Teaching in
the Multicultural Classroom
30-minute in-class presentation for LIN 544 by
Lisa Dicksteen, Jackie Petrassi,
& Dwayne Whitaker
Introduction: Dwayne (5 minutes)
In
researching this presentation, we reviewed a lot of research on creating a
classroom environment in which the widest variety of students would feel
comfortable, safe, and able to attend to their studies. We are going to begin
by introducing you to some of the interesting and useful information we
uncovered.
·
Students in the
typical classroom community represent a wide variety of countries and cultures.
·
There has been a
dramatic increase in the number of international students who are now in
According
to Louise Rosenblatt, who was quoted in the Howard Miller article in our
textbook as “the grandé dame of reader response
theory,” in order to be successful multicultural education needs to embrace
both “efferent” reading (reading for Information) and “aesthetic” (reading as a
personal, emotional experience).
·
Teachers have
come to value the aesthetic in reading, and as writing as well and often
encourage students to share personal responses in their journals.
·
Children of
color living in poverty and/or learning English are grossly over represented in
the group of unsuccessful literacy students.
·
Through 15 years
of research, MacGillivray and Rueda
have discovered evidence that differentiated instruction, which involves
teachers creating a variety of methods for infusing phonics, word analysis,
vocabulary development, and comprehension strategies into subject-area
instruction in order to help diverse kinds of learners, substantially improves
children’s chances for becoming competent readers and writers.
·
They strongly
believe that problems are situated within specific contexts, such as a child’s
unique approach to reading, or a specific subject area’s inherent difficulty,
much more than within specific individuals. They believe in the intelligence of
the individual and demand that teachers scaffold English language learners with
the appropriate information about the language, the background information on
the subject of the text, and/or the reading approach that might be most useful
to the specific student in question.
·
As a result,
educators must have a repertoire of strategies so they can vary their
interactions and curriculum as needed.
MacGillivray and Rueda developed some guidelines for
teachers working in multicultural environments, they include:
In
a review of Jane Ayers Chiong’s book, Becoming and Unbecoming White: Owning and Disowning a Racial Identity
in Transformation magazine, which
looks at the unique problems faced by multiracial and multiethnic children and
the teachers who want to include them but don’t know quite how, the reviewers
quote Chiong saying that teachers may unconsciously
transmit confused identities to interracial children through the use of racial
categorization procedures and a lack of awareness and appreciation of
multicultural identity.
·
The majority of
the teachers she interviewed acknowledged that, when discussing multicultural
issues, they rarely or never discussed multiracial identity or individuals, and
that cultural events celebrating or acknowledging diversity did not include
multiracial individuals either.
Kevin
Kumashiro’s article, The ‘Acceptability’ of Race/Gender/Sexuality-Based Discrimination in
Democratic Schools, which
was also published in Transformations, explains that, “When
schools define academic achievement in terms of repetition—that is, of
repeating the ‘official knowledge’ of mainstream society, as captured by the
‘core disciplines’—schools necessarily are engaging in perpetuating only
certain knowledges and marginalizing others.” This
results in a type of inadvertent discrimination within even the most globally
oriented classroom.
·
In looking
beyond the classroom, teachers and administrators need the support of the
community, and some larger societal issues need to be part of this
conversation.
Edmund
W. Gordon, the first director of Head
Start, had this to say about the effect of poverty on the classroom:
·
“I think schools
can be much more powerful, but I don’t think they can reverse all the ill
effects of a starkly disadvantaged status in society.”
·
As noted in the
guidelines developed by MacGillivray and Rueda, learning about the economic realities of children’s
families and their local community issues can enable teachers to see the
complex relationship between economic opportunities and poverty, and the learning
rates and styles of the children in their classrooms.
·
In a related
point, no special research is needed for us to understand that most of the
schools serving poor children have fewer resources than those in middle and
upper-class neighborhoods. Many educational opportunities are expensive, and so
they never reach many of the students who need them most.
