How do your cultural identities shape who you are as a teacher? How does it shape the curriculum you choose to teach and the instructional methodologies you employ?

 My cultural identities have shaped myself as a teacher. I am white woman. I am Catholic. I grew up in the suburbs and now I live in Chicago. This has shaped the ease, or in this case difficulty, of the curriculum that I am teaching. The first unit I have taught in my 2 sections of ESL World Studies has been on African Empires from around 600-1500. I barely learned about this topic in my high school and college classes and experiences. It was a steep learning curve creating lessons for this unit. I began by reading the textbook to get a general idea of what I would be teaching. But I wanted to know more than the textbook so that I would have the most information available to give my students the best experience. So I watched a six part, six hour documentary called Africa's Great Civilizations by Henry Louis Gates Jr and read every source I could. So despite not knowing much about the topic, I learned and have been teaching it. A personal interest of mine is art history. I like to use art in my lessons to give another perspective for students to investigate history through. Art tells a lot that texts cannot. It also lets students take a break from reading all the time.