Warm-Up 10/24

How can you teach a classroom with an increasingly diverse amount of primary discourses?

The best way to begin is to try and coach the students into using a secondary discourse. Usually this is termed as "standard English." Yet this calls into question, what is "standard English?" It doesn't necessarily need to be standard English, but maybe a standard for the classroom. Try to create one discourse for the classroom in which all students can participate. How do we do this? Well one way is to model and try to gently correct students should they diverge from the langauge that you are seeking. How do we do this without offending home dialects and such? Its a fine line that we walk on and no matter what I put up here, ideas or processes, it will not work for everyone and is always dependant on the environment of the classroom. Sometimes you may have to adapt to their language and sometimes you may have to make them adapt to yours. Its a tricky thing to deal with.