We at the College of Education at Washington State University are firmly committed to issues of cultural and individual diversity. This commitment is reflected in the activities and policies of our Diversity and Faculty of Color Committees, dedicated to providing leadership in improving the educational experiences and outcomes of traditionally underserved populations both in the state of Washington and nationwide.
"Within a College of Education, work related to diversity is such an important part of what we do—perhaps the very most important part," says College of Education Dean Judy Mitchell. "We need to be continually mindful of our impact on future generations as we prepare education professionals to work with all the world's children. We must do everything we can to honor the differences among us, to recognize and value our diverse cultural perspectives and heritages, and to help others do the same."
Here, some of our faculty members share a brief look at their work in addressing these issues through teaching, research, and service to the community.
While the work of these researchers and scholars reflects only a sample of what our faculty and programs are engaged in with diversity issues, they are demonstrative of WSU's strong, ongoing commitment to addressing issues of cultural and individual diversity throughout our College of Education.
—Dr. Brian McNeill
In 1991, while I was working on my doctorate in Florida, I asked Pablo, a high school junior from Venezuela, what he would do after graduation. He responded right away using perfect English: "I want to play professional basketball." I then asked him what would happen if he didn't grow tall enough to make it. He responded, "I will play professional soccer." I pondered and asked him what would happen if he didn't grow strong enough to be a football player, to which he replied, "I will then be a baseball player." A bit frustrated, I inquired some more by asking what would happen if he had some kind of minor disability that would impede him from being a professional athlete. This time, this tall young man thought about his answer and replied: "Well, I guess there is always McDonald's."
Many students like Pablo enter schools in the United States with big dreams but little formal schooling. The challenges for these students are colossal. They must learn to read, write, understand, and speak English. They must develop academic literacy in English in order to make the transition to the labor force or into other educational programs. And they must become socialized into American society during adolescence, a time of major emotional, physical, and psychological change.
For Pablo, becoming socialized into American pop culture had not been a problem: He was into sports, wore Nike shoes, and watched plenty of MTV. He also had a great, almost-native English accent. Yet when it came to writing lab reports, literary criticism, position papers, other conventionalized genres of writing, or reading his textbooks, he fared very poorly. In fact, Pablo was in serious trouble academically.
How can schools assist students like Pablo? How could Pablo's teachers have provided more opportunities so that he could have had another shot at learning how to write a term paper?
Schools that meet the challenge presented by LEP students such as Pablo follow practices that are consistent with research on effective schools. Schools need to:
This comprehensive approach about good teaching strategies is more likely to be successful than strict reliance on any one program or intervention. No single strategy can by itself bridge the achievement gap for LEP students. Providing equal opportunities for all students will depend essentially on the degree to which classroom teachers are able to institute classroom practices and curriculum that systematically respond to the diversity represented in their classrooms. However, implementation of these practices is in fact dependent upon supportive school staff and programs, district guidelines, and state language policies that recognize language diversity as an asset and not a handicap.
While the recommendations above are directed to classroom teachers, the responsibility needs to be shared by all those in the building. Only when all the adults in a school talk about "our" students—rather than "those" students—when referring to the LEP students can all students achieve success.
Research has shown that Native students' culturally influenced learning behaviors, communication styles, and values are often misinterpreted in the classroom and clash with their teachers' dominant-culture perceptions of how a "normal" student learns and behaves. Research on Native students' difficulties in dominant-culture classrooms has yielded three major findings about their learning behaviors and the conditions they typically encounter at school.
First, Native students from many different tribal backgrounds learn best by processing visual information—as, for example, they observe and then model the behavior of parents, elders, and older siblings. A curriculum development committee of WSU faculty, NWIC faculty, and community members from the Lummi reservation participated in an effort to revise standard teacher training curriculum to be more sensitive to Native learning styles. We have found that our students at NWIC have the most difficulty acquiring new skills when they are taught only through verbal instruction. Unfortunately, verbal instruction is still the predominant mode of communication in public school classrooms.
Moreover, in our work with school districts in Washington state, we have seen that Native children of many different tribes also avoid public performance of new skills and are unprepared or ill-at-ease when pushed into doing so without adequate opportunity for private practice. In our Native teacher preparation program, we feel that the steps involved in the acquisition and demonstration of knowledge at home versus school are reversed. At home, observation, private self-testing, and demonstration of a task for approval are essential steps in the learning process. In school, Native children are expected to learn by responding publicly to direct questions from teachers even if they are uncertain of the answers, and opportunities to practice new skills privately before performing them publicly are rare.
Lastly, Native children from numerous tribal backgrounds are socialized to avoid competing with peers and are more likely to participate in classroom situations that emphasize cooperation rather than competition. The child-rearing practices of many tribes impress upon children norms such as generosity, sharing, social interdependence, and cooperation. In comparisons of white and Native students, whites were found to be more competitive and, even when cooperative behavior was rewarded, they still preferred to compete with classmates rather than cooperate.