·
Safety and
health issues are rarely discussed problems that decrease children’s chances
for being successful literacy learners. Many teachers in high-needs districts
continue to fight for access to the same conditions taken for granted in
suburban schools.
According
to Peregoy & Boyle, success in reading,
especially literacy, is one of the most important achievements for all students
due to its key role in academic learning and consequent social and economic
opportunities. Among the other things they tell us:
·
English learners
are diverse. These students vary in age, prior educational experiences,
cultural heritage, socioeconomic status, country of origin, and levels of both
primary and English language development, including literacy development.
·
These factors
are exacerbated by the lack of consistent research on second language reading
processes and lack of agreement across the teaching spectrum regarding such
basic issues as whole language versus phonics.
·
One unifying
factor is that the process of reading in English is essentially similar for all
readers, whether they are native or non-native English readers. The process
involves decoding written symbols into the language they represent in order to
arrive at meaning.
According
to Peregoy & Boyle, all good readers do the following:
·
Approach a text
with a particular purpose.
·
Bring some prior
knowledge to the text.
·
Activate prior
knowledge by imagining what they know and do not know about the topic,
predicting what the text will be about, and generating questions the text might
answer.
·
Begin reading by
visually processing the print from left to right, and from the top to the
bottom of the page, given that we are talking about reading in English.
The
more experience teachers have working with English language learners, the more
knowledgeable they become in determining those aspects of English their
students are apt to find difficult.
One
of the major issues for teachers of diverse classroom populations is the “way
in which many people remain oblivious to their own assumptions about the
existence of a division between ‘our culture’ and ‘other cultures’, as well as
some of the information about marginalized cultures that passes for fact within
the dominant culture.”
·
This issue is
examined by Christine Sleeter in her article, Creating an Empowering Multicultural Curriculum
in the July 2000 issue of Race, Class
& Gender magazine. She looks at
how "accepted” ideas are actually the creations of people with
particular points of view and how those biases become entrenched beliefs – even
“truths”, without examination or reference to the “other” cultures about whom
they are talking.
·
In the
classroom, this often takes the form of focusing on food and holidays in an
effort to “include” those students who are “other” without really learning
anything about them. This can often have the opposite effect, resulting in the
children of non-dominant cultures or races feeling put on display or exhibited
as curiosities rather than welcomed and accepted for who and what they are.
In
an effort to more clearly convey the way in which those students might feel
when taking a standardized test designed by the dominant culture, I am going to
hand the program over to Lisa now.
At this point, Lisa explains and
administers the exam, (during which we all walk around the classroom answering
individual questions as they arise). After 10 minutes, Lisa leads the post-test
Q&A for 10 minutes. Then she turns it over to Jackie to wrap up for the
final 5 minutes.
If the SAT were really
geared toward testing a diverse, multi-cultural student body, the questions
would look rather different from the ones of 10 years ago, different even from
the ones being asked on the current, much improved, version.
This is a brief test based
on what a completely multi-cultural SAT might look like. We want you to take
it, mark your answers (you don’t need a #2 pencil) and then make a few notes
about how you felt as you encountered the questions which are based on things
that would be considered “stuff everyone knows” in any culture in which they
were raised; fairy tale characters and plots, basic religious figures, major
historical events.
You will have 10 minutes.
Go!
Wrap Up: Jackie (5 minutes)
Now that you have
all taken the fake SAT-style test we created, you have a more visceral
understanding of the frustration and sense of inadequacy with which children
raised in another culture face school in
Here’s the appetizer:
As the world gets
metaphorically smaller and smaller, we will have more and more diversity in our
classrooms, and we will be more and more responsible for shaping the world of
tomorrow by how we educate the children of today. It is essential that we help
as many of our students as possible to become skilled readers and truly
literate adults able to function in a diverse society.
