Educating Teachers for Diversity:
Elements 9 and 10

ELEMENT STATEMENT: Preservice education students are taught how to assess the relationships between the methods they use in the classroom and the preferred learning and interaction styles in their students' homes and communities. They also are taught how to use various instructional strategies and assessment procedures that are sensitive to cultural and linguistic variations, and how to adapt classroom instruction and assessment to accommodate the cultural resources that their students bring to school.

THE BIG PICTURE: Taken together, Elements 9 and 10 strongly suggest natural interrelationships among learners and their cultural backgrounds, instruction, and assessment.

Elements 9 and 10 also call for related competencies on the part of prospective teachers: the analysis, development, and use of culturally responsible instruction and assessment (Ladson-Billings, 1994). For these reasons, these two elements are treated together.

Culturally responsible instruction and assessment enable minority students to shine in the classroom. Such instruction and assessment proceed from teachers' understanding of the cultural equipment that learners bring to the classroom and their belief that this equipment serves not as baggage to be discarded but as resources to be used in instruction. Indeed, these resources have been likened to monetary currency--for example, "funds of knowledge" (Moll, 1992b), "cultural capital" (Apple, 1979), and "social capital" (Wehlage, cited in Lockwood, 1996).

Students' cultural resources and backgrounds, therefore, may be viewed as a toolkit for the construction of culturally responsible pedagogy. The tools in this toolkit are language, learning style, interaction style, and cultural content.

• Language: Language might be termed a "meta-tool" in that it constitutes the primary nexus from which learning and cognition emanate. As Ovando (1993) explains:

"Language, as a system of communication linking sound, written or visual symbols, and meaning, is an indispensable bridge for accessing knowledge, skills, values, and attitudes within and across cultures. It has tremendous power as the paramount instrument of cognitive development, and it can open or close doors to academic achievement." (p. 215)

(For further information on language, refer to Element 7.)

• Learning Style: Hilliard (1989) defines learning style as "consistency in the behavior of a person or a group that tends to be habitual--the manifestation of a predisposition to approach things in a characteristic way" (p. 67). (For further information on learning style, refer to Element 6.)

• Interaction Style: Interaction style can be defined as the ways learners communicate within their families and in other situations in which they are in the cultural majority. The work of such researchers as Au (1980) with Hawaiian youth, Moll and Diaz (1987) with Latino youth, and Tafoya (1982) on American Indian cognition and interaction styles sheds light on non-European interaction styles. Knowledge of interaction style can be used to good effect in creating culturally responsive pedagogy. (For further information on interaction style, refer to Element 7.)

• Cultural Content: Cultural content is of two kinds:

• The interests, issues, and concerns of the learner's family and community.

• The knowledge of ethnic contributions to history, literature, science, mathematics, and other fields.

An understanding of these various tools lays the groundwork for the shaping of culturally responsible instruction and assessment.

GOALS:

• Teacher educators will help preservice students understand that language, learning style, interaction style, and cultural content are cultural capital that learners bring to the classroom.

• Teacher educators will stress the importance of constructing instruction that builds on the learner's cultural capital.

• Teacher educators will develop activities and assignments for the teacher education classroom to facilitate preservice students' ability to devise culturally congruent instruction and assessment.

IMPLICATIONS FOR ACTION: A variety of activities and assignments for the teacher education classroom facilitates preservice students' understanding of and ability to use the cultural tools of language, learning style, interaction style, and cultural content. These tools also are used to create culturally responsible curricula, instruction, and assessment.

Activities for Enhancing Understanding of Language: Whole courses and programs of study are devoted to language and its role in education. Preservice students preparing to work in regular education settings should take such courses when possible and learn languages in addition to English. Activities and assignments for the teacher education classroom include:

• Watching and discussing American Tongues (1987), a video that highlights and humorously celebrates the vast array of accents and dialects of American English.

• Asking bilingual education teachers to recommend teaching strategies for the regular classroom.

• Reading such books as Joinfostering: Adapting Teaching for the Multilingual Classroom (Faltis, 1997), Teaching in Multilingual Classrooms: A Teacher's Guide to Context, Process, and Content (Hernandez, 1997), and Children with Limited English: Teaching Strategies for the Regular Classroom (Kottler, 1994).

• Learning the basic principles of language acquisition and the difference between basic communication proficiency and cognitive-academic language proficiency (Cummins, 1981; Ovando & Collier, 1985), with resulting implications for instruction of bilingual learners.

• Exploring the world of deaf people by reading articles about sign language (e.g., Wolkomir, 1992); watching and discussing the film Children of a Lesser God and the television movies Love is Never Silent and My Name is Jonah; reading and discussing the books In This Sign (Greenburg, 1983) and Seeing Voices (Sacks, 1989). Investigating sign language and considering deafness as a communication disorder, rather than a hearing disorder, help preservice students understand the defining role of language in culture, as well as the principles of language acquisition and implications for instruction. For those not involved in deaf education, such activities also provide a context for learning about language that is not fraught with political overtones.

Activities for Enhancing Understanding of Learning Styles: In order to develop an understanding of the uses and limitations of learning styles, preservice students should:

• Determine their own learning styles.

• Analyze existing instruction as it draws on various learning styles.

• Experience instructional variability in their own learning.

• Develop the capacity to design and implement instruction that appeals to a wide array of learning styles.

• Develop a habit of mind that prizes instructional variability.

While some educators (e.g., Dunn, Beaudry, & Klavas, 1989) argue for the matching of learning style and instructional style, others (e.g., Irvine & York, 1995; Shaw, 1996) advocate that teachers appeal to a diversity of learning styles by regularly engaging in variability of instruction.

