Social and Cultural Foundations of American Education/Multiculturalism/Responsibilities

Teachers are facing new challenges everyday due to an interdependent, technologically advanced, global society that we now live in today. Traditional teaching methods are being challenged to focus more on the needs of students in today’s society. One factor that teachers must learn to adjust to is the more multicultural dynamic that classrooms deal with now. Wikipedia asserts that multiculturalism is, “The idea that modern societies should embrace and include distinct cultural groups with equal social status.” Students are diverse; they come from different backgrounds, families, lifestyles, environments, and locations, and some don’t speak English. The task for teachers today is to adapt their teaching style to encompass all the diversity they may have in the classroom.

School Accountability
Schools are constantly changing and teachers will see students from all walks of life in their classrooms. The problem is that teachers may not be adjusting to the fact that students from a different culture may need an alternative style of teaching to bring them to their full potential. An article in the Journal of Cases in Education Leadership points out that the government has taken steps in the recent past to make schools accountable for achievement among all of their students. In 2002, the government signed the No Child Left Behind Act. This document requires that schools are now measured by “adequate yearly progress” (AYP). This calls for a measurement of five categories, all students, racial/ethnic groups, economically disadvantaged students, students with disabilities, and students with limited English proficiency. This law is important because it holds schools and teachers accountable for how well each category of students does rather than an average of everyone lumped together.

Identifying the Problem: Resistance and Training
Schools that are beginning to attempt a change toward encompassing all students’ needs have the challenge of convincing teachers it is necessary. The Educational Administration Quarterly presents in an article that many teachers believe that minority students or low income students have behavior problems or are slow learners. The problem is that teachers are unwilling to see that they must change their style to help these students realize their full potential. For example, a principal attempting to incorporate school justice found that teachers thought minority or low income students to be a distraction rather than a challenge. He commented on resistance from staff and parents, ‘There was this nostalgic feeling, that “if-we-only-had-those-good-students-again’ mentality, and what that meant was ‘if we had all White middle-class students again the way it used to be’ a lot of resistance to doing things differently to looking at our need to change, to being reflective, to planning together…” With principals like these however, schools are starting to help teachers and parents realize that these kids need the same opportunities to learn as their white counterparts. This attitude is partly not teachers’ fault due to a lack of training in diversity during teacher education. In an article in the Journal of Early Childhood Research the author points out that most teachers feel that they have not been trained to address multiculturalism in the classroom. This is something that must be changed; teachers must be educated in ways to deal with the special needs of their students. Teachers should also interact with the community to get a better understanding of the cultures they are dealing with in the classroom. Once they begin, there can be more progress in this issue.

Advocating Change
Many schools and teachers have gotten the message and have begun to advocate change for students and teachers alike. In the journal Educational Policy, the author researches a program whose purpose is to educate teachers in multiculturalism and help them to change their teaching practices. This article claims that the project’s goal is “to establish more inquiry based, gender-inclusive, and culturally relevant learning environments.” Maxima was a project created to educate teachers in diversity in their classrooms and how to manage it. Teachers were selected in the Southwest border states of the United States. Each summer there was a two week long institute and teachers also met every month where the participants would attend and discuss the curriculum they were using in their classroom to address this issue.

The requirements and ideas that were contributed to these educators’ new style of teaching came from something called Sociotransformative Constructivism (STC). The article defines STC as being, “drawn from multicultural education (a theory of social justice) and social constructivism (a theory of learning).” There are three major guidelines that the project hoped to include into teaching practices. They are "1. Being responsive and theoretically explicit: Professional development experiences that promote multicultural understanding are responsive to teacher needs while explicitly acknowledging the theoretical underpinnings of the facilitators of the experiences. School and university agendas are shared and merged to create meaningful professional development experiences that include the modeling and naming of curricular and pedagogical practices that align with the theoretical orientation of the project, in this case, sociotransformative constructivism (STC).

2. Ongoing and on-site support: Professional development experiences that promote multicultural understanding provide ongoing and on-site professional support including modeling STC activities, making resources and equipment readily available, and supporting STC activities in the teachers’ classrooms.

3. Reflexive approaches to collaboration: Professional development experiences that promote multicultural understanding provide reflexive2 approaches to collaboration, building a community of learners, including teachers, student teachers, university professors, and graduate students, that provides continuous opportunities for professional dialogue across and within school contexts."

In this attempt, the researchers tried to give teachers the training and development needed to address diversity in their classrooms. They followed up with support and activities that would reinforce these practices so that they could be implemented in the classroom.

Next the researchers interviewed the participants three times a year. They wanted to know how Maxima had helped them, how had it changed their teaching, their classes, and how it affected learning overall. They wanted to know how this experience compared to other professional training and what the teachers believed would improve the project or should be changed. They found that teachers felt like they had support in their endeavor and that they were able to share ideas and see how they work. They also felt that the project helped to raise awareness about multiculturalism in the classroom. The participants thought that they were able to become motivated to address diversity and they were given the right tools to incorporate STC in the classroom. The main element that teachers responded to the most positively was that the project incorporated models of how to apply the STC methods. They found that in training they are rarely shown how to incorporate what they are learning in the classroom rather they were just being taught a method and sent on their way. This way, they can see examples of how to use their new learning in their classrooms.

This project is just one way that teachers and teacher educators are changing their responsibilities in the classroom to address every type of student they may encounter. This is just one step in a direction to help teachers learn to recognize diversity as another goal to achieve in their mission to educate every child as best as possible.

Conclusion
Now that multiculturalism has become a part of every day life and that we are living in a global environment it is imperative for teachers to adapt to a new style of teaching to encompass this factor. Teachers must not only recognize that diverse students will have different needs they must realize that they must change themselves to address it. Higher education must bring in projects and classes devoted to teaching educators how to take the next step and implement a style of teaching that will fulfill the potential of every student.

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