People came to the U.S. for many reasons

1. People came to the U.S. for many reasons To live in a free society To get a job To get an education To escape persecution To escape war To make a better life for my children Because my own country was destroyed

2. Some people were forced to come here

3. Others were already here but forced off their land

4. How do we live in peace? • With all our histories and past conflicts, how do we exist together? • With our present cultures, how do we interact as a nation?

5. Respect

6. Respect • The U.S. Constitution guarantees free speech, the right to gather, the right to worship without government interference, etc. • We don’t have to always like everything about another culture, but the foundation of our nation demands that we respect other people’s rights.

7. Respect • Unfortunately, it has not always been easy to do so. U.S. history is replete with groups of people trying to get a reasonable form of respect. • The school system historically has been a means of disrespecting certain cultures. • Education was completely denied to other cultures.

8. For example http://www.kporterfield.com/aicttw/articles/boardingschool.html Boarding schools were an important part of the American Indian experience. They still are a critical factor in why some American Indian parents find it difficult to communicate with public school system administrators and teachers – and even more difficult to trust them. Many non-Indians either aren’t aware of this shameful piece of American History or know very little about it. In order to undo the boarding school legacy, it is important for every teacher with American Indian students in the classroom to have an awareness of past events and their continuing impact.

9. Boarding School History Off-reservation boarding schools for American Indian children began on November 1, 1878 when Captain Richard H. Pratt opened the Carlisle Indian School at an abandoned military post in Pennsylvania. Pratt was an Army Captain, not an educator. He had been put in charge of 72 Apache prisoners held at Ft. Marion near St. Augustine, Florida. The Army said that prisoners were suspected of having murdered white settlers, but never proved this claim. Captain Pratt started a prison school for the men in his charge. When the Ft. Marion prisoners were allowed to return home in 1878, he convinced 22 of them to continue their schooling. The Hampton Institute, a school for freed slaves in Virginia, accepted several of them. Carlisle’s opening allowed Pratt to resign his Army commission and to practice his ideas about educating Indians. Pratt’s goal was to "kill the Indian, not the man." In order to assimilate American Indian children into European culture, Pratt subjected them to what we would call brainwashing tactics today. These are the same methods that cult leaders use to coerce recruits to commit completely to a new way of thinking.

10. Brainwashing techniques At the time reformers believed that assimilation and off-reservation boarding schools were the lesser of two evils. They were a better policy than extermination, getting rid of American Indians by shooting them or starving them to death. Just because something is the lesser of two evils doesn’t make it right. After Carlisle opened, boarding schools became a part of official U.S. Government Indian policy. Attendance was mandatory. Most of the schools were run by church organizations, but they all followed the same mind-control model set forth by Pratt.

11. Brainwashing techniques, continued • Many boarding schools were established far away from reservations so that students would have no contact with their families and friends. Parents were discouraged from visiting and, in most cases, students were not allowed to go home during the summer. • Indian boarding school students wore military uniforms and were forced to march. • They were given many rules and no choices. To disobey meant swift and harsh punishment. • Students were forbidden to speak their language. • They were forbidden to practice their religion and were forced to memorize Bible verses and the Lord’s Prayer. • Their days were filled with so many tasks that they had little time to think. • Indian students had no privacy. • Boarding school students were expected to spy on one another and were pitted against each other by administrators and teachers. • Students were taught that the Indian way of life was savage and inferior to the white way. They were taught that they were being civilized or "raised up" to a better way of life. • Indian students were told that Indian people who retained their culture were stupid, dirty, and backwards. Those who most quickly assimilated were called "good Indians." Those who didn’t were called "bad" Indians. • The main part of their education focused on learning manual skills such as cooking and cleaning for girls and milking cows and carpentry for boys. • Students were shamed and humiliated for showing homesickness for their families. • When they finally did go home…many boarding school students had a difficult time fitting in.