It is clear that assimilationist education policies aimed at changing Native students' learning styles have failed. Given that the strength of cultural identity is actually beneficial to Native student academic success, the only reasonable course of action is to address teacher training to be more responsive to the needs of Native learners. A widely accepted strategy to improve American Indian and Alaska Native student learning outcomes is increasing the number of Native and non-Native teachers who are properly trained to meet the needs of Native students. (See the Indian Nations At Risk Task Force final report, Indian Nations At Risk: An Educational Strategy for Action, U.S. Department of Education, 1991.)
Although Native Americans are one of the youngest and fastest growing segments of our population, Native people make up fewer than one-half of 1 percent of those currently teaching and only 1 percent of those enrolled in teacher training programs. As a result, Native students are denied valuable role models as part of their educational experiences. Both statistical and observational research suggest that the absence of adequate numbers of Native teachers and the lack of specialized training for both Native and non-Native teachers may place Native students especially at risk for attrition. White students, too, are being deprived of the chance to learn from teachers of color who embody the increasingly diverse world in which they are growing up.
This disparity led WSU and NWIC to develop a partnership to train more Native teachers. The partnership is founded on the belief that properly trained teachers can develop trusting relationships with students and make the difference between promoting negative stereotypes and portraying realistic and empowering views of Native peoples. It focuses on recruiting and training Native teachers on or near their communities because these students come into the classroom with prior life experience with Native language and culture.
It is our firm belief that both Native and non-Native teachers benefit from training that focuses on American Indian and Alaska Native learners. At present, however, most mainstream universities provide little or no training pertaining to Native learners. As a consequence, teachers being trained today do not necessarily know how to translate cultural sensitivity into teaching techniques proven effective with Native students, especially if those students come from an array of different tribal cultures.
Teacher instructional styles do have a significant influence on Native students' classroom participation rates and academic success. It is essential that teacher preparation programs provide teachers with the knowledge and experience of how to incorporate Native students' learning strengths into classroom instruction. Teachers must be taught to build on Native students' existing learning repertoires in ways that do not compromise their cultural identities or spark their resistance.
Recent studies are detailing the significant impact that teachers of color can have on student performance and institutional change. Their presence in our classrooms has untold potential power. (See "The Power of Their Presence: Minority Group Teachers and Schooling" by Alice Quiocho and Francisco Rios in Review of Educational Research, Winter 2000).
Minority teachers are more likely to bring a critical social justice orientation and consciousness that stems from their experiences with inequality. They are ideally positioned to communicate with students from minority cultural backgrounds in ways that encourage them to participate in their education, and are having a positive impact on student achievement. And they tend to have a greater sense of how to develop culturally relevant curriculum and to understand the human, social, and communal nature of teaching and learning.
For these reasons, there is a strong need to encourage our colleagues in teacher preparation and the educational systems to set as a professional goal increasing the number of minority students interested in becoming teachers. America is facing a general teacher supply crisis. Administrators, policymakers, and legislators are clamoring for "highly qualified teachers," while many principals and personnel directors can't even find "warm bodies" to fill classrooms. Last year, state legislatures passed more than 70 new laws impacting teacher quality: from new tests for licensure to signing bonuses for new teachers. In the midst of this widespread teacher shortage, the critical need to recruit more teachers of color and to bring cultural competence to the teaching profession is being largely overlooked.
Each year for the past decade, the public school student population has grown and become more diverse. According to U.S. Department of Commerce data, about one-third of public school students are members of racial and ethnic minority groups; by the year 2035, that number will climb above 50 percent. Unfortunately, we can't say the same for our teacher workforce. The teaching profession is losing ground in terms of the parity between students of color and teachers of color. Fewer than 14 percent of teachers are minorities, and projections anticipate a significant decline. Astoundingly, fully 40 percent of America's schools have no minority teachers at all.
A number of promising steps have been taken in recent years to begin closing this glaring gap. Before coming to WSU, I helped create the Portland Teachers Program, a very successful minority teacher preparation program operated as a partnership between Portland State University, Portland Community College, and the Portland Public Schools. (For more on the Northwest Teachers Program, see Northwest Education magazine, "New Teachers: From Surviving to Thriving," Winter 2001). More recently, I worked with several national organizations—including the Association of Teacher Educators, the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, the American Association of School Personnel Administrators, the American Council on Education, the National Education Association and Recruiting New Teachers— in a partnership to sponsor a national summit on the issue. Convened in November 2001, the summit, Losing Ground: The Crisis of Diversity in America's Teaching Force, addressed the critical shortage of ethnically and racially diverse teachers in America's schools and the lack of cultural competence in the teaching profession. The summit initiated the process for formulating a national movement designed to successfully reverse the lack of racial and ethnic diversity in our public school teacher workforce. A plan for action and an implementation strategy are being developed to sponsor local, state, and national initiatives.
The need to bring the resources that minority group members bring to the teaching profession makes the need to institute teacher preparation programs that recruit and support them a must for the future of the American teaching force.
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