People came to the U.S. for many
reasons
To live in a
free society
To get a job
To escape
persecution
To get an
education
To escape war
To make a better
life for my
children
Because my own
country was
destroyed
Some people were forced to come
here
Others were already here but forced
off their land
How do we live in peace?
• With all our histories and past conflicts,
how do we exist together?
• With our present cultures, how do we
interact as a nation?
Respect
Respect
• The U.S. Constitution guarantees free
speech, the right to gather, the right to
worship without government interference,
etc.
• We don’t have to always like everything
about another culture, but the foundation of
our nation demands that we respect other
people’s rights.
Respect
• Unfortunately, it has not always been easy
to do so. U.S. history is replete with groups
of people trying to get a reasonable form of
respect.
• The school system historically has been a
means of disrespecting certain cultures.
• Education was completely denied to other
cultures.
http://www.kporterfield.com/aicttw/articles/boardingschool.html
For example
Boarding schools were an important part of the American Indian experience. They still
are a critical factor in why some American Indian parents find it difficult to
communicate with public school system administrators and teachers – and even more
difficult to trust them.
Many non-Indians either aren’t aware of this shameful piece of American History or
know very little about it. In order to undo the boarding school legacy, it is important for
every teacher with American Indian students in the classroom to have an awareness of
past events and their continuing impact.
Boarding School History
Off-reservation boarding schools for American Indian children began on November 1, 1878
when Captain Richard H. Pratt opened the Carlisle Indian School at an abandoned military
post in Pennsylvania.
Pratt was an Army Captain, not an educator. He had been put in charge of 72 Apache
prisoners held at Ft. Marion near St. Augustine, Florida. The Army said that prisoners were
suspected of having murdered white settlers, but never proved this claim.
Captain Pratt started a prison school for the men in his charge. When the Ft. Marion
prisoners were allowed to return home in 1878, he convinced 22 of them to continue their
schooling. The Hampton Institute, a school for freed slaves in Virginia, accepted several of
them.
Carlisle’s opening allowed Pratt to resign his Army commission and to practice his ideas
about educating Indians.
Pratt’s goal was to "kill the Indian, not the man." In order to assimilate American Indian
children into European culture, Pratt subjected them to what we would call brainwashing
tactics today. These are the same methods that cult leaders use to coerce recruits to commit
completely to a new way of thinking.
Brainwashing techniques
At the time reformers believed that assimilation and offreservation boarding schools were the lesser of two
evils. They were a better policy than extermination,
getting rid of American Indians by shooting them or
starving them to death. Just because something is the
lesser of two evils doesn’t make it right.
After Carlisle opened, boarding schools became a part
of official U.S. Government Indian policy. Attendance
was mandatory. Most of the schools were run by
church organizations, but they all followed the same
mind-control model set forth by Pratt.
Brainwashing techniques, continued
•Many boarding schools were established far away from reservations so that students would have
no contact with their families and friends. Parents were discouraged from visiting and, in most
cases, students were not allowed to go home during the summer.
•Indian boarding school students wore military uniforms and were forced to march.
•They were given many rules and no choices. To disobey meant swift and harsh punishment.
•Students were forbidden to speak their language.
•They were forbidden to practice their religion and were forced to memorize Bible verses and the
Lord’s Prayer.
•Their days were filled with so many tasks that they had little time to think.
•Indian students had no privacy.
•Boarding school students were expected to spy on one another and were pitted against each other
by administrators and teachers.
•Students were taught that the Indian way of life was savage and inferior to the white way. They
were taught that they were being civilized or "raised up" to a better way of life.
•Indian students were told that Indian people who retained their culture were stupid, dirty, and
backwards. Those who most quickly assimilated were called "good Indians." Those who didn’t
were called "bad" Indians.
•The main part of their education focused on learning manual skills such as cooking and cleaning
for girls and milking cows and carpentry for boys.
•Students were shamed and humiliated for showing homesickness for their families.
•When they finally did go home…many boarding school students had a difficult time fitting in.
Native Americans weren’t the only
ones…
• The immigrant poor lived in overcrowded, unsanitary, and unsafe
housing. Many lived in tenements, dumbbell-shaped brick apartment
buildings, four to six stories in height. In 1900, two-thirds of
Manhattan's residents lived in tenements.
• In one New York tenement, up to 18 people lived in each apartment.
Each apartment had a wood-burning stove and a concrete bathtub in the
kitchen, which, when covered with planks, served as a dining table.
Before 1901, residents used rear-yard outhouses. Afterward, two
common toilets were installed on each floor. In the summer, children
sometimes slept on the fire escape. Tenants typically paid $10 a month
rent.
• In tenements, many apartments were dark and airless because interior
windows faced narrow light shafts, if there were interior windows at all.
With a series of newspaper articles and then a book, entitled How the
Other Half Lives, published in 1889, Jacob Riis turned tenement reform
into a crusade.
http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/database/article_display.cfm?HHID=210
Picture from: http://www.cis.yale.edu/amstud/inforev/riis/title.html
Children in tenements often didn’t
go to school Text from: http://tenant.net/Community/LES/kleeck9.html
In the most thickly populated districts of New York
City, especially south of Fourteenth street, little
children are often seen on the streets carrying large
bundles of unfinished garments, or boxes
containing materials for making artificial flowers.
This work is given out by manufacturers or
contractors to be finished in tenement homes, where
the labor of children of any age may be utilized. For
the laws of New York state, prohibiting the
employment of children under fourteen years of age
in factories, stores, or other specified work-places,
have never been extended to home workrooms. In
this fact is presented a child labor problem,-as yet
scarcely touched,-namely: How to prevent
employment of young children in home work in
manufacture?
