Zach Peycha

Dr. Ndemanu

Multicultural Education

4-29-2021

Cultural Autobiography

When tasked with defining what multicultural education means to an educator

personally, an immediate thought that personally comes to mind is the thought of being as

culturally responsive and proactive as possible. With this mindset of Education, we as educators

can find ourselves generally more open, more aware, more tolerant, and more effective in our

education. Educators that often find themselves Blocked mentally because of a lack of

understanding generally don't take into consideration that every single student that walks into

your classroom comes from a different background, whether that be a different socioeconomic

status, a different racial group, a different sexuality, a different sexual orientation, or even a

different religion. Working to help identify and accommodate your classroom structure to help

your students learn in the best way possible should be at the forefront oven educator’s mind,

and in some respects, it all starts with a strong and deep look into multicultural education and

how it should be addressed in your classroom. With this awareness as an educator, we can find

ways to be as responsive as possible to cultural differences in our classrooms. Multicultural

education can also be prominent outside of the classroom as well. Being Sensitive in public
 situations as well as inside of the classroom is equally important to an individual.

Interactions between people don't carry different weight inside or outside the classroom.

People should always be aware of actions that they're taking and how they affect someone

even if they are not apparently different. To Put it simply, multi education is the link between

the educator and the learner truly coming together to understand each other. When a

classroom feels comfortable and inclusive, learning becomes more natural and more long

lasting simply due to the larger impact you may have on your students. We as educators

sometimes do not realize how much of an impact, we may have on students whether that be

good or bad. Taking the time to learn about a student in a more personal manner could reap

fantastic rewards not only in an educational setting but in a social setting

From a personal standpoint, I was raised in a mostly white, suburban town in the middle

of Indiana. going through my education I was never really exposed to a lot of cultural diversity

however our town did have a diverse student population regarding socioeconomic status.

Starting from when I was a student at my original high school, I found that I never really

understood different situations at home simply because I was lucky enough to live in a run of

the mill, middle class, white, suburban family that was living comfortably while I was in school.

When the difference is in my classmates first started to become noticeable, it was in my band

class when we were getting ready to pay our dues to participate in the marching band. The

band director would always try to keep the fees low because the town I grew up with in was a

blue-collar town. With fees being around $200 every year, my family was lucky enough to pay it
with little to no financial stress placed on them. Every year the band director would also

implore students that may or may not have financial issues to talk to him personally about

getting financial aid to help participate in the marching season. My band director was a firm

believer that financial trouble should not limit a child from participating and pursuing their

dreams. Looking at this now as an educator, I found this to be the first real interaction with

multicultural education. The realization that not everyone had the same resources and network

as me or my friends in the band really caused me to think critically and to be more aware of

how a diverse group of students, and in this case diverse in socioeconomic status, could pull

together in create an amazing program all while having drastically different lives outside of the

rehearsal space and school.

Being raised in a suburban and mostly white town has brought different challenges to

finding my social identity especially when coming to an extraordinarily diverse campus such as

Ball State University. a major turning point in my analysis that has shaped who I am today must

be my first couple of weeks here in Muncie. Meeting people from so many different walks of

life coming together and creating music as one entity really blew my mind upon walking on the

campus and still astonishes me to this day. Working and talking with my peers has brought to

light a very new perspective on how you look at people in the best way possible. before my

introduction into academia, I was analyzing people at a very surface level which caused me to

have a lot of misconceptions about my peers during high school in middle school. When you are

in an environment where your life and day-to-day activity is filled with aspiring educators, this
helps you in being open with who you really are and where you come from. Talking with peers

about their home lives and how their towns fared in comparison to other towns has been a very

interesting but enlightening process and it has been by far the most influential aspect of my

education to date. Another turning point in my education must probably be taking the

multicultural education class at Ball State University. with Muncie being a suburban area in

North East central Indiana, we as educators are still not very exposed to very much diversity.

This class offers a unique lens to analyze educational settings and interactions between

teachers and students to help gain a more complete understanding of what does and does not

work in a classroom setting. Realizing that my peers in this class were from different parts of

the country and had different backgrounds in their family’s history, we engaged in very in

interesting discussion on at home lives and experiences inside the classroom that shaped us to

who we are today. with this class at the forefront of my mind, I feel that it has proven to be a

very long lasting and truly deep experience in recognizing my identity as well as identifying with

and adapting who I am to help better educate my future students.

