Reflection #6

I read Finding Ways In: Community Based Perspectives on Southeast Asian Family Involvement with Schools in the State of New England by Francine F. Collignon.  I found myself thinking back to lots of class discussion and my own recent experience with UTEC and LCHC and the Teen Coalition when they visited our class.  One thing I had not noticed among these groups was a mention of family.  In Collignon's article, a CBO is brought up that is aimed "at the intrapersonal level (a Summer Academy for youth and their families)."  I really like the idea of community programs that involve a range of ages and cause parents and their children to spend time together in a different way outside of the home.  Involvement like this could possibly help parents understand the way US schools operate and educate their children.  Collignon writes that these current parents were once refugee children.  They grew up in a time of war and had to abandon education in order to survive.  Instead of the separation between home life and school life that these parents were used to, they are finding that school and family are more closely intertwined.  As a future educator, I believe it is important for parents to be involved in their child's education.  It is strange for me to think about my childhood and my parents not being interested in what I was doing at school.  I am not quite sure how this connects to the stereotype of Asian students being very intelligent and hard working.  Is this article implying that they are also very independent and do not need family involvement in school?

Reflection #5

For this week's blog entry, I decided to focus on Affirming Diversity.  I was very happy to read the case studies in Chapter 8, and was quite interested by them.  For my Student Behavior and Adolescent Development class, I read a case study a week and really enjoyed writing about one a couple of classes ago.  The case studies I want to reflect on that of a young girl who from the United States named Nadia Bara. She is a high school freshman.  Nadia was born and raised in the United States with her older sister.  Her parents are from Syria and moved to the US after getting married.  She is Arabic and Muslim and identifies with these qualities just as much as she identifies with being American.  Nadia discusses the struggle to find a balance between her roots and the country she calls home.  I believe we have discussed a lot of this in class back when we were reading about immigration.  She also discusses the stereotypes she faces as an Arabic Muslim.  Since the 9/11 attacks, she has had to deal with the preconceived notions people have towards those of a Middle Eastern background.  Nadia writes about some serious issues in a very mature style, while still maintaining a youthful tone. I found her essay to be an optimistic and hopeful one.  She sounds confident in her desire for stereotypes to be broken, especially those that have been applied to her culture and her religion.  I was really glad to read more case studies on immigration, and more case studies in general.  I find that I learn more from the experiences of someone else than I do from an informative, textbook write up about the same topic.  It was much easier to learn about and understand what life has been like for Muslims in the US since 9/11.