Education and reflection in "The education of Little Tree

Education

In Gruwell's Teach with Your Heart, Carter's Education of Little Tree, and Stuart's Thread that Runs so True, each other takes a unique yet somewhat similar approach to the various challenges and issues that both educators and education face today. Each work gives the reader a different perspective as to the aims of education and how those aims are best reached.

In Teach with Your Heart, author and educator Erin Gruwell chronicles her first years of teaching in Long Branch California to classes of what the public has seen as being "hopeless classes." Ms. Gruwell was just another in a long line of sacrificial lambs. However, Ms. Gruwell decided not to follow this "easy route" and instead work to develop a revolutionary teaching approach directly aimed at transforming a group of slackers into what she refers to as "imaginative learners." To do this Ms. Gruwell developed the Freedom Writers project. The goal of this curriculum was to "teach tolerance through literature and writing." Her program has been largely successful, with all 150 Freedom Writers graduating from high school, largely because it uses a method that teaches to the unique needs and voice of this unique population of students.

Likewise, in Forrest Carter's Education of Little Tree, he also discusses how education approaches sometimes need to be adjusted and adopted in order to better reach the intended audience. Unlike Gruell's book, this book is not written by a teacher but instead from the perspective of a Cherokee student o the 1930s. In this narrative, the story teller tells of both his informal education in his tribe and the formal education he received through the Indian boarding school run by whites which attempts to assimilate him to the Anglo world, one that differs greatly from the Cherokee way. What the educator can take away from this book is that the best educational approaches are those that are culturally sensitive. One of the main reason our schools are failing in low-income and high minority areas is because it was originally created to teach middle class white children. When this same curriculum is used in a low-income classroom, what is essentially happening is a modern-day form of assimilation. Instead, a more culturally sensitive approach needs to be developed, as was done by Ms. Guell.