The Diversity Council (DC) presented Tuesday morning their Cultural Proficiency (CP) training to the instructional coaches. The coaches were joined by members of Early Childhood and the ELL staff, including the translators and interpreters. A few other folks from counseling who missed the pre-break session, the first in DC’s presentations, also attended. Presenters began the session with accounts of their lives, biographies with reference to their cultural background and conditions or events in their lives that helped bring them to an appreciation of and, passion for, CP. An activity followed that engaged table groups to describe what equity meant to them. That done, various definitions, including one from the text Cultural Proficiency: A Manual for School Leaders, were rolled out and discussed. Many table groups expressed the notion that “fair” or equal is not equitable, that some folks need more or different resources to overcome barriers.
Randall Lindsey explains how exasperating is the conversation and contentious the interaction between dominant and minority groups when the outcome or results of these barriers are considered. The lack of awareness of the white, anglo-saxon protestant (WASP) culture to see how society and all its trappings has been overwhelmingly stacked in its favor makes it difficult for people of color to broach the subject of equity. For me, the work that matters the most is about how to help teachers see how some or many of their instructional practices and strategies are unconsciously geared to the perspective and style of their mainstream students.
I will offer only one, very broad stroke, example – individual versus group or collective identification. Many observers in our classrooms will see teachers conducting literal or recitation level questioning with students waving their hands or calling out what they hope or know to be “the right answer”. When the dominant style is aggressive individualism, the fastest or loudest or most visible students get called. Other students may be less willing to participate; they may not, by upbringing, want to stand out, or they may not be as well versed, or prepared or willing to risk a “wrong answer”. These students, all students, would benefit from a shift away from rapid fire, single answer recitation (a useful strategy some of the time) to a more deliberative, inquiry based process that requires collaboration, cooperation, and on-going conversation with others. This is quite in line with the “21st Century Learning Skills” featured in the Common Core Standards. It is how enterprise fosters creativity, innovation and proactive change.
The presenters offered an “iceberg model” to depict how many features of minority culture are only “surface level” manifestations of cultural identity - holiday celebrations at best and stereotypes at worse. Dominant culture is everywhere, so ubiquitous that it is as invisible as the water in which the proverbial fish swims. The surface level details of culture, traditional, or youth dress and music, food and dance, holidays, language expressions, what is typically seen on TV and popular media are bearable, even attractive for the novelty. I have a saying, that I now recognize only goes to this surface level of culture, that “Anything that annoys us is worth checking out”.
What puts us us out of our comfort zone is a signal from the brain-gut connection that we are facing something different. What this simple reaction may not reveal is the other layers depicted in the iceberg model. Beneath the surface level, the “low emotional load” level, are “unspoken rules” and “unconscious rules” that truly color our lens on the world are much more difficult to uncover and even more difficult to discuss. Despite the presenters’ insistence that the discussion is not about blame, it is, in some sense about shame and vulnerability, about what or where people are, not what they did (that is guilt)*. It is the deeper levels that I wish the CP presenters would have explored more because “thinking” at those levels seem to inhibit risk taking, experimentation and collaborative exploration of ways to adapt to changing conditions.
The early chapters of the Lindsey text speak to the unconscious privilege, the unawareness by the beneficiaries of long ago culture wars, that the practice and behaviors borne from their view on the world don’t benefit everyone equally or equitably. Again this is broad strokes stuff, and no culture is monolithic or one dimensional. However, the data is clear. Diverse, disadvantaged and disabled people fare less well in this society than they might be doing now. Their children do less well in school as well. Our children, those children, are largely schooled by practitioners who by their very training and upbringing, embrace the dominant perspective, expectations and style, myself included.
There is a tendency to see “the other children” as missing something, as deficient rather than beneficiaries of other families’ and communities’ cultures and heritages. Raising the consciousness of the nature of privilege, working with the cultural experiences and perspectives of others, and using instructional strategies such as Sheltered Instruction to deliver newly developed units of instruction, will go a long way to not only close the achievement gap, but to raise the achievement bar.
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* http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/brene_brown_listening_to_shame.html
