Tara Payano
EDTE440-03
Cultural Autobiography
	What is the role of education?  Why do we have schools?  More importantly, why do we send our children to them?  Many people have different beliefs about school and its purposes.  There are many contributing factors to my educational philosophies.  The educational heritage passed down from family is one contributing factor.  My schooling experiences, as well as my teaching and life experiences are also contributing factors.  All this has led me to believe that the role of education is to positively benefit the students and their community in some way.    
	My families schooling history is a unique one.  My paternal grandmother did not attend college.  My paternal grandfather attended some college, but did not graduate.  The same went for my father, who attended some classes, but did not graduate.  Neither my grandparents nor my father believed that college was important to find a good, stable job.  My father works for the same company that my grandfather worked for.  It is so specialized that they train you themselves, whether you have a college degree or not.  They were only somewhat supportive of my decision to go to college; realizing today things are much different then before.  My maternal grandfather graduated from college at 20 years old then graduated from officer's school in the Marines.  My maternal grandmother went to some classes, but did not graduate from college.  My mother graduated from college and became a teacher.  Following the gender roles passed down from both sides of my family, I have graduated from college, however my brother has not.  There has been a pattern throughout my family that has reinforced traditional male-female roles regarding who provides and who cares for the home.  However, with my mother, as well as with history, things changed.  If my maternal grandparents had been alive during my college years, I am sure that they would have been very supportive.  They left me part of their inheritance to help pay for college.
	My schooling experiences, however, have not been very unique.  I grew up in a middle class home in Anglo suburbia.  I went to a school with a specialized program with emphasis in Reading, Writing and Arithmetic.  There was a waiting list to get into these classes that supposedly gave your child advantages in schooling.  Interestingly enough, because of the location of the school, the children who were in this specialized program were also some of the wealthiest in the city.  I was considering the poor girl, being only from a very middle class home.  The class was entirely white students and all the teachers I ever had were white (though I did have 3 male teachers in elementary school).  I did not have a student of another color in my class until Junior High, and that was maybe one or two students.  My junior high was made up of mostly white students and all white teachers.  It wasn't until high school that I began to have friends of different cultures.  I have my Latina friends and my African American friends.  They taught me about their cultures and languages.  It was the first time in my life that I realized there were people who weren't like me in the world.  It was what began to be my curiosity in learning about all peoples and cultures.  I had some wonderful teachers in high school who began to prepare me to live in a world full of different people.  We began to study different culture groups and their contributions to the world.  My Spanish teachers, who were all white women, all instilled in me the desire to learn more about Latin America.  
	My teaching experiences were very unique.  I began as a volunteer ESL teacher during a summer in Japan.  That was my first experience with teaching other cultures and languages.  Then after college I was a bilingual ESL aide in Biggs, which is a small agricultural community outside Chico.  I worked purely with the Mexicans from the community.  Then I moved to the Dominican Republic, where I taught native Dominican children in English at a bilingual American school.  Then when I moved back to Chico in August I worked as a bilingual ELD aide in Oroville, another town outside Chico.  After that I received a job at Pleasant Valley High School as the ELD aide.  All of these experiences have contributed to my knowledge and expertise in teaching other cultures and languages.  I still have much to learn, but one of the most important things I've learned is to always be a good observer.  You can't learn anything about anyone else if you don't stop long enough to observe them and listen to them.  
	The biggest example in my life of learning by observing has been my husband.  My husband is Dominican.  We have been together for more than 3 years, 2.5 of them in the Dominican Republic.  I learned more about Dominicans, and learning about other cultures, by just sitting around the house with his family and observing them.  We speak Spanish in our relationship, even though we try to speak English to help him improve his English skills.  Generally, the language you start a relationship in, is the language you will always speak in that relationship.  This is a good thing to remember in dealing with bilingual students and parents.  My husband's schooling was almost non-existent.  He went to public school in a developing nation where school is not important and, true to his culture, dropped out of school to help provide for his family.  However, his education was a rich experience.  He learned many valuable life skills from both of his parents and then from the American who founded the school where I taught.  This American became a mentor to my husband and educated him in many of the things we take for granted in the US.  Living this reality with him (He still has yet to obtain his high school equivalency, though he's working on it) has taught me that there is a very big difference between schooling and education.  
	A student may attend school, may show up at the classroom, but may not learn anything or be challenged in any way.  The role of education is to benefit the student in any positive way.  It might not be the way the administrators or test monitors would like, and it most likely isn't measurable, but students should walk into those classrooms and leave having grown in some way (social, cognitive, etc).  How do you measure growth?  How do you measure improvement?  Those are the hard questions that teachers must try to find answers to.  I also believe that some good hearted person believed that testing was a way to measure growth, but it was taken to such an extreme that it was never meant to.  If education is to bring about growth in a student's life, then it should benefit the community in some way.  It is logical that if a student is growing and improving in any area, that would have a positive impact in the community.  My experiences and educational heritage contribute to what I believe makes me an effective teacher.  
	I received my educational heritage from my family, who contributed to my foundational understanding of education.  My lower educational years were spent in mostly homogenous groups.  My high school years were affected by the expansion of these homogenous groups to begin to understand others.  My college years were spent trying to escape these homogenous groups with the result of accepting my race, ethnicity, language and gender.  My teaching experiences contributed to the formation of my educational philosophy, as well as my choice in my mate and future family.  All these things lead me to believe that the role of education is to positively benefit the students and their community in any way.