Christine Sleeter’s article, Creating an Empowering Multicultural Curriculum, published in Race, Gender & Class, provides some interesting
approaches to this process:
·
She says, “Learning
to construct a good multicultural curriculum is an on-going process…[and as we] grappl[e] with the
questions about what is most worth teaching…[we are] constantly learning. Every
time I teach, the students are different, the context is different, and I bring
to the enterprise a deeper understanding of the central issues than I had last
time I taught similar concepts.” This quote represents a central truth about developing
the multicultural curriculum, or any curriculum, and that is progression.
·
This confirms
what Dwayne mentioned earlier from the Peregoy &
Boyle article, regarding the fact that the more experience teachers have
working with English language learners, the more knowledgeable they become in
determining those aspects of English their students are apt to find difficult.
·
Sleeter confirms the
importance of the multicultural curriculum when she says it “delves into issues
that touch the core of our own personal and community-based identities, [so] doing
it well brings a personal, as well as an intellectual response.”
Now, the meat
course:
·
The concept of
creating a multicultural curriculum has a long history of difficulty. Just
adding “others” into the curriculum doesn’t automatically change anything. In
fact, as Dwayne mentioned earlier, Sleeter has found
that it can even make things worse by simply dumping in some information about
the food and holidays of the “different” students in the class in an effort to
“include” them without making the effort to really learn anything about them.
This approach can work a little like adding something to a batter without
incorporating it fully – lumps. In this case, children of non-dominant cultures
or races feeling put on display or exhibited as curiosities rather than
welcomed and accepted for who and what they are.
·
The idea is not
only to add attention to those who have traditionally been excluded, but also
to address exclusion itself. Simply adding “difference” to the same old curriculum
will not provide a multicultural curriculum that empowers. Multiculturalism
should not merely recapture “lost” traditions in order to display the diversity
of
·
She further
addresses the issues of unintended racism in the classroom when considering the
teaching of history, referring to the perspective from which it a given history
is told as that history’s center, a locus she reminds us is entirely moveable.
“History is somebody's story about what happened. Renditions
of
·
Sleeter agrees that “at
first, asking whose experience defines how a narrative is centered may lead to
fragmentation, as a multiplicity of narratives come
forth. However, centering narratives from the margins has the potential to open
up an examination of marginalization itself. For teachers building
multicultural curriculum, this is critically important.”
Allison Bernstein and
her co-authors call this kind of simple multiculturalism an “empty,
hollowed-out vision,” in their article, What directions do you foresee for curriculum transformation and
inclusive pedagogy in the first decade of the next millennium? in the journal Transformations.
·
They tell us
that the task of “curriculum transformers” is to etch a more “precise and
nuanced politics of power relations.” It is not enough to simply take differences
into account, but to recognize and examine the particular historical context of
unequal social and cultural scholarly efforts.
·
According to
Elizabeth Kamarck Minnich
in the same article, it is important to continue critiquing new fields of knowledge
and ways of teaching all the time. Focusing on excluded and marginalized
knowledge and ways of thinking seeks to comprehend both differences and
similarities, deepening our interests and concerns across identities, fields,
communities, nations, and causes.
Here are your veggies:
Many students come
alive when they recognize that what they are learning about is real,
challenging, and ethical. Once again, we are able to come full circle and
connect this to Dwayne’s earlier remarks about learning about the out-of-school
lives of your students, especially those from other cultures. When lessons
connect with young people’s everyday experiences, they are engaged, and when
they are engaged, they learn more.
·
In Sleeter’s article, she quotes John Dewey saying “education
in a democratic society must enable young people to think about and act
responsibly and ethically on social issues, and help young people learn to see
others’ points of view.”
·
Sleeter mentions a study
of eleven social studies classrooms in grades five through eleven, conducted by
C.Cornbleth, which found a wider diversity of people
in the room, but a lack of any “rework[ing of the]
content into a comprehensible new narrative that analyzes racism, poverty, and
sexism, and does so in a way that suggests citizen action.”
·
Sleeter says, “We are
living in a time of rapid global consolidation of power into the hands of a very wealthy, white elite.” She argues that a truly multicultural
curriculum must focus on the issues surrounding exclusion and power, and give
all the students we encounter the tools to operate effectively as literate
communicators in the language of the dominant culture when the need arises. And
we must do this without quashing their ability to communicate in, and be proud
of, their home languages.
