Why Culture Matters

By Donna Walker Tileston, Ed.D. and Sandra Kay Darling, Ph.D.

Today in this country, we have more than 10 million children living below the poverty line and, for many of these children, entering school is not through a doorway but a gap.  Schools, based on middle class values and expectations with predominately white teachers, are often ill-prepared for the students they receive. These students speak languages the teacher does not speak, come from diverse cultures and backgrounds that the teacher does not understand, and from conditions of poverty over which neither the students nor the teachers have control.   In many cases, students from poverty enter school with half the vocabulary of middle class students. 

Caring teachers everywhere are working harder to improve achievement – attending more meetings, analyzing more data, testing students more often, focusing on a more scripted curriculum,  responding to pacing guides, encouraging students to stay in school – and yet they continue to be overwhelmed and frustrated, especially in low performing, high poverty schools.     

A New Set of Glasses for Observing Achievement Gaps
In the past we have looked at children from poverty as coming into school with “deficits” that needed to be fixed.  New studies indicate that although poverty impacts achievement (ES= .76 Wenglinsky, 2000), there are other factors that have an even greater impact on learning.  The 2007 STAR results from California (Mangaliman, 2007) indicate that white students, who live in poverty, are out-performing African-American and Latino students who are NOT poor, but middle class or affluent.  This means that something besides poverty is having a greater impact on learning in our schools.  Could it be that public schools grounded in a middle class, European white culture have done a good job of educating students that are just like them, and a poor job of educating students who are different from that culture?

Individualistic vs  Collectivist Value Systems
Triandis (1990) observed that the emphasis on individualist versus collectivist value systems in schools is probably the most important cultural difference in social behavior than can be identified, and suggests that we should be mindful that 70 percent of the world’s population lives in a collective culture.  If teachers pay close attention to both the culture of the school and incorporate important culture elements of the children, the school becomes more comfortable to both students and teachers.  It will also accomplish two goals – focusing on increasing achievement AND closing the achievement gap between middle class students and those living in poverty.

Individualistic classrooms reflect the values of northern European Americans.  They encourage students to work independently, and to do their own work.  They reward and recognize individual achievement, and therefore it is valued.  Intelligence is viewed as competitive and aggressive.  Knowledge is to be gained to become more competent and able to construct knowledge – which is viewed as power – of the world around them.  Communication that is valued is through linguistic means such as reading and writing.  The school and European Americans support cognitive development that increases knowledge of the physical world and linguistic communication skills.  Communication involves talking about the substance, or content, first; relationships to people are second in speaking.

Collectivist classrooms will reflect the value systems of Native American Indians, Native Hawaiians, Native Alaskans, Latin Americans, African-Americans, Asians, and Arabs.  They will emphasize the interdependence among the students, as opposed to independence.  There is an emphasis on maintaining relationships.  This means that the family, group, or community, and a student’s place in it, supersedes the individual.  A child’s intelligence is measured by how well they know how to do their part in the family and/or community collaboratively.  There is a great deal of value placed on sharing and the ability to participate in social relationships.  Knowledge of social responsibility is greatly valued.  Communication in collectivist classrooms involves many non-verbal means, such as touching and holding.  These classrooms support the child’s social intelligence, emphasize interpersonal relationships, respect for elders and tradition, and responsibility for others and cooperation.  Communication involves talking about the relationships first, and the substance, or content, second. 

Attending to culture means not making children in our classroom choose between the culture of the home and community and the culture of the classroom.  It does not mean that we totally abandon the way we manage our classrooms or deliver instruction.  We can do both – honor and provide experiences in our classroom that reflect the culture of our students and teach the culture of the dominant culture.  We can provide ample opportunities for students to work together cooperatively (collectivist) and explain that a specific activity is to be done on your own and why (individualistic).  We can honor students who answer our curriculum questions by starting to explain the family context in which they learned it before they get to the substance of their answer (collectivist).  We can provide ways for students to share community classroom materials (collectivist) and teach respect for the individual property of a student’s desk (individualist).  We can provide times where students respond as a group, such as choral reading, call and response techniques, literature circles (collectivist), as well as providing opportunities for an individual to respond (individualistic).  We can provide opportunities for movement and touching (collectivist), and times where stillness and quiet need to be observed (individualist). 

Dr. Donna Walker Tileston, Ed.D. and Dr. Sandra Darling Ph.D are co-authors of “Why Culture Counts: Teaching Children of Poverty,” which will be available Fall 2008 and is published by Solution Tree  www.solution-tree.com