ACKNOWLEDGING STUDENTS' VOICES AND IDENTITIES IN THE TEACHING AND LEARNING PROCESS: HOW DO WE DO IT?
Abstract
Students come to class bringing their own cultures including their own voices and identities which influence them in how they learn. Acknowledging them in teaching and learning process is very important to ensure the success in learning, and a failure to notice these will cause mismatch between students’ culture and classroom culture. This mismatch may cause the students to failure, simply because the students do not learn the same way as the schools teach them. Nieto (2010) suggested that schools need to be more responsive towards the students' voices and identities that they bring into schools and tried to utilize these to maximize teaching and learning process. However, acknowledging students' voices and identities in teaching and learning process may not be easy since there may always be a doubt on the teachers' minds whether students voices will actually have positive effects in the teaching and learning process, since students often viewed as those who do not know the best way on what and how to learn.
The paper aims at reporting a case study on how an experienced teacher in a university acknowledged the students’ voices and identities in the teaching and learning process. The research was carried out through observation and interviews. The description on how the teacher acknowledged her students' voices, and how her knowledge about her students identities influence her choices of materials, activities, and interactions will be presented. The case study could inform the practices of the implementation on acknowledging the students' cultures.