And now for
dessert:
The most recent school
reforms involve an increase in high-stakes standardized tests, which lead
inexorably to a more and more standardized curriculum giving lip service to
diversity without really incorporating it into its central views and thinking.
·
Sleeter argues that “many
educators and citizens have grown tired of struggling over issues related to
diversity, and prefer to think about more ‘pressing’ concerns, such as
students’ test scores.” She feels that many people think multicultural
discussions create dissention, and, in order to maintain unity and high test
scores, curriculum changes must be developed with some form of consensus. And
we all know what happens when major decisions are made by majority vote.
·
However, as both
schools and the wider society continue to diversify, gaps among racial and
social class groups widen and a curriculum based on the dominant culture
becomes less and less able to provide solutions to the problems that face a
multicultural society.
·
“Multicultural
curricula for tomorrow’s citizens must work with insights of minority position,”
says Sleeter. And, as we have noted earlier, today’s
students need access to the kinds of thinking that will enable them to deal
with issues of race, class, and gender, and render them able to use this
knowledge “within current global systems of power.” The route to this power is
through the development of a truly multicultural curriculum, and the education
of all our students into skilled readers and writers of English.
THE END
Annotated Bibliography
Blake, Michelle Emery, Cashwell, Suzie T. “Use of Poetry to Facilitate
Communication About Diversity: An Educational Model.” Race, Gender & Class.
The use of metaphor was extensively examined as a method of
revealing connections and ”disclosing feelings and
thoughts that would not be possible to capture otherwise.” Poetry itself is
described as a powerful communication tool that “may be uniquely able to
capture the thoughts and feelings of an individual and express these so that
they can be readily understood,” as well as a way to “glimpse an individual's
‘standpoint,’ which "emerges from one's social position with regard to
gender, culture, color, ethnicity, class, and sexual orientation and how these
factors interact and affect one's everyday world." It grew out of a
three-hour focus group on the use of poetry to enhance group communication
around issues of gender and cultural diversity.
Blezard, Richard. “We Don’t Use That
Language Anymore.” Teaching Tolerance Magazine. Number 23. Spring 2003.
www.tolerance.org (a web project of the Southern Poverty Law Center). Accessed
This article looks at a long-term project of the
Southern Poverty Law Center focusing on changing behavior through changing
language. It contains examples of gay bashing that, when researched by Steve Wessler, former head hate-crimes prosecutor in the Maine
Attorney General’s Office, and founder of the Center for the Prevention of Hate
Violence at the University of Southern Maine “invariably [began with] a history
of escalating conduct, and it started with language." The main tool of the
center, “training young people to speak up against put-downs,” is based on the
idea that silence equals acceptance. “Most students who engage in name-calling
or tell demeaning jokes don’t have deeply thought-out and deep-seated bias
towards particular groups, Wessler says. Often,
they’re just picking up on the messages they hear repeated again and again in
the schools. When peers challenge the language, it not only cuts down on the
degrading messages themselves, but it also sparks classmates to challenge
perceptions and stereotypes. The program works by disrupting the pattern of
thoughtless, habitual name-calling prevalent in many schools. In teaching
students about the harm caused by careless words, the Center appeals to their
natural sense of decency. The training empowers students to put "doing
right" over peer pressure when it comes to daily interactions. Challenging
the culture of name-calling and teasing can be as simple as saying, ‘We don’t
talk like that in this school’ or ‘I don’t like that kind of talk.’ Or even
just shaking your head or pointing a finger. All of which are inherently doable
by anyone.
Bullivant, B. “Culture: Its Nature and
Meaning for Educators.” J. A. Banks & C. A. Banks (Eds.), Multicultural
Education Issues and Perspectives.