Children working at home
Schools in tenement neighborhoods were overcrowded, as you might imagine.
http://www.iath.virginia.edu/utc/abolitn/walkerhp.html
It was against the law to teach slaves
to read…
•
"If any are anxious to ascertain who I am," writes David Walker near the end
of his Appeal, "know the world, that I am one of the oppressed, degraded and
wretched sons of Africa, rendered so by the avaricious and unmerciful, among
the whites." Born near the end of the eighteenth century in North Carolina as a
freed person of color, by the mid-1820s Walker had moved to Boston. It was
there that he wrote this book; first published in 1829, it is one of the earliest
African American authored protests against slavery and racism. Despite his
title, throughout he addresses himself often to white readers, hoping to change
their hearts and acts: "America is as much our country, as it is yours.--Treat us
like men, and there is no danger but we will all live in peace and happiness."
He intended his exhortation, though, mainly for black readers, hoping to
arouse them to claim their human rights: "Oh! my coloured brethren, all over
the world, when shall we arise from this death-like apathy?--And be
men!!"Before his death in 1830, Walker worked to circulate his Appeal to
blacks in both the North and the South. Copies found in the possession of
slaves led to stronger laws against teaching slaves to read and distributing
inflammatory writing in a number of southern states.
The question becomes…
• How do we create schools that truly educate
people to live in a diverse, respectful,
democratic society?
• This is the first generation to attempt to
“leave no child behind.” What a great goal
(and a daunting one).
Individuals, Groups, and Society
Across the centuries,
many immigrants have
come to the U.S.
Melting pot: a
metaphor for the
absorption and
assimilation into the
mainstream of society
so that ethnic
differences vanish.
Reactions to immigrants and
minorities have been
problematic: assuming
everyone should become just
like majority-type Americans,
and assuming that anyone who
isn’t, is lacking, somehow.
Cultural deficit model: a model that explains the school achievement problems of
ethnic minority students by assuming that their culture is inadequate and does not prepare
them to succeed in school.
Multicultural education
• Education that promotes equity in the
schooling of all students.
• In other words, we are not going to deny
education to some, and we are not going to
attempt to brainwash some students because
we think their culture is bad.
Dimensions of multicultural
education
Content integration: using examples
from a variety of cultures and groups
to illustrate key concepts, principles,
generalizations, and theories in their
subject area or discipline.
An Equity Pedagogy: matching
teaching styles to students’ learning
styles in order to facilitate the academic
achievement of students from diverse
racial, cultural, and social class groups.
The Knowledge Construction Process:
helping students to understand how the
implicit cultural assumptions within a
discipline influence the ways that knowledge
is constructed within it.
Multicultural
education
Prejudice Reduction: identifying the
characteristics of students’ racial attitudes
and determining how they can be modified
by teaching.
An Empowering School Culture and Social Structure: examining group and labeling practices,
sports participation, and the interaction of the staff and the students across ethnic and racial lines to
create a school culture that empowers students from all groups.
Content integration
If this is the only image a child sees of a scientist, what is the child likely to assume
about who gets to be a scientist? If children don’t see themselves in the examples, they
are less likely to imagine themselves taking on these roles.
Knowledge construction
Intelligence
For example, some people
thought that the bigger the head,
the smarter a person was. In
order to explore that idea, they
placed mustard seed in various
skulls in order to measure the
volume. They used skulls from
two different races of people.
Unfortunately, they didn’t do a
“double blind” experiment where
the person measuring the skull
would have no idea about the
person whose skull it was. So,
their prejudices towards one race
and against another influenced
their data (it’s easy to stuff a little
extra mustard seed in some skulls
and to not completely fill others).
It was in the early 1900’s when this theory was discredited, using a then new statistic, the
correlation.
This information from Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man
This is a really obvious example of how cultural assumptions (that one culture is smarter
than another) influence the construction of knowledge. There are more subtle but equally
significant examples. When you are reading about a culture, you not only need to read
writers from outside that culture but also writers from INSIDE the culture.
Inside vs. outside
• This is one of the challenges of working with nondominant cultures: these groups have been
historically left out of the education process, so
they are less likely to write books about their lives.
It’s harder to find “insider” material about people
in poverty or people in certain cultures. Outsiderwritten material can distort information about the
culture because of misunderstanding.
Prejudice Reduction
• Students come from a range of homes, from those
that teach and practice tolerance to those that are
extremely bigoted toward one group or another.
• Yet, in school, students have to be able to work
together.
• We need to teach students to hold at bay
prejudices that impede their ability to be a
constructive member of the classroom.
Equity Pedagogy
• Teachers used to ask: how come these
students don’t know this? They must be
lazy or deficient.
• Now we ask: what do students need to
know? What range of teaching strategies
and information presentation modes can I
use to get this concept across?
Empowering school culture and
social structure
• If one group or another typically does not
participate in a school activity (type of
class, club, sport) then it’s possible that
subtle messages have been sent that
members of this group are not welcome.
When school activities reflect the diversity
of the school, then students who have an
interest in that activity are likely to choose
to participate.
Why is this so important?
• Students begin school when they are young—five
years old. They don’t know what they might be.
One purpose of school is to give students
opportunities to explore career possibilities and
personal interests, to find out who they are in
relation to careers and what they do on their own
time. If only one ethnic group participates in
science club or in the orchestra, then students from
other ethnic groups who might be good at this will
not select it—they lose educational opportunities.
What is culture?
• The knowledge, values, attitudes, and
traditions that guide the behavior of a group
of people and allow them to solve the
problems of living in their environment.
Something to remember
• Culture is important but doesn’t completely
define a person.
• General characteristics of a culture may not
be apparent in every person who is part of
the culture. Don’t allow cultural
information to become stereotypes.
Appalachian Culture and Schooling
In traditional Appalachian culture, there are two concepts of knowledge: “horse
sense” and “book learning.” Horse sense refers to the fact that horses are careful
about where they step, often more careful than the people who are riding them.
Horse sense is superior to mere book learning, a type of knowledge that is not
particularly helpful in the hard-scrabble life of subsistence farming.