12. Native Americans weren’t the only ones… • The immigrant poor lived in overcrowded, unsanitary, and unsafe housing. Many lived in tenements, dumbbell-shaped brick apartment buildings, four to six stories in height. In 1900, two-thirds of Manhattan's residents lived in tenements. • In one New York tenement, up to 18 people lived in each apartment. Each apartment had a wood-burning stove and a concrete bathtub in the kitchen, which, when covered with planks, served as a dining table. Before 1901, residents used rear-yard outhouses. Afterward, two common toilets were installed on each floor. In the summer, children sometimes slept on the fire escape. Tenants typically paid $10 a month rent. • In tenements, many apartments were dark and airless because interior windows faced narrow light shafts, if there were interior windows at all. With a series of newspaper articles and then a book, entitled How the Other Half Lives, published in 1889, Jacob Riis turned tenement reform into a crusade. http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/database/article_display.cfm?HHID=210

13. Picture from: http://www.cis.yale.edu/amstud/inforev/riis/title.html Children in tenements often didn’t go to school Text from: http://tenant.net/Community/LES/kleeck9.html In the most thickly populated districts of New York City, especially south of Fourteenth street, little children are often seen on the streets carrying large bundles of unfinished garments, or boxes containing materials for making artificial flowers. This work is given out by manufacturers or contractors to be finished in tenement homes, where the labor of children of any age may be utilized. For the laws of New York state, prohibiting the employment of children under fourteen years of age in factories, stores, or other specified work-places, have never been extended to home workrooms. In this fact is presented a child labor problem,-as yet scarcely touched,-namely: How to prevent employment of young children in home work in manufacture?

14. Children working at home Schools in tenement neighborhoods were overcrowded, as you might imagine.

15. http://www.iath.virginia.edu/utc/abolitn/walkerhp.html It was against the law to teach slaves to read… • "If any are anxious to ascertain who I am," writes David Walker near the end of his Appeal, "know the world, that I am one of the oppressed, degraded and wretched sons of Africa, rendered so by the avaricious and unmerciful, among the whites." Born near the end of the eighteenth century in North Carolina as a freed person of color, by the mid-1820s Walker had moved to Boston. It was there that he wrote this book; first published in 1829, it is one of the earliest African American authored protests against slavery and racism. Despite his title, throughout he addresses himself often to white readers, hoping to change their hearts and acts: "America is as much our country, as it is yours.--Treat us like men, and there is no danger but we will all live in peace and happiness." He intended his exhortation, though, mainly for black readers, hoping to arouse them to claim their human rights: "Oh! my coloured brethren, all over the world, when shall we arise from this death-like apathy?--And be men!!"Before his death in 1830, Walker worked to circulate his Appeal to blacks in both the North and the South. Copies found in the possession of slaves led to stronger laws against teaching slaves to read and distributing inflammatory writing in a number of southern states.

16. The question becomes… • How do we create schools that truly educate people to live in a diverse, respectful, democratic society? • This is the first generation to attempt to “leave no child behind.” What a great goal (and a daunting one).

17. Individuals, Groups, and Society Reactions to immigrants and minorities have been problematic: assuming everyone should become just like majority-type Americans, and assuming that anyone who isn’t, is lacking, somehow. Across the centuries, many immigrants have come to the U.S. Melting pot: a metaphor for the absorption and assimilation into the mainstream of society so that ethnic differences vanish. Cultural deficit model: a model that explains the school achievement problems of ethnic minority students by assuming that their culture is inadequate and does not prepare them to succeed in school.

18. Multicultural education • Education that promotes equity in the schooling of all students. • In other words, we are not going to deny education to some, and we are not going to attempt to brainwash some students because we think their culture is bad.

