Keepin' it real: Personalizing school experiences for diverse learners to create harmony and minimize interethnic conflict

Journal of Negro Education, The, Fall 1999 by Katz, Anne

This article reports on an approach to helping teachers learn about the cultures of diverse groups of learners that is based on a sociocultural theory of education. Using this approach, students from diverse racial/ethnic backgrounds are seen as conduits for facilitating teachers' greater understanding of the cultural knowledge that students, their families, and their communities bring to schools. The article describes the efforts made by leaders at two case study elementary schools to create personal linkages between schools and students. It further explores how these schools have established a caring environment, increased parental involvement, and restructured student groups to reduce interethnic conflict and tension and thus provided a more harmonious environment for learning.

When news media proclaim that public schools in the United States are becoming more ethnically diverse, they tend to ignore the fact that only one segment of the school population is changing: the students and their families, who come from an increasingly varied array of ethnic, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds. Though children of color and their families make up the largest segment of this population in terms of numbers of stakeholders at a given site, it is another group of stakeholders-those who teach in its classrooms or lead the weekly assemblies-who tend to make the critical decisions about what happens in schools such as what gets taught and how, whose voices get heard, and how classrooms are constituted. The demographics of these members of the school community have, for the most part, remained the same; today's teachers are mostly White and predominantly middle class.

Coming to school may present difficulties for any child, but that difficulty is even greater for learners who come from diverse cultures of the "other"-be their differences linguistic, cultural, racial, ethnic, economic, or combinations of these variables. Delpit (1995) captures the essence of this notion of difference, and the misperceptions that often accompany it, when she writes:

I have faced this fog too many times in my career in education. It is a deadly fog formed when the cold mist of bias and ignorance meets the warm vital reality of children of color in many of our schools. It is the result of coming face-to-face with the teachers, the psychologists, the school administrators who look at "other people's children" and see damaged and dangerous caricatures of the vulnerable and impressionable beings before them. (p. xiii)

Examples of these misperceptions become poignantly apparent when school staff members describe these "other people's children" as having no language or as having parents who never come to parent-teacher conferences because they do not care about or value their children's education.

As educators examine the challenges faced by schools today, particularly those serving diverse populations, this lack of congruence between the schools (as represented by teachers, administrators, district personnel, and other staff) and those served by the schools (e.g., students and parents) enters into many of the discussions and analyses. It is this difference on the part of students that is often identified as being responsible for "other" students' lack of schooling success. A common assumption is that these students do not bring the "right" literacy skills to the formal educational setting or that they fail to present the appropriate linguistic variety needed to succeed in the contemporary classroom. Rather than examining such assumptions critically, teachers serving diverse populations often hold low expectations for student achievement, interact with students in less cognitively demanding ways, and provide inadequate counseling for both within-school academic choices and postsecondary career planning. Evidence of this "dumbing down" tendency is manifested in findings that students of color in the United States are more frequently tracked into low-ability groupings and disproportionately represented in special education (Haney, 1993; Kozol, 1991; Ladson-Billings, 1996; Moll, 1988; Oakes & Lipton, 1999).

In analyzing why schools are not better serving the diverse student populations that are increasingly filling the nation's hallways and classrooms, Erickson (1987) quickly reviews (and likewise quickly dismisses) cultural-deficit, sociolinguistic, and labor market perception-based explanations that have focused on cultural or economic difference to explain the school failure of students of color. Instead, he argues that schools need to operate from the standpoint of a culturally responsive pedagogy informed by resistance theory. Similarly, rather than focusing on how students of color might change to adapt to existing school norms, Nieto (1994) suggests that attention must be refocused on schools that adapt to serve these students. More specifically, she maintains that the conditions that create "good" or "bad" schools for diverse populations should be examined: "If we understand school policies and practices as being enmeshed in societal values, we can better understand the manifestations of these values in schools as well" (p. 394-395). She further contends that change in school structure alone will not result in appropriate responses to diversity unless such changes are accompanied by profound shifts in the way educators think about their students. It is teachers' beliefs and expectations about their "other" students, she claims, that influences how they serve those students.