Appalachian Culture and Schooling
Within Appalachia, there is a history of exploitation: outsiders came in and
bought mineral rights to land and lied to the farmers. Then they came in again
and hired locals to mine the coal from the land in terribly unsafe conditions.
Outsiders also came in as social workers, medical personnel, and teachers, often
with the attitude that Appalachian culture was deficient and that Appalachians
were ignorant and stupid.
Appalachian Culture and Schooling
Many Appalachians moved to the Columbus area when jobs became scarce in the
coal fields during the 1950’s and 1960’s. Their grandchildren now attend
Columbus public schools. Often within these families are negative memories of
school, of teachers who did not appreciate the types of knowledge that are
important to Appalachian people, teachers who communicated disrespect for
people of this culture.
Appalachian Culture and Schooling
This is Jessrie Tussey, of Greenup
County, Kentucky, who went through
the eighth grade in school. She loved
school and was encouraged by her
teacher to go onto high school but her
family needed her to work on the
farm, so she left school.
When working with students from this culture, understand that the parents of your
students may not be fully supportive of school unless you as a teacher exhibit horse
sense and respect. There may also be some negative family experiences with
school; with your understanding, respect, and support, you may be able to
overcome these barriers. I have used the example of Appalachian culture because
of its importance to the Columbus area, but these principles apply to working with
families of many cultures.
Economic and Social Class
Differences
• Socioeconomic status (SES): relative
standing in the society based on income,
power, background, and prestige.
Economics
• Money (or the lack thereof) has often been a
divide amongst Americans.
Economics
It’s hard to even define who is wealthy and who is poor. The concept is relative: to a
person who struggles to find money for a burger at McDonalds, a middle class person
making $60,000 a year is wealthy. To a middle-class person, someone making $200,000 is
wealthy. To a person making $200,000 a year, a person making $1,000,000 is wealthy.
Economics
People’s economic positions influence their perspectives. For example, the loss of a
material item such as a pair of glasses might be annoying to some people and a complete
disaster to others, depending on how much money they have access to. The people who
would be slightly annoyed may have a hard time imagining the perspective of the person
to whom it is a disaster—and vice versa.
Culture and Economics
• Ruby Payne (A Framework for Understanding
Poverty) argues that each economic class has a
culture that is largely invisible to itself.
• Part of the difficulties we face as educators is the
potential for misunderstandings because of
economic class differences.
Are people poor because they have a bad culture? No. The “culture” of poverty,
according to Celano and Neuman (reference cited later in this slide show), is a “rational
response” to the conditions of poverty—in other words, people who deal with
unmitigated poverty react in certain ways and these ways are reasonable under the
circumstances.
From: Payne, R. (revised, 2003) A Framework for Understanding Poverty. Aha! Process, Inc., p. 42
Economics and Language: Register
Register
Explanation
Frozen
Language that is always the same. For example: Lord’s Prayer,
wedding vows, etc.
Formal
The standard syntax and word choice of work and school. Has
complete sentences and specific word choice. THIS REGISTER IS
NOT TYPICALLY USED IN HOMES OF PEOPLE IN POVERTY,
YET ALL STANDARDIZED TESTS ARE WRITTEN IN THIS
REGISTER.
Consultative Formal register when used in conversation. Discourse pattern not quite
as direct as formal register.
Casual
Language between friends and is characterized by a 400- to 800-word
vocabulary. Word choice general and not specific. Conversation
dependent upon non-verbal assists. Sentence syntax often incomplete.
Intimate
Language between lovers or twins. Language of sexual harassment.
Economics and Language: Narrative
patterns
• Payne also points out that people from different classes tell
stories in different ways and for different reasons.
• In homes that use higher registers, stories are told
chronologically or they move directly toward a point.
• In homes that use lower registers, stories are told for the
purpose of entertainment or to reinforce a relationship
between speaker and listener. Therefore the stories are told
not from “beginning to end” chronologically but the most
emotionally interesting aspect is usually presented first.
Or, the person may be seeming to “beat around the bush”
before getting to the point.
These differences in expectations can influence the quality of health care…
I take my husband to the doctor
Chronology
What the doctor is expecting to
hear:
I’ve had the swelling since May. I
have had a CAT scan and an
ultrasound which found nothing.
How long have
you had this
swelling?
Emotion
What the doctor hears:
It kind of worries me
because it might be cancer.
My buddy had a swelling
on his leg that was cancer.
My husband grew up in poverty. Recently, he had a swelling on his leg and he went to
the doctor to try to find out if he was okay (it turns out that yes, he is).
Appalachian discourse patterns
• Conversations typically begin with the establishment of
the relationship. The first information exchanged is
usually where both participants are from (in Kentucky,
this information consists of the name of the county, e.g.,
Pike County). The next part is establishing who knows
whom—both participants mention people they know who
lived in the area the other person is from. Often someone
will know either the person or a close relative. Once this
is established and pleasantries about the weather have
been exchanged, then business can take place.
• This is a very civilized way of doing things, a lot better
than just taking care of business without developing the
relationship. In the long run, relationships count.
Parent-teacher conferences
• While suburban schools might be able to get away
with short teacher conferences because discourse
patterns used by both parents and teachers are the
similar and are efficient (everyone tends to get to
the point quickly), this is not so in schools that
serve families in poverty. Storytelling takes time
and you will need to listen and participate in order
to establish the relationship. If there is no
relationship, you will not get anything
constructive done.
Cultural Differences: Time
There are two basic approaches to time that cultures tend to take: clock time
and “experience” time. The dominant culture within the US is clock time based
and most institutions, such as schools and government offices, are set up along
clock time values.
Clock time people are
constantly aware of time
in relation to the clock.
An experience begins or
ends when it is scheduled
to do so, no matter what
is going on.
For “experience time”
people, an experience is
not over until it’s over, no
matter how much clock
time that takes.