Several reviews of this popular book indicate that it looks
closely at the ongoing debate regarding how to classify the children of mixed
race marriages. “Limited research is beginning to show that multiracial and
multiethnic children not only have identity needs that are different from
single-race children, but that they are suffering in our programs because their
unique needs are not being met.” According to the US Census,
Childs, Erica. (REVIEW) Clark, Christine and James
O'Donnell (Eds.). Becoming and Unbecoming White: Owning and Disowning a Racial
Identity; Chiong, Jane Ayers. Racial Categorization
of Multiracial Children in Schools. Transformations.
This review offers a detailed
looks into a book that is examining one of the issues most often passed over in
the search for multicultural diversity in the classroom – the multiracial
student. Conducting original research by interviewing teachers and school
personnel about their categorization of multiracial children resulted in the
theory that “teachers
may unconsciously transmit confused identities to interracial children, through
the use of racial categorization procedures, and through a lack of awareness
and appreciation of multiracial identity. Many of the teachers reported
incidents where numerous problems arose over the categorization of multiracial
children, and often the categorization was based on the needs of the school
rather than any legitimate criteria. The majority of the teachers also
acknowledged that when discussing multicultural issues, they rarely or never
discussed multiracial identity or individuals; cultural events celebrating or
acknowledging diversity did not include multiracial individuals; and the
libraries did not have any books about the multiracial experience (when asked,
they cited books about monoracial minority
experiences). The book encourages an approach to multicultural education that
incorporates the recognition and appreciation of those individuals who are multiracial
and/or multicultural, yet the reviewer indicates that there is a lack of
substantial input from those who feel that in some cases multiracial children
should be raised as one race or the other, so that they will have a stronger
sense of their own identity. This seems like a small flaw that could be
rectified by using this book in conjunction with some of the available
biographical material written by white mothers of black/white children who
strongly advocate for raising these children as black.
Goings, Kenneth W., Rothenberg, Paula, Bernstein, Alison, Minnich, Elizabeth Kamarck, Anderson, Mia. “Forum: What directions do you foresee for
curriculum transformation and inclusive pedagogy in the first decade of the
next millennium?” Transformations.
The authors here are interested in
insuring that while teachers strive to “globalize” the curriculum they do not
inadvertently "exoticize” women and “others” and end up producing a
curriculum which is reminiscent of recent ad campaigns for Levy's rye bread and
Phillip Morris cigarettes. Such an approach ends up offering a mindless
celebration of ‘diversity’ in lieu of a radical interrogation of the
construction of “difference”. It encourages faculty and students to race to a
premature sense of “community”, one which ignores existing hierarchies and
corresponding inequities, leaving them unnoticed and unchallenged. They are
interested in insuring that curriculum is broadened and deepened at the same
time. In this effort they deconstruct multiculturalism in the classroom and, in
re-assembling it, try to include the “politics of power relations” as well as
how race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, language, and religion
intersect with the equally important issues of “historical contexts of unequal
social, cultural and economic resources and thus, political choices.” The
author is interested in “reintroduc[ing] the ‘political to the personal’ in [teachers’]
scholarly and pedagogical efforts.”
Kumashiro, Kevin. “The
‘Acceptability’ of Race/Gender/Sexuality-Based Discrimination in Democratic
Schools.” Transformations.
This article argues that while “legally and ideally,”
students attending schools in
Mathison, Carla. “The Best of
Intentions: The Challenges of Cross-Cultural Communication.” Transformations.