19. Dimensions of multicultural education Content integration: using examples from a variety of cultures and groups to illustrate key concepts, principles, generalizations, and theories in their subject area or discipline. The Knowledge Construction Process: helping students to understand how the implicit cultural assumptions within a discipline influence the ways that knowledge is constructed within it. Multicultural education An Equity Pedagogy: matching teaching styles to students’ learning styles in order to facilitate the academic achievement of students from diverse racial, cultural, and social class groups. Prejudice Reduction: identifying the characteristics of students’ racial attitudes and determining how they can be modified by teaching. An Empowering School Culture and Social Structure: examining group and labeling practices, sports participation, and the interaction of the staff and the students across ethnic and racial lines to create a school culture that empowers students from all groups.

20. Content integration If this is the only image a child sees of a scientist, what is the child likely to assume about who gets to be a scientist? If children don’t see themselves in the examples, they are less likely to imagine themselves taking on these roles.

21. Knowledge construction Intelligence Unfortunately, they didn’t do a “double blind” experiment where the person measuring the skull would have no idea about the person whose skull it was. So, their prejudices towards one race and against another influenced their data (it’s easy to stuff a little extra mustard seed in some skulls and to not completely fill others). For example, some people thought that the bigger the head, the smarter a person was. In order to explore that idea, they placed mustard seed in various skulls in order to measure the volume. They used skulls from two different races of people. It was in the early 1900’s when this theory was discredited, using a then new statistic, the correlation. This information from Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man This is a really obvious example of how cultural assumptions (that one culture is smarter than another) influence the construction of knowledge. There are more subtle but equally significant examples. When you are reading about a culture, you not only need to read writers from outside that culture but also writers from INSIDE the culture.

22. Inside vs. outside • This is one of the challenges of working with non-dominant cultures: these groups have been historically left out of the education process, so they are less likely to write books about their lives. It’s harder to find “insider” material about people in poverty or people in certain cultures. Outsider-written material can distort information about the culture because of misunderstanding.

23. Prejudice Reduction • Students come from a range of homes, from those that teach and practice tolerance to those that are extremely bigoted toward one group or another. • Yet, in school, students have to be able to work together. • We need to teach students to hold at bay prejudices that impede their ability to be a constructive member of the classroom.

24. Equity Pedagogy • Teachers used to ask: how come these students don’t know this? They must be lazy or deficient. • Now we ask: what do students need to know? What range of teaching strategies and information presentation modes can I use to get this concept across?

25. Empowering school culture and social structure • If one group or another typically does not participate in a school activity (type of class, club, sport) then it’s possible that subtle messages have been sent that members of this group are not welcome. When school activities reflect the diversity of the school, then students who have an interest in that activity are likely to choose to participate.

26. Why is this so important? • Students begin school when they are young—five years old. They don’t know what they might be. One purpose of school is to give students opportunities to explore career possibilities and personal interests, to find out who they are in relation to careers and what they do on their own time. If only one ethnic group participates in science club or in the orchestra, then students from other ethnic groups who might be good at this will not select it—they lose educational opportunities.

27. What is culture? • The knowledge, values, attitudes, and traditions that guide the behavior of a group of people and allow them to solve the problems of living in their environment.

28. Something to remember • Culture is important but doesn’t completely define a person. • General characteristics of a culture may not be apparent in every person who is part of the culture. Don’t allow cultural information to become stereotypes.

29. Appalachian Culture and Schooling In traditional Appalachian culture, there are two concepts of knowledge: “horse sense” and “book learning.” Horse sense refers to the fact that horses are careful about where they step, often more careful than the people who are riding them. Horse sense is superior to mere book learning, a type of knowledge that is not particularly helpful in the hard-scrabble life of subsistence farming.

30. Appalachian Culture and Schooling Within Appalachia, there is a history of exploitation: outsiders came in and bought mineral rights to land and lied to the farmers. Then they came in again and hired locals to mine the coal from the land in terribly unsafe conditions. Outsiders also came in as social workers, medical personnel, and teachers, often with the attitude that Appalachian culture was deficient and that Appalachians were ignorant and stupid.

31. Appalachian Culture and Schooling Many Appalachians moved to the Columbus area when jobs became scarce in the coal fields during the 1950’s and 1960’s. Their grandchildren now attend Columbus public schools. Often within these families are negative memories of school, of teachers who did not appreciate the types of knowledge that are important to Appalachian people, teachers who communicated disrespect for people of this culture.

