Cultural Sensitivity and Awareness

I currently teach Honors Spanish I and II at one of the higher-performing high schools in Baltimore City.  Last week, right after giving a huge unit exam, I decided to design a cultural mini-unit on West Side Story to give my students a “fun” week of instruction.  Little did I know that watching an eleven-time Academy Award winning musical could be such a miserable experience for everyone who was involved.

I began the mini-unit by having students read a New York Times Article that discussed the changes in immigration demographics from the 1960 to now in New York City, with references to how these demographics were portrayed in West Side Story.  Then, students used their background knowledge about Romeo and Juliet and the new information about New York to predict what would happen in the musical, and how issues such as racism would affect the story.

As with almost all of the “creative” lessons that I have taught throughout the past two years, I encountered some unanticipated obstacles throughout the lesson—for example, my students could not discuss migration patterns from Puerto Rico and Spain, because even as 10^th graders at a high performing school, they did not know where these places were located.  So, in an attempt to be thorough, I adjusted my lesson plan to include a world map.  However, even with the world map, years of Spanish instruction, and even a targeted unit on ethnicity, several of my students were still referring the Puerto Ricans as “Mexicans.”  And this was before the movie even started.  As an educator, I felt responsible for not giving them the necessary background information to support their learning—but in my preparation, I felt that I was honestly doing so.  I had not anticipated the cultural references I have, and that I was taking for granted.

Once the movie began—West Side Story consists of over 20 songs—before each song, in each class, I had at least one student exclaim “OH MY GOD, ARE THEY GOING TO SING…AGAIN?!”  At that point it hit me.  Most of my students had never even seen a musical.  Not only did they not have the frame of reference to understand the conflict in the musical, they did not have the experience to support watching a musical for information.  As a Spanish teacher, taking a week off of vocabulary to do culture was a risk, but even in that week I could not physically give my students what they needed to be supported and successful, which leads me to ask—If we can move students two grades ahead in reading level in one year, how do we incorporate our student’s identities into consideration, all while making up for a lifetime of culture incompetence?