Capitalizing on Cultural Backgrounds

The Minority Achievement Gap

According to Diplomas Count: An Essential Guide to Graduation Policy and Rates (Olson, 2006),  in 2006 more than 1.2 million students, most of whom were minority students, did not graduate from high school with a regular diploma. Close to 30 percent of students nationally do not graduate, of which 51.6 percent are Black students, 47.4 percent are American Indians, Alaskan Native students, and 55.6 percent are Hispanic students. Compare this to over three-quarters white, non-Hispanic students that will graduate on time.

According to Diplomas Count, only 60 percent of students in urban schools, versus 75 percent in suburban, will graduate. 

Embracing Diversity in Our Classrooms

Students with various cultural backgrounds and a range of experiences with ensuing perspectives can bring a great deal of cultural, linguistic, and ethnic diversity to our classrooms. These resources can become powerful teaching tools in bringing awareness to food, culture, religion, discoveries, ideas, literature, art, music, and so forth to enrich the American culture by virtue of our classrooms. Not to mention it will stimulate a challenge to the “status quo” – is this such a bad thing?

As we build a repertoire of approaches to teach and learn by capitalizing on the multitude of cultural experiences in our classrooms, we can also develop interpersonal skills, communication, and language proficiencies. Many studies have shown that when students work collaboratively with peers from various cultures, they will be better prepared to face the world outside of the classroom, for 21^st century college and career readiness.

Here are some approaches that foster successful teaching in diverse classrooms (Zeichner, 1992):

• Teachers should develop and communicate a clear sense for who their students are ethnically and culturally. This understanding will go a long way in garnering their commitment and cooperation to becoming high academic achievers.   

• Communicate high expectations equally for all students, despite the stage of language development one might be in. Language development can be supported with adjusted and differentiated curriculum, while holding students accountable for the same expectations in progress.

• Develop a bond with students instead of seeing them as “those others.”

• Hold students accountable through an academically challenging curriculum that fosters higher-level cognitive skills.

• Focus instruction on meaningful content in the most interactive and collaborative learning environments as possible.

• Include the perspectives and contributions of all students equally.

• Scaffold curriculum to link academic challenging content to the cultural framework and resources students bring to the classroom. For instance, nurture their ethnic pride while introducing new content to challenge them, debate with them, and stimulate peer discussions with.

The following considerations can help you to understand your students’ strengths, learning needs, and what they can contribute to your classroom in order to deliver them needed interventions within a new culture with possibly an even larger learning curve combined.

• The level of the family's socioeconomic circumstances and resources. These often correlate to school success.
• Extent and level of prior education in the country of origin, also associated with success in school.
• Level and extent of literacy in the home language. The more literacy in the native language at home, the more likely students will assimilate English in the classroom, and experience academic success.
• Extent of home family support systems – languages spoken, English language used, single-parent households, number of other family members living in the home. These factors also correlate to academic success.
• Showing students how much you care about them will go a long way in garnering their devotion, getting to know and understand them, and nurturing their hopes and dreams in a genuine way that builds trust.
• Integrate curricular themes to bring awareness to all students. Share hopes, dreams, doubts, fears about cultural diffusion, cultural differences, and integrating cultures both in and out of school.

• Discuss and practice building character, such as what it means to be an “admirable character” and what good character attributes are in general. Discuss ideas of love, friendship, and good parenting, helping strangers, warm, poverty, and tolerance within the understanding of human rights.

• Understand and learn to recognize the strengths and challenges faced by your second language students in order to refer them and their families to appropriate community-based services, such as homework help, library programs, after school programs, programs that provide Internet access.

Tapping into students’ backgrounds will not only enhance learning, but contribute to their sense of belonging, comfort with the new culture and its assimilation, and devotion to learning. This feeds a self-esteem and motivation that validates them.  Here are some suggestions:

• Use semantic webs to find out what they already know and how this knowledge relates to their cultural framework. For example, the word “culture” could be drawn in the center, with all students contributing to what the word means to them. Next, they would discuss all those elements related to culture, expanding the subtopics. Students ideally will come across more that interests them, and this can become fodder for further research either independently, or as a class.
• Students can be asked to voice their opinion about a topic presented, then return to research books and other resources to expand on, or even change, their opinions and perceptions.

• Selection of culturally relevant curriculum and instructional materials is crucial. Material that reflects diversity, students’ heritage, cultures, and other aspects of their cultural and ethnic identities will go a long way in garnering devotion and the self-esteem needed to become strengthened, empowered learners with practice in language, thinking, reading and writing in meaningful contexts.

• Always select text and supplemental materials that reflect other cultures, written from multiple viewpoints in art, history, poetry, journals, and even illustrations that represent content and ideas.

• Rodriguez (1992) observed that high school students felt left out of the curriculum in the absence of anything that related to their own cultures. When presented with information pertinent to their own cultures, or even others outside of the mainstream culture, students feel valued, empowered, and thus resulting in higher rates of participation. 

Au & Jordan, 1981; Boggs, 1985; Coballes-Vega, 1992; Gallimore, Boggs, & Jordan, 1974.