Clock time people get upset at experience time people because experience time
people often don’t arrive or leave by the clock (they may be significantly late and
they may hang around longer than expected). This discrepancy is a source of
disrespect for experience time people—that experience time people are lazy or
irresponsible. Experience time people get upset at clock time people because clock
time people cut things short just because a machine tells them to; they may feel that
clock time people are not “with it” or are grossly insensitive.
Clock time vs. experience time at a
conference
• I once attended a conference run by clock time people
but that included experience time people. At this
conference was Paulo Friere, a famous educational
philosopher, in one of the last appearances he was
able to make. He spoke to the conference, struggling
to use English (Portuguese was his native language)
and to express complicated ideas. The clock time
folks cut him off when the clock told them the session
was supposed to end. This was upsetting even to
some who had been raised in clock time cultures!
Conference story, continued
• At a subsequent session in which people were
invited to air their concerns, a Native American
woman spoke. She said: “In my culture, we
listen to our elders with respect no matter how
long it takes. I feel this was not done at this
conference.”
If you are a clock time person, you need to be aware of the strengths of cultures
that run on experience time and you need to let go of the clock. You need to let go
of disrespect for experience time people. If you are an experience time person,
when you deal with clock time people, you need to accommodate them somewhat
and understand that they don’t intend disrespect when they are paying attention to
the interaction but also to the clock.
Poverty and School Achievement
• Health, environment, stress
• Low expectations, low academic selfconcept
• Peer influences and resistance cultures
• Tracking: poor teaching
• Home environment and resources
Health, environment, and stress
• Lead poisoning is more common for children in
poverty because they tend to live in older houses
that have lead-based paint (paint manufactured
before the mid 1970’s frequently had lead in it.
Lead-based paint is brittle and tends to chip;
toddlers tend to put in their mouths whatever is on
the floor). Lead poisoning leads to neurological
damage.
• Children in families of poverty breathe more
polluted air, and have less health care than
children in wealthier families.
For you Praxis takers: remember this about lead paint—it has shown up on some Praxis II
PLT exams.
Poverty and teeth
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
One of the characteristics of poverty that can make middle class people feel uncomfortable
is the results of poor dental care to which most people in poverty are exposed.
All the commercials for teeth-whitening products and dentists who repair smiles play on
the anxiety middle class people might feel about their own teeth.
In rural areas, children often drink well water, which has no fluoride in it, so their teeth are
more prone to cavities.
Additionally, with health care being as expensive as it is, dental care is often extremely
low priority for these families. As a result, children don’t get preventive care.
Children in families of poverty may be given sugary pop (“soda” to those outside the
culture) to drink from a very young age because it is cheap and it tastes good.
Finally, dentists who serve people in poverty usually don’t try to save teeth; they tend to
pull them. It’s cheaper to pull a tooth than to give it a $600 crown. It is common to see
people in their twenties with few or no teeth.
This means that many people will be missing individual teeth, will have obviously
diseased teeth, or will be missing all their teeth entirely (and may not have money for false
teeth). They see the same commercials, and they may feel terrible about their appearance,
but they don’t have the money to do something about their teeth.
Poor teeth contributes to nutritional problems—it’s hard to chew food properly with a
toothache or no teeth.
Low expectations—low academic
self-concept
• Traditionally, teachers have thought of low income
students as not being bright—primarily because
cultural differences made it hard to identify HOW
children in poverty are smart.
• When students experience this attitude from their
teachers, they begin to feel that nothing they do
will be effective. They experience “learned
helplessness.” See last chapter for more
information on learned helplessness.
Peer influences and resistance
cultures
• Resistance culture: group values and
beliefs about refusing to adopt the behaviors
and attitudes of the majority culture.
Peer influences and resistance
culture
The attitude of some is, since we can’t join the dominant culture, let’s create our own
culture that is opposed to it. Students who subscribe to resistance cultures choose not to
appear to do well in school since that goes against their peer culture. Not all students in
poverty become part of a resistance culture. The best insurance against resistance cultures
is for students to have real, significant success in school before adolescence.
Tracking: poor teaching
• Tracking: assignment to different classes and
academic experiences based on achievement.
• Tracking has traditionally relegated low SES
students to dumbed-down classes, poor teaching,
and an inferior education. It has given many of
them the message that they are not capable of
learning. Unfortunately, this message tends to
stay with people throughout their lives,
significantly influencing their ability to work,
especially in a technological age.
Cycle of poverty
Schools that:
•Track
•Fail to understand
and support
students in poverty
•Think of students
in poverty as stupid
•Fail to address
learning and other
needs of students.
Receive poor
schooling
Drop out
Born into
poverty
Get lowpaying job
Have kids
who are..
How would this cycle look if schools addressed the needs of ALL students???
Home environment and resources
• From: What’s Holding Black Kids Back?
Kay S. Hymowitz
• Social scientists have long been aware of an immense gap in the way
poor parents and middle-class parents, whatever their color, treat their
children, including during the earliest years of life. On the most
obvious level, middle-class parents read more to their kids, and they
use a larger vocabulary, than poor parents do. They have more books
and educational materials in the house; according to Inequality at the
Starting Gate, the average white child entering kindergarten in 1998
had 93 books, while the average black child had fewer than half that
number. All of that seems like what you would expect given that the
poor have less money and lower levels of education.
http://www.city-journal.org/html/15_2_holding.html
Home environment and resources
• But poor parents differ in ways that are less predictably the
consequences of poverty or the lack of high school diplomas.
Researchers find that low-income parents are more likely to spank or
hit their children. They talk less to their kids and are more likely to
give commands or prohibitions when they do talk: “Put that fork
down!” rather than the more soccer-mommish, “Why don’t you give
me that fork so that you don’t get hurt?” In general, middle-class
parents speak in ways designed to elicit responses from their children,
pointing out objects they should notice and asking lots of questions:
“That’s a horse. What does a horsie say?” (or that middle-class mantra,
“What’s the magic word?”). Middle-class mothers also give more
positive feedback: “That’s right! Neigh! What a smart girl!” Poor
parents do little of this.
http://www.city-journal.org/html/15_2_holding.html
Home environment and resources
• From: Access to Print in Low-Income and Middle-Income
Communities: An Ecological Study of Four Neighborhoods.
