Teaching Strategies for Multicultural Classrooms - Research Paper Example

OVERVIEW OF THE TEACHING STRATEGIES FOR MULTICULTURAL CLASSROOMS. TABLE OF CONTENT OVERVIEW OF THE TEACHING STRATEGIES FOR MULTICULTURAL CLASSROOMS. 1 1 --- OVERVIEW OF THE TEACHING STRATEGIES FOR MULTICULTURAL CLASSROOMS. 3 INTRODUCTION 3 TOPIC OF RESEARCH 5 TRADITIONAL METHODS AND THINKING 5 THE NEED FOR THIS STUDY 6 2. REVIEW OF LITERATURE 8 3. RESEARCH PLAN 13 INTRODUCTION 13 METHODOLOGY 15 COOPERATIVE LEARNING STRATEGY 15 COOPERATIVE STRUCTURES AND ACTIVITIES 16 FAMILY AND PARENTAL SUPPORT INITIATIVES 21 REFERENCES 25 1 --- OVERVIEW OF THE TEACHING STRATEGIES FOR MULTICULTURAL CLASSROOMS. INTRODUCTION With the number of immigrants moving to US increasing day-by-day, the issues of dealing with diverse and multicultural population are becoming important. And most critical among them is the rise in multicultural and diverse students in the classrooms who not only have a different background but also a different primary or mother language. Thus dealing with such ethnically different students who also exhibit language diversity is a challenging task for the teachers of today. The extent of change in demographic population of US can be understood by looking at the statistics according to which in 1984, about one in four schoolchildren were minority students while it is estimated to increase to nearly one in two by 2020, and most likely , many of these students will be poor (Pallas, Natriello, & McDill, 1989). As per the National center for education statistics, 72 5 of student enrollment in 1994 was that of minorities. And the worst part is that most of these minority students are not able to achieve the desired learning outcomes in the academic field. Besides the language problems and the different ethnic backgrounds, the lack of equal opportunities to learn and lack of sensitivity of teachers to their problems contribute significantly to the academic underachievement of many minority students.(Jones and Fennimore, 1990, p. 16) More intriguing is the fact that most of the students who are studying to be the future teachers do not have confidence in these minority students and think that these students are incapable of learning high-level concepts in the subjects they are preparing to teach (Stoddart, 1990). The presence of large number of culturally different students have created a new set of problems in the classrooms. Not only has this phenomena changed the way teachers look and interact with the students, it has also change the way the students interact with each other. Though sometimes the effect is good with the students learning from each other’s experience but sometimes the effects can be negative and disturb the overall balance of the classroom. If the students are unable to understand or relate to the minority co-student, they tend to perceive them as different and thus starts a long path of misunderstandings and misguided apprehensions about each other. Thus if the teachers are not able to balance out these negative forces, the result is the detached students unable to communicate or benefit from each other. Thus in such a scenario, it becomes critical to have teachers who understand and promote racial harmony and avoid any kind of bias towards their students in a classroom. And to be able to help such students from diverse cultural backgrounds, teachers need to explore other alternatives to the current method of teaching where teachers do most of the talking and directing in the classroom (McGroarty, 1993).Infact, a multicultural classroom should be taken as an opportunity to learn and teach students to cope up with multicultural society when they grow up. Banks (1993b) defines multicultural education as an effort to reform schools and teachers designed to increase education equity for a range of cultural, ethnic, and economic groups. Thus the role of teachers becomes very critical in imparting bias free education to all and treating all the students equally and trying to encourage different students to rise above the bar and achieve the desired learning outcomes. Thus if the teachers themselves do not believe in the capability of students, how can they help and encourage those students to wards excellence? TOPIC OF RESEARCH Thus, in this paper, we will try to provide a proposal for study of the different methods and teaching strategies for secondary classes which include students from different ethnic backgrounds and countries and are racially and linguistically diverse. This issue is of fundamental importance in today’s world as we come to accept our different heritages and ethnicities and try to make a world free of any racial bias and prejudice and provide equal opportunity to work and life to all the people irrespective of their caste, creed, race and gender. And the schools and the classrooms are the best place to start and practice equality. The educational policies and strategies need to be put in place to shape today’s children into intelligent and culturally sensitive individuals of tomorrow. TRADITIONAL METHODS AND THINKING But it is very clear that the existing practices of education are inadequate for promoting multicultural equity. Infact, the same set of practices have shaped the teachers of today, but being responsible individuals, they should throw away and unlearn those strategies and try to incorporate more culturally sensitive practices in their teaching methods. Their own education has been probably the assembly line education with students viewed as finished products from the school factory (Shaw, 1993) and characterized by traditional modes of instruction and learning models and styles and curriculum that does not include the diversity of cultures and grouping of students based on measures of intelligence, achievement, or aptitude. The traditional teachers are typically white and middle class, speak generally English, and being from majority community and having never been exposed to culturally sensitive practices, they bring little intercultural experience from their largely suburban and small-town backgrounds (Zimpher, 1989). According to American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (1990), 69% of these white teachers and education students spend most of their free time with people of their own racial or ethnic background. THE NEED FOR THIS STUDY Therefore it is important to teach these to be teachers