquests. Just as the NCSS thematic strands suggest, humans create, learn, share, and adapt to culture. I kept this in mind as a them for the unit and was able to use it in the examples of the Roman Catholic religion being brought to South America along with the indigenous religions being mixed in.
At Irmo, during Internship B, I designed and taught the culture unit for Honors and CP Human Geography. The most obvious difference to the conceptual teaching in my classroom at Irmo as opposed to my classroom at Lexington, I thought the class on a thematic basis rather than regionally. In this way, I believe that it was easier to help the students understand the ways in which cultures are created, distributed, shared, and how humans adapt to cultures around the world. The best way to do this is to focus on the difference between folk and popular culture. While teaching 9th graders, sometimes it is hard for them to understand traits of cultures not of their own. The only way to get them to start looking at different cultures and their customs is to show them. In the artifact below, I showed this funeral custom among the Maori tribe in New Zealand. This was footage of a funeral that happened very recently to celebrate the life of a famous rugby player in New Zealand, Jonah Lamu. In the video, the friends, family, and former teammates of Lamu perform the Haka dance during the funeral. This dance is a folk dance that would otherwise never be seen by students in an American classroom. However, through diffusion of folk culture in the international sports and the funeral being broadcasted and then posted to YouTube, we learn about Maori culture and are able to share it around the world. My students learned that through this simple examination into other cultures through electronic media, they can also learn even more about different people and different cultures on their own without being told or shown an even like this in class.
At Irmo, during Internship B, I designed and taught the culture unit for Honors and CP Human Geography. The most obvious difference to the conceptual teaching in my classroom at Irmo as opposed to my classroom at Lexington, I thought the class on a thematic basis rather than regionally. In this way, I believe that it was easier to help the students understand the ways in which cultures are created, distributed, shared, and how humans adapt to cultures around the world. The best way to do this is to focus on the difference between folk and popular culture. While teaching 9th graders, sometimes it is hard for them to understand traits of cultures not of their own. The only way to get them to start looking at different cultures and their customs is to show them. In the artifact below, I showed this funeral custom among the Maori tribe in New Zealand. This was footage of a funeral that happened very recently to celebrate the life of a famous rugby player in New Zealand, Jonah Lamu. In the video, the friends, family, and former teammates of Lamu perform the Haka dance during the funeral. This dance is a folk dance that would otherwise never be seen by students in an American classroom. However, through diffusion of folk culture in the international sports and the funeral being broadcasted and then posted to YouTube, we learn about Maori culture and are able to share it around the world. My students learned that through this simple examination into other cultures through electronic media, they can also learn even more about different people and different cultures on their own without being told or shown an even like this in class.