Margaret Buchman, in Role over Person: Morality and Authenticity in Teaching, states “In schools, teachers are supposed to help students participate in “the community of subject matter” whose objective contents of thought and experience ---systems, theories, ideas---are impersonal because they are distinct from the people who learn or discuss them. They are, to some extent, independent of time and place.” I find this thought at odds with other readings we have encountered. Other authors say we must learn about our students’ lives and cultures in order to be competent teachers. We must understand how gender, individual differences, race and culture impact the ways in which students have learned to express themselves, the ways they absorb new ideas, the ways they interact with peers and teachers, and, just as important, the ways those things impact how teachers see and respond to those students. I think that each teacher’s beliefs about what constitutes “objective contents of thought and experience ---systems, theories, ideas” cannot, in fact, be entirely objective, due to their own biases. In I Just Want to Be Myself: Discovering What Students Bring to School “in Their Blood,” for example, Lisa Delpit uses a study by Courtney Cazden to show the disparate responses of African American and European American educators to the writing of an African American child. Delpit says “When the interpretation of narrative differences can produce such differential results in teachers’ attitudes toward Black and white children, clearly those children who are different from the teacher and from the mainstream may be in serious trouble.” I think teachers must do their best to assimilate some measure of each student’s culture in order to improve their vision and responses towards students of different races and cultures.
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