With these events becoming a more prominent aspect of my life, I have taken these life

lessons to heart and have applied them to as many aspects of my daily living as I could. Working

with my peers became a lot more professional and a lot more productive as well as creating a

culture of understanding between everyone involved. The beautiful part about being a music

education major is that not only do you get to collaborate with your peers in curriculum design

and lesson planning, but you also get to collaborate artistically with them in developing and
rehearsing music that you will perform for loved ones and people from all around the nation.

Once this mutual understanding was met between my peers and myself, work became more

seamless and more collaborative rather than strenuous and tedious. Creating an environment

where people are first rather than a product that you and your colleagues are trying to pursue,

create a drastically more efficient working environment not only in the realm of education but

in any collaborative space. Working with people from different walks of life that have not been

raised like I have been personally has really increased my patience. Before really integrating a

mindset of multiculturalism I became frustrated and easily irritated by a lack of efficiency and

understanding amongst peers when tasked with group work or in a rehearsal setting when we

were playing in a band. Through my interactions with my peers and through this course, I have

found that understanding someone on a deeper level then just knowing what their name in

major is proving to be very important when creating a dynamic in the educational setting where

you may need to be efficient as well as socially adept.

Connecting all this very valuable information that has been presented and professed in

this classroom, I've had the esteemed privilege to work with two drastically different high

school marching bands and create valuable relationships with almost every individual student

that I teach. The first school that I work with is on the northwest side of Indianapolis and it is

my hometown. Being a few years removed from the program I get a very interesting look on

how I perceived the program inside while I was an active participant with the band and now

analyzing the program based on my perceptions and observations outside the student
perspective. The student body is largely made up of white middle class suburban kids with

varying economic comfort at home. This really reigns in the scope in which I can analyze and

evaluate these students simply do too only one or two aspects of multicultural education being

prominent in this situation. A large part of being successful is specially in the music field, is to

take private lessons on your primary instrument. With some student’s situations not being as

financially stable we have created a program where some of the funding for lessons come out

of the band boosters’ budget to not limit the student’s success simply due to financial difficulty.

With this program in place, every student can study with an instructor that has the same or

more instruction on their primary instrument to help them receive pedagogical instruction

specific to their instrument. I teach the tuba, trombone, and euphonium and I teach roughly

eight students from this school district. As an educator I don't discriminate or treat my students

differently based on their financial status. I treat them with the upmost respect and try to give

them not only a professional learning experience but also building relationships that help

achieve an emotional understanding while playing music. With music being an emotionally

complex activity that requires the entire brain to do, building emotional connections with your

students is very important not only two gauge how they're feeling in certain situations but to

portray and perform music that they have selected also properly.

Another school that I was lucky enough to work for was up in Northwest Indiana near

Chicago. What was interesting about this town is that it was quite small, and the high school

was more of a regional area high school that brought in students from several towns. Despite

being so close to Chicago, a lot of the students were living in rural communities where their
parents were farmers and didn't really work in the city. These types of situations really are scary

for music educators because farmer families and families with that same line of work generally

don't see music education as a valuable resource for their kids. The director has done an

amazing job building and recruiting this program to become one of the better high schools up in

Northwest Indiana to perform at a state level. With a band of roughly 110 students, this

seemingly small regional high school helps me breathe a breath of fresh air and have hope for

MUSIC Education in places other than suburban America. Students in this area were a bit more

racially diverse with a larger Hispanic population while most had similar at home situations,

there were few that had financial struggles paying for marching band every year. Just like the

school mentioned previously, the director made it a priority to allow anyone who had an

interest in performing the ability to participate no matter what their financial standing was at

home. Another very interesting aspect of this school was the sense of camaraderie amongst the

students. When students didn't have a ride with their parents, a friend would step in and offer

them a ride even if they were 20 minutes out of the way. These weren't isolated cases either,

this sense of ownership and courtesy spread throughout the band program and became part of

the culture.