32. Appalachian Culture and Schooling This is Jessrie Tussey, of Greenup County, Kentucky, who went through the eighth grade in school. She loved school and was encouraged by her teacher to go onto high school but her family needed her to work on the farm, so she left school. When working with students from this culture, understand that the parents of your students may not be fully supportive of school unless you as a teacher exhibit horse sense and respect. There may also be some negative family experiences with school; with your understanding, respect, and support, you may be able to overcome these barriers. I have used the example of Appalachian culture because of its importance to the Columbus area, but these principles apply to working with families of many cultures.

33. Economic and Social Class Differences • Socioeconomic status (SES): relative standing in the society based on income, power, background, and prestige.

34. Economics • Money (or the lack thereof) has often been a divide amongst Americans.

35. Economics It’s hard to even define who is wealthy and who is poor. The concept is relative: to a person who struggles to find money for a burger at McDonalds, a middle class person making $60,000 a year is wealthy. To a middle-class person, someone making $200,000 is wealthy. To a person making $200,000 a year, a person making $1,000,000 is wealthy.

36. Economics People’s economic positions influence their perspectives. For example, the loss of a material item such as a pair of glasses might be annoying to some people and a complete disaster to others, depending on how much money they have access to. The people who would be slightly annoyed may have a hard time imagining the perspective of the person to whom it is a disaster—and vice versa.

37. Culture and Economics • Ruby Payne (A Framework for Understanding Poverty) argues that each economic class has a culture that is largely invisible to itself. • Part of the difficulties we face as educators is the potential for misunderstandings because of economic class differences. Are people poor because they have a bad culture? No. The “culture” of poverty, according to Celano and Neuman (reference cited later in this slide show), is a “rational response” to the conditions of poverty—in other words, people who deal with unmitigated poverty react in certain ways and these ways are reasonable under the circumstances.

38. From: Payne, R. (revised, 2003) A Framework for Understanding Poverty. Aha! Process, Inc., p. 42 Economics and Language: Register

39. Economics and Language: Narrative patterns • Payne also points out that people from different classes tell stories in different ways and for different reasons. • In homes that use higher registers, stories are told chronologically or they move directly toward a point. • In homes that use lower registers, stories are told for the purpose of entertainment or to reinforce a relationship between speaker and listener. Therefore the stories are told not from “beginning to end” chronologically but the most emotionally interesting aspect is usually presented first. Or, the person may be seeming to “beat around the bush” before getting to the point.

40. These differences in expectations can influence the quality of health care… I take my husband to the doctor Chronology What the doctor is expecting to hear: I’ve had the swelling since May. I have had a CAT scan and an ultrasound which found nothing. How long have you had this swelling? Emotion What the doctor hears: It kind of worries me because it might be cancer. My buddy had a swelling on his leg that was cancer. My husband grew up in poverty. Recently, he had a swelling on his leg and he went to the doctor to try to find out if he was okay (it turns out that yes, he is).

41. Appalachian discourse patterns • Conversations typically begin with the establishment of the relationship. The first information exchanged is usually where both participants are from (in Kentucky, this information consists of the name of the county, e.g., Pike County). The next part is establishing who knows whom—both participants mention people they know who lived in the area the other person is from. Often someone will know either the person or a close relative. Once this is established and pleasantries about the weather have been exchanged, then business can take place. • This is a very civilized way of doing things, a lot better than just taking care of business without developing the relationship. In the long run, relationships count.

42. Parent-teacher conferences • While suburban schools might be able to get away with short teacher conferences because discourse patterns used by both parents and teachers are the similar and are efficient (everyone tends to get to the point quickly), this is not so in schools that serve families in poverty. Storytelling takes time and you will need to listen and participate in order to establish the relationship. If there is no relationship, you will not get anything constructive done.