• by Susan B. Neuman , Donna Celano
• This study attempted to examine four community environments,
placing print resources specifically under scrutiny. It documented how
differences in economic circumstances translated into extraordinary
differences in the availability of print resources for children who live
in low-or middle-income communities. Inequity was reported in the
number of resources, choice and quality of materials available, public
spaces and places for reading, amount and quality of literacy materials
in child-care center resources--even in the public institutions, the
schools, and local public libraries in the community. Long before
formal schooling begins, considerable variations in patterns of early
literacy development are likely to be evident based on the ways in
which print is organized in communities.
“Access to Print in Low-Income and Middle-Income Communities: An Ecological Study of
Four Neighborhoods.” Donna Celano and Susan B. Neuman. Reading Research Quarterly.
Vol. 36, n. 1. 2001.
Home environment and resources
•
What might be the consequences of differential access for children's literacy
learning? Stanovich and his colleagues (Cunningham & Stanovich, 1997;
Stanovich & Cunningham, 1992; Stanovich, West, & Harrison, 1995), for
example, have proposed an environmental opportunity hypothesis. Children
gain familiarity and practice with exposure to print, creating a reciprocal and
increasingly positive relation toward initial and developing reading
acquisition. However, those children who lack exposure and experiences with
print are less likely to be skilled at the initial acquisition process, less likely to
become involved in reading-related activities, and less motivated to read,
beginning the spiraling effect of the rich-get-richer, poor-get-poorer
phenomenon. Once children are in public schools, the problem often becomes
exacerbated through remedial instruction that exposes less skilled children to
fewer interactions with text than their more skilled peers (Allington, 1983),
providing them ultimately with the very poorest language and literacy
instruction. Such unrewarding experiences in reading multiply, with the
consequences that children attend less to the comprehensibility of reading, its
purpose, and potential usefulness.
Access to print, continued.
Ethnic and racial differences
• Ethnicity: a cultural heritage shared by a
group of people.
• Race: a group of people who share common
biological traits that are seen as selfdefining by the people of the group.
• Minority group: a group of people who
have been socially disadvantaged—not
always a minority in actual numbers.
Legacy of discrimination
• Part of the historical oppression of enslaved
people included laws against teaching them to
read and write.
Legacy of discrimination
• After Emancipation, African Americans
generally had access to inferior materials in
their schools. African American teachers in
these schools were often strongly
committed to providing children with a
good education as a means of liberation but
they worked with second hand torn up
books and in buildings that were often
inadequate.
Legacy of discrimination
•
Therefore, a significant portion of the Civil Rights Movement concerned access
to education. The desire was for access to the same materials as white children,
not a desire to take on the type of majority values that disrespected the rich
history and culture of the African American people.
Legacy of discrimination
• Resistance to integration by those who ran
the schools included tracking African
American students in non-college prep
course work, relegating a disproportionate
number of African Americans to the
educational ghetto of special education
(particularly in the days before
mainstreaming), and disrespecting African
American culture in general.
What is prejudice?
• Prejudgment or irrational generalization
about an entire category of people.
Prejudice
• Human beings rely on vision—categorizing
quickly what we see so we can survive.
This was a critical skill in the prehistoric
days. Anything different in the environment
could be a threat.
Prejudice
• We still have this skill and the feelings that are
associated with it, but we live in a much different
age. We live in a diverse world and we experience
people who are different from us all the time.
• Moreover, we need to develop constructive
relationships with people who are different from
us—we need to know how to work together.
Prejudice
• So, we need to overcome our tendency to judge, based on
appearance.
You can’t judge a book by its cover—or a person by what he or she looks like…
The development of prejudice
• Prejudices develop early—and are brought
to school.
• We need to help students overcome
prejudicial thinking.
Stereotype
• Stereotype: schema that organizes
knowledge or perceptions about a category.
• Our mind uses schemas (networks of
knowledge) to organize knowledge. We
will learn more about this later on.
Stereotypes
• Changing schemas is not easy—and yet
these can strongly influence how we
interact with other people, particularly
people we don’t know.
Stereotypes
Those who supported the desegregation of schools hoped that when children of all races
attended school together, they would get to know each other and overcome some of the
negative stereotypes.
Desegregation: my story
• I grew up in Kentucky, which never seceded
during “the” war (the Civil War, but you never had
to say this—“the” war was all you had to say), but
was a slave state. Brother fought brother, so they
say. After Brown v. Board of Education, school
districts were supposed to be integrated. But
school boards in Kentucky and other places
simply drew lines such that we still had black
schools and white schools. Real estate agents
would never sell a house in a white neighborhood
to an African American person.
Desegregation: my story
• When I was in junior high school, a new decision
came down that said schools had to be integrated,
by busing if necessary. I was in line to change
schools from the white suburban school I attended
during seventh grade to what had previously been
an African American inner city school. Several of
my friends’ parents put them in private school in
order to avoid this change, but I got on the bus and
went to my new school.
Desegregation: my story
• This was the age of Motown and Superfly and while the
white students came into the school, the school retained
much of its dominant African American culture. The two
years I went to this school were the best two years of my
public school education. While I remember moments of
discomfort, I remember a lot of enjoying all aspects of my
school, from the academics to the many clubs one could
join, from the many forms of popular music in the school
to the interactions I had with the whole range of students
who attended the school.
Desegregation: my story
• Many years later, I would work at an inner
city battered women’s shelter and later run
my own shelter in a small town. I credit my
experiences in Lexington Junior High as the
foundation for my being able to talk with,
listen to, and help a wide range of women
and their children.
Desegregation: my story
• Overcoming prejudice is not as simple as simply having
two groups of students go to school together. For example,
in my high school, African American students were
typically tracked lower than white students. All the hightrack courses took place in classrooms in one hall and the
low-track courses took place in another hall. I went to a
segregated high school—we were all in the same building
but there were only two African American students who
were in the high track and were in the courses I took. I
don’t think anyone learned much of anything about
overcoming stereotypes at this high school during that
time.
