BEYOND CULTURE, Speaking the Same Language

By: Delcia Mendez, Ethan Kahn and Angelia Ridgway, PhD.

Masters of Arts in Teaching Programs are preparing graduate students to become engaging secondary teachers, not only to earn a teaching license and master’s degree, but also to attain personal growth in the way they view how students learn and how to meet their various needs.

One such program at the University of Indianapolis

selects a diverse group of 30 participants and places them in

cohort-based groups each fall with a missionary zeal to serve diverse adolescent populations.

“From first conversations with our prospective students, we share our primary focus and mission of teaching within and across differences,” says Angelia J. Ridgway, Ph.D., coordinator of the University of Indianapolis MAT program. “The program embraces diversity of those who enter each year, students from 22 to 61-years old, from states and countries around the world.”

Ridgway explains that the diversity of the participants serves as “a springboard for understanding the same diversity that exists in today’s secondary classrooms.”

These programs focus on helping the graduate students achieve cultural competency while addressing their individual variations. Given the many cultural experiences that the cohort members bring to the classroom, the UIndy MAT program gains an initial understanding of their students’ framing of such cultural experiences.

This is done primarily by having them complete the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI), a research-based 50-item paper and pencil self-assessment inventory which measures an individual or group’s capacity to experience cultural differences along a developmental continuum.  Milton Bennett’s Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity (DMIS) serves as the theoretical framework for this assessment.  The model suggests that individuals typically experience cultural differences along a continuum ranging from a denial that cultural differences are important, to an

integration of cultural differences as an integral part of their identity.

Other stages along this continuum include a polarization of cultural differences which manifests as either becoming defensive of cultural differences or highly critical of one’s own culture; minimization of differences, a tendency to see all cultures as the same; acceptance of differences, and, finally, adapting one’s perspective and behavior to accommodate for cultural differences.  Students take the IDI twice, at the beginning and end of the program.  The initial group profile is used to customize experiences which target the students’ developmental level with an underlying goal to help them develop increased levels of intercultural sensitivity by the end of the MAT program. This also affords the faculty a unique opportunity to model developmentally-appropriate instruction.

One of the key advantages in using the IDI and the DMIS Framework is that it allows students to locate themselves along a cultural competency continuum.  For most of the students, this is a “reality check” as they come to recognize that there is a gap between where they perceive themselves in terms of their level of intercultural sensitivity and where they actually score on the IDI.  In other words, most students over-estimate their capacity to be culturally competent.  This provides a critical moment for self-reflection as students become conscious of their own “incompetence.”  More importantly, for the first time many of the students have a fairly well developed framework for considering what cultural competency might look like in the classroom and they have a mental model for what is needed for moving along the continuum.

…Other important elements that students learn about becoming culturally competent include

self-awareness.

Self-reflective questions that are posed to these beginning teachers include:

‣               What underlying assumptions do I have about people whose beliefs are different from my own?

‣               How has my cultural influenced my experiences with others?

‣               When a see a behavior different from my own experiences, how else might I interpret this behavior?

Are there alternative meanings?

Ridgway says her program stresses that gaining an awareness of one’s own cultural identity is fundamental to becoming a culturally competent teacher.  “We encourage our students to learn to discriminate,”

she says, explaining-

Questions of discrimination that are posted to beginning teachers include:

‣               Is it fair to teach different students in the same way?

‣               Do I show favoritism if I accommodate to the differences in the classroom?

‣               How do I justify that fair is not always the same for all students?

If I use students’ cultural background to accommodate, how do I ensure that I am not also stereotyping?

This notion moves beyond the traditional interpretation of discrimination as negative treatment of people due to their membership in a particular social group.  Ridgway says, “In this sense, we teach our students that discrimination refers to the practice distinguishing between different individuals and groups and for identifying cultural and individual differences in learning styles, conflict styles, motivational styles, cognitive, linguistic and communication styles. Teachers who are unable to discriminate many of these differences tend to fall into the trap of wanting to teach all students the same.”

A failure to delineate differences could consequently lead to a singular pedagogical or classroom management approach that generally reflects the dominant culture.

UIndy’s MAT program encourages students to understand that cultural competency

is a journey.

Questions of discrimination that are posted to beginning teachers include:

‣               How receptive am I to accepting the notion that students’ cultural background impacts their learning?

‣               How am I continually learning in terms of understanding my students’ backgrounds and their impact on teaching and learning?

‣               What additional knowledge or skills do I need to develop in order to teach diverse students skillfully?

Am I willing to accept that I will always be on a journey of cultural competency with no final destination?

Questions of discrimination that are posted to beginning teachers include:

‣               How receptive am I to accepting the notion that students’ cultural background impacts their learning?

‣               How am I continually learning in terms of understanding my students’ backgrounds and their impact on teaching and learning?

‣               What additional knowledge or skills do I need to develop in order to teach diverse students skillfully?

Am I willing to accept that I will always be on a journey of cultural competency with no final destination?

Ridgway says her program encourages participants to share excerpts from their own journeys, current struggles and pitfalls, and to understand the importance of being life-long learners, particularly in the area of

cultural competency.

‣               What aspects of my identity must I be cognizant of in order to minimize biases? How can I effectively teach students the culture of the school while valuing their home culture and experiences?

‣               When student experiences or behavior clash with my own values and expectations, and might be problematic within the school, how do I respond and address such experiences or behaviors?

How do I affirm students’ cultural background and still require behavior consistent with the dominant culture?

Teachers need to develop and demonstrate cultural competence by acknowledging the cultures of the students in their classrooms, building upon students’ home culture, accepting both cultural and individual differences. But cultural competence requires more than an uncritical acceptance of all differences.

No culture has a monopoly on morality, and teachers could better serve students not by trying to replace their cultural values, but by offering them new lenses from which they can perceive and experience the world.  As such, the teacher’s role is to offer lessons in the dominant culture as add-ons to students’ existing frames of reference, not as replacements.