lcarrenoro's blog

For my field placement, I tutor one to two elementary school children on a weekly basis as a part of an afterschool program. A few weeks ago, my peers and I unintentionally arrived nearly thirty minutes early and the elementary students were not released for afterschool tutoring yet so we patiently waited in the hallway for them to arrive when something in particular caught my eye. Alongside ESL pamphlets and food nutrition pamphlets was one pamphlet that stood out to me—on the cover it stated in bolded letters “FIGHT BACK AGAINST: Drugs, gangs, robbery, vandalism, violence, and weapons in your school by calling WeTip inc”. And the pamphlet went on to describe how an individual can anonymously report a crime and potentially receive up to a $1,000 reward by reporting though a specific number and website.

This pamphlet prompted me to begin asking many questions about the environment and the concept of safety within and outside of a school setting and the impact it can have on a student’s education. So as a result of my curiosity I began to question: is this a standard program for all public schools in this area? Was the school required to implement this program or was it the school’s choice? Was there a particular instance that “set off” an insecure feeling that led to the execution of this program? From what I discovered from the WeTip website, it is a service that can be bought by schools and companies in order to secure anonymity of anyone reporting a tip and the service has been in existence since 1972.

Lucy Carreno-Roca

February 19, 2013

Paper 2

An Insider looking Within: Analysis of Lareau’s Theoretical Approach

In Lareau’s Unequal Childhoods, she associates class, race, and gender as the key to a child’s educational experience and what they learn in the course of their life as they grow up to become citizens of the society that defined their learning and educational experiences. Through the information gathered in her research team’s field work, Lareau develops two constructs in which theoretically all middle and lower class fall into: a concerted cultivation experience or an accomplishment of natural growth experience. This either-or approach has many flaws but has helped lay some sort of ground work that can be built upon in future field work research that could potentially benefit the children of the United States in the long run. While reading this text, I felt as though there were many fundamental concepts that needed to be defined before truly diving into the field placement research. For example, the definition of lower class versus working class versus middle class is ambiguously established as this concept that defines a child’s potential and learning experience.