Discrimination
• Treating or acting unfairly toward particular
categories of people.
• Statistics (given in your book) show that
certain groups continue to be disadvantaged
in certain career paths but also in terms of
the criminal justice system.
Discrimination
• Each generation has gotten somewhat better about discrimination and yet
the cutting edge knowledge in a given generation suggests that more could
be done.
• During the Civil Rights movements, there were egregious forms of
discrimination—such as “whites only” water fountains. Cutting edge
knowledge then suggested that this was unfair. Many at the time resisted
that knowledge.
Discrimination
• We all accept now that “whites only” water
fountains and other “Jim Crow” practices are
wrong. Some of us may think that everything is
just fine.
• Cutting edge knowledge now says we still have
things to work on. Discrimination has become
more subtle than signs over water fountains.
• Each generation has to find a way to understand
and incorporate its cutting edge knowledge for the
benefit of all people. Racism benefits no one,
least of all the racist.
Stereotype threat
• The extra emotional or cognitive burden
that your performance in an academic
situation might confirm a stereotype that
others hold about you.
• This is an added pressure in addition to the
normal pressures of assessment.
Stereotype threat
• Can affect anyone
• Is a form of anxiety
• Anxiety makes test performance even more
difficult.
Disidentification
• One longterm effect of stereotype threat is
disidentification. The thinking is, “they say
I can’t do this, and since it’s hard for me to
do it, then instead of being part of their
stereotype, I’ll redefine the task as uncool
and choose not to do it.” It’s choosing to
flunk instead of being flunked.
Unfortunately, not all who choose to flunk
would flunk. So, it’s self-defeating.
Combating stereotype threat
• When people believe that intelligence is
improvable (in other words, they have the
possibility of controlling something), they
tend to do better.
• Guess what you need to tell students?
Girls and boys: differences in
the classroom
• Sexual identity: a complex combination of
beliefs and orientations about gender roles
and sexual orientation.
• Gender-role identity: beliefs about
characteristics and behaviors associated
with one sex as opposed to the other.
How much of this is “nature” and how much of this is “nurture” remains to be seen.
Lots of people have strong opinions in several different directions—and current
research on both sides reflects this divide.
From the Hippocratic Oath
• Doctors at the beginning of their careers swear an
oath that includes the following:
• “I WILL FOLLOW that method of treatment
which according to my ability and judgment, I
consider for the benefit of my patient and abstain
from whatever is harmful or mischievous.”
• Perhaps we, as teachers, need to do the same—use
our best professional judgment and attempt to do
no harm, particularly when dealing with issues
that potentially have a great emotional impact on
students.
Gender roles
• These result as a complex mix of biology
(hormones, etc.) and experience.
• Gender schemas: organized networks of
knowledge about what it means to be male
or female.
• Our gender schemas have a significant
influence on how we feel about ourselves
and what we expect from ourselves.
Gender biases in the schools
• Different views of males and females, often favoring
one gender over the other.
• The problem with gender bias is that it limits people’s
possibilities: perhaps a young man is well-suited
intellectually and emotionally for a career in nursing,
but if he never sees a male nurse, he might miss out
on the possibility of a very satisfying career. Perhaps
a young woman is equally suited for a career as a
scientific researcher, but if she believes that girls
aren’t good at science, she may miss out on being
everything she is capable of being.
Gender stereotyping in curriculum
Traditional curricular materials supported gender biases (as well as leaving out people of
color). In the world of Dick and Jane, a series used in schools from the 1930’s until the
1970’s, little girls wear dresses and little boys take the lead in many activities.
Research??????
Girls do
worse than
boys in math
and science
?????
Boys are more
often in remedial
classes
Girls’
participation in
class declines as
they grow older
Boys get
called on
more than
girls
Women earn
more college
degrees than
men
Boys fail
more often
than girls
What to do?
• Communicate openly with students about gender
issues and concerns
• Eliminate gender bias in instructional activities
(make sure girls are doing math and that
everyone gets called on equally, for instance)
• Present students with nonstereotypical role
models (male nurses, female scientists, etc.)
Language differences in the
classroom
• Dialects
• Bilingualism
Dialects
• Dialect: rule-governed variation of a language
spoken by a particular group.
• These variations from “standard” are not errors.
They occur as a result of history (e.g.,
Appalachian English is a different outgrowth of
Elizabethan English) or influence of other
languages (certain aspects of African-American
dialect were influenced by various African
languages; aspects of Cajun English are influenced
by French).
Phun with Phonics
“The work we done was hard…
at night we’d sleep ‘cause we
were tired…”
In this excerpt from her autobiographical
song, Coal Miner’s Daughter, Loretta Lynn
creates a rhyme between “hard” and “tired.”
In Appalachian dialect, these words rhyme
because of the dialectic tendency to shift the
long-I to an “a” sound.
Loretta Lynn, Appalachian singer
More Phun with Phonics
Are ye ready to dig
out them taters?
First syllables tend to get dropped (“taters,” “maters,” etc.) unless they are important
for understanding the word. If they are important, they become accented: HO-tel, POlice, UM-brella
Phun with Phonics in School
• This means that a child who speaks
Appalachian dialect at home will have a
hard time with phonics materials written in
“standard” English. The vegetable we love
to mash and smother in gravy on
Thanksgiving does NOT begin with a “P”
sound in this dialect. “Tar” and “tire” are
homophones.
Phun with Phonics in School
• Appalachian dialect uses a different vocabulary. I
remember hearing about a big-city kindergarten
teacher completely misunderstanding a rural child
who said, “I ain’t got ary pencil.” The child meant
that he did not possess a pencil. “Ary” and “nary”
are substitutes for “any.” Some of this vocabulary
is from the English of Shakespeare’s time—it was
preserved in Appalachian English while it was lost
in standard English.
