Cultural Competence - Cultural Competence in US Education

Cultural Competence in US Education

With the larger population of minorities and racial integration during the 1960s and 1970s, the public school system of the United States had to grapple with issues of cultural sensitivity as most teachers in public school system came from white, middle class backgrounds. Most of these teachers were educated, primarily English speaking, and primarily from the Western European cultures. They often had trouble trying to communicate with speakers of limited English proficiency, let alone people of vastly different value systems and normative behaviors from that of Anglo-European culture. The purpose of training educators and others in the area of cultural competence is to provide new teachers the background and skills to work effectively with children of all backgrounds and social classes.

With the growing diversity of the student body in U.S. public school, it is increasingly imperative that teachers have and continually develop a cultural competence that enables them to connect with, respond to, and interact effectively with their pupils. The achievement gap between cultural minority and majority students suggests that some sort of communication disconnect often occurs in minority classrooms because cultural mismatch between teachers and students is common and should not prevent positive, productive for both parties, provided the educator is a culturally competent communicator. Over the last few decades, scholars have increasingly shown interest in the relationship between learning, reading, schema, and culture. People’s schema depends on their social location, which, as Anderson (1984) explains, includes a reader’s age, sex, race, religion, nationality, and occupation, amongst other factors. Considering schemata determine how people understand, interpret, and analyze everything in their world, it is clear that background and experience really do affect the learning and teaching processes, and how each should be approached in context. "In short," Anderson (1984) says, "the schema that will be brought to bear on a text depends upon the reader’s culture" (p. 374-375). More simply, Anderson (1984) describes a person’s schema as their "organized knowledge about the world" (p. 372). In considering the role of schema, one of the educator’s principal functions in teaching, particularly with literacy, is to "‘bridge the gap between what the learner already knows and what he needs to know before he can successfully learn the task at hand’" (Anderson, 1984, p. 382). This is important because Staton (1989) explains that student learning—i.e. successful communication between instructor and pupil—occurs when teachers and students come to "shared understandings" (p. 364). Thus, teachers must remember that they are "cultural workers, not neutral professionals using skills on a culturally-detached playing field" (Blanchett, Mumford & Beachum, 2005, p. 306).

Teachers and administrators in the public school systems of the United States come in contact with a wide variety of sub-cultures and are at the forefront of the challenge of bringing diverse groups together within a larger American society. Issues confronting teachers and administrators on a daily basis include student learning disabilities, student behavioral problems, child abuse, drug addiction, mental health, and poverty, most of which are handled differently within different cultures and communities.

Examples of cultural conflicts often seen by teachers in the public school system include

• role of women in the family and the decisions they can make
• practices among cultural groups (e.g. fire cupping)
• symbol systems among cultural groups (see semiotics)

Some examples sub-groups within the United States:

• African American
• Asian American
• Indian American
• Irish American
• Jewish American
• Mexican American
• Native Americans or American Indians
• refugees

Citations

Anderson, R. C. (1984). Role of the reader’s schema in comprehension, learning, and memory. In Learning to read in American schools: Basal readers and content texts (pp. 373–383). Laurence Earlbaum Associates.

Blanchett, W. J., Mumford, V., & Beachum, F. (2005). Urban School Failure and Disproportionality in a Post-Brown Era. Remedial and Special Education, 26(2), 70-81.

Chamberlain, S. P. (2005). Recognizing and responding to cultural differences in the education of culturally and linguistically diverse learners. Intervention in School & Clinic, 40(4), 195-211.

• Moule, Jean (2012). Cultural Competence: A primer for educators. Wadsworth/Cengage, Belmont, California.

Staton, A. Q. (1989). The interface of communication and instruction: Conceptual considerations and programmatic manifestations. Communication education, 38(4), 364-372.