Activities for Enhancing Understanding of Interaction Styles: Preservice students can learn about interaction styles through a combination of direct and indirect means. A direct, firsthand approach to learning about cultural styles of interaction and how they might be used in instruction is through ethnographic inquiry. Moll (1992b), Moll and Diaz (1987), and others describe their uses of qualitative research to do double duty--stimulating both instructional change in the education of children and conceptual change in the sensibilities of teacher education students. Hollins (1996) details a particularly promising approach to ethnographic inquiry for teachers, which she calls reflective-interpretive-inquiry or RIQ. Adaptable for use with preservice students, RIQ is "a process for acquiring, interpreting, and transforming knowledge about students for pedagogical practice" (p. 56). (For more information on RIQ, refer to Element 8.)

Indirect means of learning about interaction styles include the following:

• Reading and discussing literature by and about people from diverse cultures.

• Reading and discussing instructional strategies, such as Hollins' (1996) treatment of interaction styles.

• Reading and discussing educational cases in which teacher-researchers give ethnographic accounts of working with minority students (see Au, 1980; Au & Kawakami, 1985; Dillon, 1989; Moll & Diaz, 1987). Passages from these accounts, which provide transcripts of students' responses to traditional instruction, might be excerpted and used as case studies. Preservice students might analyze these cases, hypothesizing reasons for learners' responses and ways that instruction might be modified to produce more culturally congruent interactions. They might then compare their analyses to those of the researchers. Reference to the work of such social theorists of learning as Vygotsky (1978b) should prove helpful in these analyses.

Activities for Enhancing Understanding of Cultural Content: Preservice students can learn of one kind of cultural content--the interests, issues, and concerns of students' families and communities--by conducting ethnographic inquiry and interacting with students and their families. In the teacher education classroom, they then can explore ways of making this content the focal point of instruction, gleaning ideas from the work of other teacher-researchers (e.g., Lipka, 1991; Rison, 1990; Wigginton, 1977, 1991).

For example, Walker (1994) describes the experience of a teacher who worked with Luis Moll and his team of researchers to culturally authenticate the literacy instruction of her Latino students. Through research, the teacher identified building and construction as topics of high interest to her students and their families. She then implemented an instructional unit in which students conducted library research, built models, wrote essays, learned the names and functions of tools, came to understand the importance of mathematics and economics in construction, listened to speakers, engaged in problem solving, and gave oral reports. Students, parents, and the community responded enthusiastically, and students were more motivated to learn crucial literacy skills than they had been with more traditional, less culturally centered approaches.

More formal cultural content derives from knowledge of the contributions of women and the contributions of minorities to history, literature, mathematics, science, and other fields. Using Banks' (1993a) approaches for integrating multicultural content into the curriculum, preservice students might develop culturally responsible units of instruction. To facilitate decision making regarding content, preservice students might be asked, as they are with less formal cultural content, to consider ways culturally relevant content can be used to teach high-level thinking skills and high-status knowledge. For example:

• In American literature classes, can Toni Morrison's Beloved be used to teach symbolism rather than Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter? What would be the advantages of making such a substitution? What would be the disadvantages?

• In math classes, which tend to have little curricular flexibility, how can the contributions of women to mathematics be integrated into instruction?

Activities for Enhancing Understanding of Appropriate Assessment: Just as instruction should use the learners' cultural backgrounds as tools, so should assessment. The teacher should function as the students' advocate (Cummins, 1986), seeking assessment strategies that reveal what learners know, rather than simply diagnosing what they do not know. Alternative assessment strategies might include oral interviews, skill demonstrations, portfolios of a student's work over time, observation records, and student exhibits.

Through the use of ethnographic inquiry in communities and classrooms, preservice students can develop sensitivity regarding the cultural congruence of various approaches to assessment. They also should develop competencies in devising and administering assessment measures and in interpreting the data yielded by such measures. These competencies come not only from hearing about alternative assessment but also from experiencing it in teacher education coursework.

OBSTACLES TO ACTION: Preservice students may have inadequate knowledge of classroom management strategies when teaching diverse groups of students. Villegas (1992) notes that teachers who lack knowledge of cultural interaction styles may misinterpret student behavior and respond inappropriately:

"For example, lack of familiarity with a particular turn-taking procedure may lead some students to call out in class instead of raising their hands and waiting until the teacher awards the floor. This calling out, while inappropriate in certain classroom situations, may be exactly what is expected of those youngsters in their homes. In this case, instead of automatically interpreting the students' behavior as a conscious breach of discipline, it would be more productive for the teacher to verify whether the student actually knew the turn-taking rule was being enforced." (pp. 15-16)

She adds that in culturally diverse classrooms, teachers must clearly communicate the ground rules for classroom routines and procedures so that all students know what behavior is expected in the classroom.

DIFFERENT POINTS OF VIEW: Few advocates of effective instruction for all students would deny the importance of using students' cultural backgrounds as tools for learning. Some educators, however, object to the substitution of indirect, process-oriented approaches for the more direct, traditional instruction that emphasizes skill acquisition. Delpit (1988), for example, states that process-oriented approaches fail to prepare minority students to participate in the "culture of power," which she says should be a primary mission of schools (p. 282). Sizemore (cited in Raack, 1995) concurs. She contends that progressive approaches do not provide the high degree of structure that poor minority students need in order to achieve. Further, she takes issue with the exclusive use of alternative assessment, arguing that it does not equip students with the test-taking skills they will need for admission to college.

Another perspective comes from critics of cultural mismatch theories, which explain academic failure by reference to the dissonance between home culture and classroom culture. Although such lack of congruence may provide a partial explanation, it does not provide a sufficient one. Rather, the problem is inextricably linked to larger issues of equity in both education and society at large.

References

Additional Reading for Elements 9 and 10