This article asks us to “Think about a belief (political,
religious, etc.) that you hold strongly. What would it take to make you
significantly change that belief? Our belief systems and their conceptual
building blocks are critical to us as we interpret and bring meaning to our
experiences. They are what hold us together, giving us a perceptual lens
through which to view the world in which we live. The network of concepts
comprising our beliefs is complex. Again, think about the concepts you have
formed, for example, about homeless people, wealthy people, religious people,
business people, college professors. Some of these
concepts are more easily defined than others. Ironically, it is likely that we
are more aware of the conceptual definitions we hold for people, events, and
ideas to which we have less exposure. For instance, we may be much more aware
of our concept of homeless people than we are of our concepts of college
professors. That doesn't mean we don't have conceptual understandings about
college professors, it simply means those understandings are often invisible to
us because we may know so many professors and be (sic) exposed to them so
often, that a relatively simple, narrow conceptual classification of them may
be impossible. This is why our more pervasive stereotypes tend to be of people
with whom (or ideas with which) we have the least prolonged interaction. If we
want to understand the world from someone else's perspective, we need to
venture from the parameters that presently frame our own understandings. If we
are open to new learning, we actively pursue the learning of something outside
our conceptual comfort zone. Respecting individuals from other cultures means
we have to know something about other cultures (besides food) and some of what
we learn may require rather radical adjustments in our thinking. But what
happens when our beliefs are challenged?” This is a detailed look at the
“socially constructed and culturally shaped process” that occurs every time we
interact with anyone, whether individually or in a group, with special emphasis
on the teacher/student and student/student dynamic.
MacGillivray, Laurie, Rueda,
Robert. “Listening to Inner City Teachers of English Language Learners:
Differentiating Literary Instruction.” Robinson, Richard, McKenna, Michael, Wedman, Judy (Eds). Issues and
Trends in Literacy Education, Third Edition. Pearson Education: Boston
2004. (96)
These authors investigate the relationship between genuine
empathy and the integration of a diverse student body into a coherent classroom
whole. They look at different types of reading (efferent and asthetic), and the values inherent in each, emphasizing the
importance of helping students to garner both “intellectual understanding of
what prejudice is and recogn[ition] that it is a negative
quality.” They use mainly children’s’ books as their examples, yet it would be
easy enough to render their lessons for a secondary school audience.
Miller, Howard. “Teaching and
Learning about Cultural Diversity.” Robinson, Richard, McKenna, Michael, Wedman, Judy (Eds). Issues and
Trends in Literacy Education, Third Edition. Pearson Education: Boston
2004. (92)
Here the authors are using the sociocultural
theory of Russian theorist Lev Vytogsky as a tool for
investigating “the social and cultural bias of teaching, learning, and
development.” Using a student population in Los Angeles’ poverty stricken inner
city as their subjects, they promote several strategies for assisting the
children of color and poverty who are so often grossly over-represented in the
group of unsuccessful literacy students, they emphasize the need to understand
the out-of-school lives of one’s students in order to be more effective in
assisting them in school, the value of differentiating instruction for emergent
readers, and the importance of avoiding a “deficit model” of education. They
acknowledge that this is an issue that teachers alone cannot resolve and
recommend calling on administrators, community leaders, parents and politicians
for assistance.
Peregoy, Suzanne, Boyle, Owen. “English
Learners Reading English: What we Know, What we Need
to Know.” Robinson, Richard, McKenna, Michael, Wedman,
Judy (Eds). Issues and Trends in Literacy
Education, Third Edition. Pearson Education: Boston 2004. (103)
This article examines the “highly vocal and polarized
rhetoric” surrounding the question of which approach is most effective: whole
language or phonics, indicating that “often missing in the debate are the
literacy needs of English learners, though as a group, they score among the
lowest in reading achievement nationwide.” They focus on the skills that are
associated with good readers and how to transfer them to English language
learners most effectively, noting the especially essential nature of background
knowledge to comprehension of a text. They remind teachers not to ignore the
fact that “various aspects of reading and writing transfer across languages,
including attitudes and expectations about print as well as the general process
of decoding, interpreting the language, constructing meaning from text and
monitoring comprehension.” They also admonish educators to investigate the
fluency of the student’s literacy in his or her primary language, as this can
be a source of inspiration as well as a marker of mastery of the basic concepts
involved in becoming a skilled reader and writer.