Advantages of dialects
• Dialects say things that standard English cannot.
• For example, standard English used to have a way to
indicate second person singular (thou) and second person
plural (you) just the way German and French do (and other
languages). But that distinction got lost around two
hundred years ago.
• Therefore, it’s easy to get misunderstood: “I would like
you to come to my party.” Does that mean one person or
all of us standing here?
• As a result, several English dialects have developed ways
of differentiating between you singular and you plural:
“you/y’all” in Southern, “you/you-uns (ones)” in
Appalachian, “you/youse-guys” in New York City dialect.
Advantages of dialects
• There is a certain amount of charm in the regional
and ethnic differences of American speech. New
Englanders say, “In Vuh-mont theah ah two
seasons: win-tah and put’ neah wintah.”
(Translation: “In Vermont, there are two seasons:
winter and pretty near winter.”). Some books
(notably, Alice Walker’s The Color Purple) were
written in dialect and this adds to how vividly the
story can be imagined by the reader—it adds a
significant sound element.
I grew up in Kentucky, living with a father who was from Maine. Then we moved to upstate
New York for a year…I enjoyed hearing all these differences in speech patterns and
vocabulary and eventually learned how to speak all these dialects.
Code-switching
• Successful switching between cultures in
language, dialect, or nonverbal behaviors to
fit the situation.
• Dialect speakers need to be able to do
this—to use their home dialect at home and
to use academic English.
• Students can be taught directly to do this.
Dialects: what to do?
• Talk to kids about school English and home English
• Kids need to learn school English in order to succeed
academically but home English must be valued, too. To
fail to value home English means that we are rejecting a
child’s home culture. This can be devastating to a child.
• Encourage translations between home and school English,
in both directions—this helps students to code-switch.
• Encourage exploration of dialects and the advantages that
dialects bring to language
• Use literature in dialect as well as literature in academic
English
Bilingualism
• The ability to speak two languages fluently.
• This term is actually a joke—in many cultures, children grow up
speaking three or four languages.
• I was once in a bookstore in Brussels, Belgium. I heard the owner of
the store speak to people in fluent English, Flemish, and French—in
rapid succession. Many people in Europe speak three to five
languages. There are three official languages in Switzerland: English,
German, and French. People in India regularly speak Hindi, English,
and a local language, of which there are many. The great linguist,
Charles Berlitz spoke many languages and the language in which he
dreamed depended on the person he was dreaming about—he dreamed
in the subject of his dream’s language.
• We should call this concept “multi-lingualism,” but the U.S. is so
notably monolinguistic that we can only imagine learning two
languages.
Bilingualism: cultural issues
• But language is not just language. It is a representation of
culture, and this can get tricky for multi-lingual students.
Some languages are preferred in school settings, notably
English. It is common for children to learn English at
school and then to stop communicating in their native
language at home because the home language represents a
culture that is not American and the students are trying to
fit in.
• This situation cuts the students off from their own heritage
and it can also create significant disciplinary problems—
the parent cannot speak enough English to be aware of
exactly what the student is doing or to place limits on a
child’s behavior.
Becoming multi-lingual
• Learning another language is not just a
matter of picking up grammar and
vocabulary. A language represents a way of
thinking and this way of thinking differs
from other ways of thinking. So, you have
to learn the thinking pattern as well as the
grammar and vocabulary.
“Bilingual” education
• Remember that English may be a third or
even fourth language for some students, so
“teaching English as a second language” is
a serious misnomer.
• English Language Learners (ELL) [a more
accurate term than ESL—English as a
Second Language]: students whose primary
or heritage language(s) is/are not English.
ESL: designation [however problematic the name] for programs and classes to teach
English to students who are not native speakers of English.
Semilingual students
• Students who are not proficient in any
language; speaking one or more languages
inadequately.
Semilingualism and the history of
deaf education
• Across the history of the education of people with
hearing impairments, there have been two major
camps: the oralists (speech) and the manualists
(sign). The oralists argued that teaching deaf
people to speak orally and read lips would make it
easier for them to communicate with the
mainstream. Unfortunately, these are very
difficult skills for the profoundly deaf to acquire.
The manualists argued that deaf people should
primarily learn sign as their language and then
they can learn English secondarily.
Semilingualism
• The oralists held sway for awhile:
• “Signing in the classroom became a forbidden thing. Anecdotally,
people have shared stories about being forced to sit on their hands. It
was not uncommon for children to have their hands slapped for
signing. The issue of corporal punishment, when seen in the light of
earlier teaching practices, does not seem cruel. Children, both hearing
and deaf, were disciplined this way when they disobeyed. However,
upon reflection, these deaf children had poor communication with their
teachers and no effective way of communicating among
themselves. The fairness of harsh discipline under these circumstances
is questionable. As a result of these attitudes and practices, signing
was done in secret and ASL was often taught to the younger children
by the older youths in the residential institutions.”
Options in Deaf Education—History, Methodologies, and Strategies for Surviving the
System By: Cheryl Zapien July 15, 1998 http://www.listen-up.org/edu/options1.htm
Semilingualism
• Insisting upon oral methods only created
generations of semilingual people among the
profoundly deaf—they could not communicate in
English terribly well and they had no native sign
language in which they could communicate well.
It was often extremely difficult to teach these
people to read well because reading is a skill that
is built on the ability to speak and understand
language.
The tragedy of semilingualism
• Because language is so central to thinking,
when people are denied access to some kind
of complex language, they are denied access
to a significant portion of the ability to think
and to the ability express their thinking.
Creating Culturally Inclusive
Classrooms
• Culturally relevant pedagogy
• Fostering resilience
Culturally inclusive classrooms: classrooms that provide culturally diverse
students equitable access to the teaching and learning process.
Culturally relevant pedagogy
• Excellent teaching for students of color that
includes academic success,
developing/maintaining cultural
competence, and developing a critical
consciousness to challenge the status quo.