or future teachers to be more culturally sensitive and respect the diversity and not be biased towards any students simply because they belong to a different community or ethnic background. As noted by Banks (1991a), it is important to integrate multicultural education within the teacher education curriculum such that they are able to receive the knowledge, skills, and attitudes needed to work effectively with students from diverse racial, ethnic, and social class groups. (pp. 135-136) By this study, we hope to find out the different teaching methods, strategies and practices that foster the spirit of equality and promote the harmonious relationship between the majority white and diverse minority students in the classroom. Such practices should also be able to help the minority students overcome their ethnic social and language barriers and achieve the desired learning outcomes or academic excellence. There are many new methods of learning being promoted by experts or academicians such as cooperative learning, use of learning models, use of parental and social support in education etc. We will try to look at these methods in detail and try to base our study on one or two specific topics to be able to have a better focus. 2. REVIEW OF LITERATURE There have been a lot of studies concerning teaching students who are ethnically and culturally different and are linguistically diverse in the secondary education. We will take a look at some of them. As the students in the schools, become more and more diverse due to increase in the immigrants from different countries to US, it has become important for schools to adopt approaches that support these culturally diverse students. Governments and Schools need to reform their education system and policies to take into account the heterogeneity of school population and adopt measures which allow the students from minority backgrounds to gain meaningful education and academic excellence despite the social and linguistic barriers faced by them. The low achievement rates by these students are a cause of concern to all as they may be due to lack of equal opportunity and equity in education As per Jones and Fennimore (1990) schools are unable to recognize the inherent ability of these students and label these children as failures because they are unable to express themselves because of language and cultural barriers. Thus it is necessary to first teach those who teach students i.e. the teachers or the future teachers. These new student teachers need to be taught about the cultural and linguistic diversity so that they are capable of handling such issues when the need arises. As Parla stated (1994), Educating teachers for cultural and linguistic diversity means that the teacher education curriculum must include discussions and methods and strategies to handle cultural differences and linguistic diversity in the classrooms. In a similar study, 16 key elements of effective teacher education for culturally diverse classrooms were discussed and identified.(Zeichner, 1993) These 16 elements have been used comprehensively by many educationists to further study the matter. Many authors such as (Banks & Banks, 1993; Baruth & Manning, 1992; Bennett, 1995; Garcia, 1994; Nieto, 1996; and Tim, 1996) have focused on multicultural education for teachers. Many educationists have also tried to define multiculturalism and multicultural education as school reforming exercise such that it brings different cultural, ethnic, and economic groups at the same level and provides educational equity for all. There has also been a lot of literature on school counselors and their perceptions of multicultural competence and the needs and challenges they face in their work with culturally diverse students. The Multicultural Counseling Competencies (MCC) is a framework developed by Sue, Arredondo, and McDavis (1992) for professionals engaged in cross-cultural work in schools. It provides insight into beliefs and attitudes, knowledge, and skills of awareness of our own worldview, awareness of the other's worldview, and appropriate interventions. These talks have been going on for a while now. Some teachers believe that by following certain series of steps or simply providing some sops to minorities will help them to reach the same level as others. But this is not true. Not only the school environment and the class environment, but in general, there is a need to be socially aware of this problem and make the stakeholders aware of it too. That is to say that equal efforts and participation is needed from home front – that is the parents and the community groups as well. Children are very sensitive and vulnerable to the existence and effects of racism. As per one of the studies done, 84 % students agreed that racial prejudice exists in the schools and 45% had personally experienced prejudice (Teens and race, 1995). So, if teachers think that they can implement an effective multicultural education program without changing the social scenario and without participation by community and parents and school policies, they are wrong (Ladson-Billings, 1995) Thus what is needed is a comprehensive treatment of this problem by involving all the stakeholders – parents, teachers, schools, community groups and government. Holt et al. (1993) examine the use of cooperative learning in the culturally diverse classrooms and show that it is possible to increase participation by minority students by using this technique. Actually this concept is nothing new and its effectiveness has been proved by many research studies (Johnson & Johnson, 1986; Kagan, 1986; Slavin, 1988). But till recently this methodology was not used to cover cases where students came from non-English language and culturally diverse backgrounds. But now such multicultural classrooms are significantly higher and there is a need to use this methodology for such heterogeneous classroom settings.