Schacht, Steven P. “
This article tracks the use of the
movie Paris is Burning
in the classroom as a way of looking at the questions: "’How does the
stratification system metaphorically make drag queens of us all?’; ‘How is it
that to create the illusion often is to live the reality?’; ‘What sort of
behaviors and actions do they (the participants of the class) undertake to
demonstrate the social categories -- class, race, gender, and sexual
orientation -- that they belong to?’; and ‘What are the implications of these
behaviors and actions for themselves and others?’" By using excerpts of
student’s writings the author offers a glimpse into a unique and creative way
to open the discussion of an individual’s identity as a member of a
marginalized group within the larger society. It also examines the ways in
which all members of a society “pretend” in some area of their public lives to
fit into or endorse the culture of the dominant society.
Singer, Judith Y., Trubek, Jessica, Carter, Joya A., Scott, Kimberly A., et
al. “Dialogue: Does a Teacher
(Educational Researcher, Counselor or Other Professional)’s Race, Gender,
Class, Ethnicity and Ideology Belong in the Classroom?” Race, Gender & Class.
This article grew from Tracy Wagner’s article “She’s For
Real” in the Winter 2001/2002 issue of the newspaper Rethinking Schools in
which she “explained her decision to discuss that she was a lesbian with
students in an eighth grade class while she was a student teacher. As part of a
lesson on stereotyping, Wagner said to students, ‘Really? This is what gay and
lesbian people look like? Because I'm gay, and I don't look like this.’ Later
in the article, Wagner reflects that ‘(t)hinking
back, I have to admit that I told the students about my sexual orientation for
my own emotional well being, to live up to my beliefs of what it meant to be a
teacher.’ She also argues ‘that this disclosure resonated profoundly in our
classroom. I could feel it in small ways, each and every day -- the way
students more eagerly shared their poetry; the way they chose the more private
of two journal entries to read.’ Using Wagner’s article as a starting point,
this piece looks at “whether teachers and other professionals should allow
their personal lives, ideas and concerns to enter their classrooms,
professional practice and research.”
Sleeter, Christine E. “Creating an Empowering Multicultural Curriculum.” Race, Gender & Class.
This article looks at the way in which many people remain
oblivious to their own assumptions about the existence of a division between
“our culture” and “other cultures” as well as some of the information about
marginalized cultures that passes for fact within the dominant culture. It
takes a very scientific approach to understanding how "’accepted’ ideas
are actually the creations of people with particular points of view.” For
example, “Imagine two different theoreticians. Theorist A creates a narrative
by selecting data that seem most important, and putting them into a coherent
theory. When this theory is told and re-told as "truth," the data
that theorist A decided not to use are left out, and
eventually disappear from view. Theorist B looks at the same broad set of data,
but from a different perspective. Theorist B may or may not select the same
data as Theorist A did. She may decide to say explicitly why she chose the data
she did, and why she put them together differently from Theorist A. But to the
extent Theorist A's work is taken for granted as ‘truth,’ Theorist B's work
will be perceived as biased. What biases informed Theory A? This is a very
important question that marginalized groups raise about knowledge. If knowledge
produced by Theorist A makes up most of the canonized
curriculum, how was it constructed, around whose vested interests? From the
perspectives of marginalized communities, knowledge should serve the purpose of
empowering the community and enabling people to solve problems of concern to
the community. To do that, knowledge must be created with sensitivity to what
the community sees as its problems and concerns, build on the strengths and
resources of the community, and take account of the actual lived experiences of
people in the community.”
Vacca, Richard, Vacca
Jo Anne. “Culturally and Linguisically Diverse
Learners.” Content Area
This chapter examines the way English language learners
perceive themselves as readers and writers, and the adverse affects that the
often automatic placement of these students in low-ability groupings has on
their ability and even their willingness to become literate in English. They describe
the experiences of these students as “often characterized by failure,
disconnection, and resistance to reading and writing in academic contexts” and
detail the “need for literacy-related instruction that is strategic and
culturally responsive, with high learning expectations for all students.”
According to the authors this is a goal that is attainable only if teachers
begin by “understanding the cultural and linguistic differences between
mainstream and nonmainstream learners [and begin to
respond to them] in their classrooms by scaffolding instruction in the use of
vocabulary and comprehension strategies and by creating environments that
encourage talking and working together.”