43. Cultural Differences: Time There are two basic approaches to time that cultures tend to take: clock time and “experience” time. The dominant culture within the US is clock time based and most institutions, such as schools and government offices, are set up along clock time values. Clock time people are constantly aware of time in relation to the clock. An experience begins or ends when it is scheduled to do so, no matter what is going on. For “experience time” people, an experience is not over until it’s over, no matter how much clock time that takes. Clock time people get upset at experience time people because experience time people often don’t arrive or leave by the clock (they may be significantly late and they may hang around longer than expected). This discrepancy is a source of disrespect for experience time people—that experience time people are lazy or irresponsible. Experience time people get upset at clock time people because clock time people cut things short just because a machine tells them to; they may feel that clock time people are not “with it” or are grossly insensitive.

44. Clock time vs. experience time at a conference • I once attended a conference run by clock time people but that included experience time people. At this conference was Paulo Friere, a famous educational philosopher, in one of the last appearances he was able to make. He spoke to the conference, struggling to use English (Portuguese was his native language) and to express complicated ideas. The clock time folks cut him off when the clock told them the session was supposed to end. This was upsetting even to some who had been raised in clock time cultures!

45. Conference story, continued • At a subsequent session in which people were invited to air their concerns, a Native American woman spoke. She said: “In my culture, we listen to our elders with respect no matter how long it takes. I feel this was not done at this conference.” If you are a clock time person, you need to be aware of the strengths of cultures that run on experience time and you need to let go of the clock. You need to let go of disrespect for experience time people. If you are an experience time person, when you deal with clock time people, you need to accommodate them somewhat and understand that they don’t intend disrespect when they are paying attention to the interaction but also to the clock.

46. Poverty and School Achievement • Health, environment, stress • Low expectations, low academic self-concept • Peer influences and resistance cultures • Tracking: poor teaching • Home environment and resources

47. Health, environment, and stress • Lead poisoning is more common for children in poverty because they tend to live in older houses that have lead-based paint (paint manufactured before the mid 1970’s frequently had lead in it. Lead-based paint is brittle and tends to chip; toddlers tend to put in their mouths whatever is on the floor). Lead poisoning leads to neurological damage. • Children in families of poverty breathe more polluted air, and have less health care than children in wealthier families. For you Praxis takers: remember this about lead paint—it has shown up on some Praxis II PLT exams.

48. Poverty and teeth • One of the characteristics of poverty that can make middle class people feel uncomfortable is the results of poor dental care to which most people in poverty are exposed. • All the commercials for teeth-whitening products and dentists who repair smiles play on the anxiety middle class people might feel about their own teeth. • In rural areas, children often drink well water, which has no fluoride in it, so their teeth are more prone to cavities. • Additionally, with health care being as expensive as it is, dental care is often extremely low priority for these families. As a result, children don’t get preventive care. • Children in families of poverty may be given sugary pop (“soda” to those outside the culture) to drink from a very young age because it is cheap and it tastes good. • Finally, dentists who serve people in poverty usually don’t try to save teeth; they tend to pull them. It’s cheaper to pull a tooth than to give it a $600 crown. It is common to see people in their twenties with few or no teeth. • This means that many people will be missing individual teeth, will have obviously diseased teeth, or will be missing all their teeth entirely (and may not have money for false teeth). They see the same commercials, and they may feel terrible about their appearance, but they don’t have the money to do something about their teeth. • Poor teeth contributes to nutritional problems—it’s hard to chew food properly with a toothache or no teeth.

49. Low expectations—low academic self-concept • Traditionally, teachers have thought of low income students as not being bright—primarily because cultural differences made it hard to identify HOW children in poverty are smart. • When students experience this attitude from their teachers, they begin to feel that nothing they do will be effective. They experience “learned helplessness.” See last chapter for more information on learned helplessness.

50. Peer influences and resistance cultures • Resistance culture: group values and beliefs about refusing to adopt the behaviors and attitudes of the majority culture.