New Classroom Discourse Analysis (Class Assignment no. 3)

In class this week, we took up the critical view of education voiced by both Asa Hillard and Sleeter and Grant's "Multicultural Education" chapter. Specifically, we took up the question of how the cultural competence of the instructor affects the effectiveness of the instruction of the child.

Hillard contructs this picture of distinct behavioral styles that (to put it in the least problematic way possible) tend to create a cultural gap between African American students and White American students. As Sleeter articulates further, the kids have no concept of the instructor's cultural context and so it is up to the instructor to bridge whatver gaps in understanding the child might have due to his/her own "behavioral style" or cultural codification.

Directly linked to this is the danger of teaching a child away from his/her creativity. This goes beyond behavioral styles and cultural distiction, but still maintains the same idea of, as my professor puts it, "meeting the student where he/she is at." The video lecture by Sir Ken Robinson addresses this topic very appropriately in my opinion.

Now, as I am wont to do, I would like to critique this fractured notion of how children learn. Don't get me wrong, I think that it is more important than anything else to specialize educating methods to maximize the ways in which the individual student related to the lesson (which i feel helped me learn every language I've ever spoken effectively). I would rather the lesson be no other way than tailored to address the needs of visual learners, audial learners, hands-on learners as related to the children's individual experiences. But I can't help but acknowledge the concern I had when reading Hillard's article: In the shadow of recognizing behavioral styles that TEND to codify students along the lines of their social location (ie. race, gender, sexuality, ability, class, nationality), does there not lie a danger to deemphasize their similarities as children and common human experience at the risk of highlighting their differences.

For example, if I were a able-bodied/minded, heterosexual, lower-class, inner-city African American 5th grader, whose family has been in the country since the 1800's and began to subscribe to the "typical" urban African-American subculture in a classroom with little other demographics, a teacher imparting the lesson to me solely in "my context" at the risk of imparting the the part of the lesson that can be palatable to me as a child regardless of my social location could be denying me something as well.

This video both illustrates the gap of the cultural styles of the instructor and that of the students and the problems that it creates with regard to educating students, and also examines critically the way in which both the students and the teachers are reduced only to their behavioral styles.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVF-nirSq5s

--TAHS