In other words…
• There are two basic views of education. One view
is that the purpose of schools is to replicate society
as it is—underclass and all. The argument is that
we need a class of cheap workers because of all
our service industries (Walmart and McDonalds
workers). According to this view, it’s okay to track
students because we need underachievers. If
everyone were an overachiever, who would be
willing to work for minimum wage? This is the
way we keep the cost of goods cheap.
In other words… continued…
• The second view is that the purpose of
education is to “liberate” people—to help
people rise above their class level, to break
the cycle of poverty that was shown in a
previous slide. History is replete with
people who, because of education, were able
to rise to great heights, such as the great
orator, abolitionist, and former slave,
Frederick Douglass. The goal in this view is
to eliminate the underclass so that everyone
has a chance to use his/her talents to the
maximum.
Democracy
• Since we have a government that is “by the
people, for the people, and of the people,” it
does make sense that we educate “the
people” to the best of our ability. We have a
long way to go to live up to this ideal, but
this generation is making significant strides
in this direction.
Culturally relevant pedagogy
• Experience academic success—we need to
teach so that all children experience real
(not pretend) success. This means that we
need to develop a variety of ways of getting
ideas across to accommodate the diverse
mindsets and experiences of our students.
Culturally relevant pedagogy
• Develop and maintain cultural competence:
students need to develop cultural competence
within academic culture while maintaining
competence in their home culture. This can be
done when we model and teach respect and
admiration for home cultures. We need to actively
teach code-switching strategies. We can use
examples from students’ home cultures to teach
concepts (such as using rap to teach rhyme and
other poetic devices).
Culturally relevant pedagogy
• Develop a critical consciousness to challenge the
status quo: every generation has areas in which it
is making positive strides and areas in which
negative conditions remain. African American
students during the Civil Rights movement had to
challenge the status quo of Jim Crow laws in the
south. Today’s students of color and/or poverty
need to challenge the idea that the underclass must
remain intact and that certain groups of people are
relegated to holding three minimum wage jobs (if
they go the legal route) just to make ends meet.
Fostering resilience
• Resilience: the ability to adapt successfully
in spite of difficult circumstances and
threats to development.
Students At Risk for Failure
Think about:
What does this mean
for our society?
What can we as
educators do?
Factors:
Poverty
Inner City
Transient
Minority
ELL
Divorced families
Consequences:
Dropping out
Bad grades
Failing
Lack of motivation
Poor attendance
Drug use
Classroom management problems
Low self-esteem
Crime
Low test scores
Suspension
Some researchers
prefer the more
positive term:
“students of
promise” —
students who
potentially can
succeed.
Resilience: a learner characteristic that raises the likelihood of success in school and in
other aspects of life, despite environmental adversities.
Resilience
Another
definition of
resilience: the
ability to be
flexible and to
handle a
variety of
circumstances
without being
side-tracked
from your own
goals by
adversity.
Participation
in afterschool
activities
Order and high
structure
High,
uncompromising
academic standards
Strong personal
bonds between
teachers &
students
Think about
WHY these
things promote
resilience
Cultural values and learning
preferences
Teachers who design culturally inclusive classrooms:
• Recognize various ways students display
capabilities
• Respond to students’ preferred ways of learning
• Understand that a particular group’s cultural
practices may not apply to everyone in that group
Sociolinguistics
• Sociolinguistics: the study of the formal and
informal rules for how, when, about what, to
whom and how long to speak in conversations
within cultural groups.
• Pragmatics: the rules for when and how to use
language to be an effective communicator in a
particular culture.
• Participation structures: the formal and informal
rules for how to take part in a given activity.
Sociolinguistics
• The rules for how to participate are significant but
often unspoken. For instance, in some families,
it’s common for people to talk over one another—
not to wait their turn to speak. Yet in classrooms,
this behavior is considered rude and inappropriate.
Traditionally, children have been expected to
figure out how to participate in classrooms
appropriately and children who have not been able
to figure this out for themselves have been
punished or considered dumb.
Culturally relevant teaching
• Culturally relevant teachers don’t make
students guess what is appropriate: they
make all aspects of the classroom, including
rules for how to “do” school (e.g., how to
converse in the classroom, how to transition
from one activity to another, how to behave
in the halls) explicit rather than implicit.
Culturally relevant teaching
• This is like Universal Design for Learning: when
we accommodate the needs of one group of
students (students not from the dominant culture)
we are actually helping all students. There are
students from the dominant culture who are not
good at picking up implicit rules about
interactions, notably people with Asperger
Syndrome or Autism. Making rules and practices
explicit potentially benefits all students.
The digital divide
• The disparities in access to technology
between poor and more affluent students
and families.
Technology and the workforce
• A century ago, there were many jobs that
did not require a person to be able to read.
A person with little or no formal education
could support a family with one of these
jobs.
• With the industrial revolution came jobs
that required more education, including the
ability to read.
Technology and the workforce
• Now, with the information technology
revolution, people not only need to know
how to read well, they also need to know
how to use a personal computer. Even cash
registers are now computers.
Technology and the workforce
• Computer literacy is AS important as
linguistic literacy. Yet because of the digital
divide, the underclass remains, because
their children don’t have easy access to
information technology.
Technology and the workplace
• Schools have the potential to reduce the
effects of this divide, by providing access to
computers and computer education to
students.
Vocabulary
Culturally
BilingualDiscriminclusive
ism
ination
classrooms
Gender
biases
Minority
group
Culturally English as
Coderelevant a second
switching
pedagogy language
Genderrole
identity
Multicultural
education
Gender
schemas
ParticiSociopation Resilience economic
structures
status
Melting
pot
Prejudice
Culture
Dialect
English
language
learners
Cultural
deficit
model
Digital
divide
Ethnicity
Pragmatics
Semilingual
Stereotype
Race
Sexual
identity
Stereotype
threat
Resistance Socioculture linguistics
Tracking