(Olsen & Chen, 1988). And as per McGroarty, (1993) to be able to reach students from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds, the teachers should explore other alternative methods of teaching than the traditional way where teachers do most of the talking and directing in the classroom. Cooperative learning is one such alternative that has been explored by the teachers to teach the diverse student population. This method has many advantages as it helps teachers to manage students with diverse needs. It has been shown to improve academic achievement and social development. Cooperative learning thus uses strategies that try to improve students learning over language and content by forming heterogeneous groups of students who perform varied tasks together and thus learn to work with each other and understand each other more effectively. In cooperative teams, students with lower levels of proficiency can interact with students with higher levels in order to negotiate the meaning of content. The teachers generally form small groups and provide them with tasks that help to promote friendship, understanding and tolerance of each other’s diversity. These activities can last for five minutes, half an hour, 2 hours or one week. As per the work done by Johnson and Holubec, (1988), students were seen to benefit from participation in both short-term and long-term experiences in cooperative teams. Considerable literature also exists on how the cultural diversity helps or creates problem at different levels of education. For example, it has been seen that secondary school students have less time to cope up with language problem than the elementary school students. And it has been shown that this adversely affects their academic achievement and they generally lag behind their native English-speaking peers in academic achievement (Collier, 1987; Minicucci & Olsen, 1992). Moreover the high rate of drop outs from schools is also seen at the secondary or the middle school (Minicucci, 1985; Olsen & Chen, 1988). Not only at the academic level, but also socially, the seconadary level students face more difficulties than their elementary counterparts. Studies have shown that children generally seek friendships within their own cultural groups and these friendship patterns result in conflict within and between different ethnic groups (see Ogbu & Matute-Bianchi, 1986). The social difficulties result in pushing these children into isolation from the mainstream of the school and they are not motivated enough to attend school regularly or try to achieve desired learning outcomes. Under such situations, parental and family support goes a long way in helping students cope up with such pressures at school. Thus the multicultural education system should involve parents and community groups to help the students achieve their desired goals. It has been shown that at this age, the student’s social relationships also play a crucial role in their academic achievements As per Roeser, Eccles & Sameroff (2000), the secondary school age is the time when they try to find their own identities, try to express themselves uniquely and all such social activities help in developing their competence and self-esteem. Also, these students desire freedom and independence, They want to spend more time with their friends and peers, but at the same time, they continue to rely on guidance from parents and other adults.(Eccles, 1999) and (Zarret & Eccles, 2006) . Previous research has shown that family involvement during secondary and high school education helps to overcome adverse adolescent pressures and behaviors and students whose parents are more involved with their studies are more academically inclined than others. (Eccles & Harold, 1993) (Zill, & Nord, 1994) Another important research was undertaken by Kreider, et al.( 2007) to prove the link between family involvement during secondary school and high school and their academic and social levels of achievements. Thus they wert able to show that it is important to have the family support at this critical juncture in their lives for secondary school students to achieve academic excellence and move towards a college degree. 3. RESEARCH PLAN INTRODUCTION In our proposed study, we are interested in identifying the best instructional and teaching practices for multicultural or culturally and linguistically diverse students in a secondary class. With the increase in number of such students in US schools, the education system needs to be reformed or modified to suit the needs of all students – without discrimination on the basis of gender, race or language. This cannot happen overnight. There needs to a whole hearted effort from all the stakeholders --- the students, the parents, the community, the schools and the government. The government should adopt policies that help to promote racial harmony and provide support to low income minority groups. The Schools should provide a bias – free atmosphere to students to be able to focus on their studies. They should have strict rules against racial or any form discrimination and should promote a culture where all students can co exist harmoniously. Similarly, the students and the parents should try to understand the viewpoints of other cultures and reinforce the goodness and equality of all races. The community groups too have a responsibility towards their young children and should try to foster the spirit of respect and tolerance of people of other races. The current teacher programs should be modified to include curriculum that supports the use of various instructional strategies and assessment procedures which are sensitive to cultural and linguistic variations. They should help teacher students to adapt classroom instruction and assessment to accommodate the cultural resources that their students bring to school. Appropriate courses in methods and field experiences should be mandatory for teaching in diverse classrooms. Education of parents and taking their support is of utmost importance to make these children interested in studies. We have already seen, how literature has shown that lack of interest from parents or lack of family support has a greater impact on such students and they are unable to cope up with the pressures of studying in the diverse classrooms or being unable to gain entry into one of the peer groups at the school level. Thus most of the dropouts are usually from lo income and troubled family subgroups of minority community and they can easily be misled and fall into the crime trap. METHODOLOGY We plan to select 8-10 small groups of students from culturally diverse backgrounds who are studying in different schools. Each group would consist of 4-5 students from culturally diverse backgrounds. They will be taught using Cooperative learning strategy plus regular counseling sessions will be held along with their parents so that parents and family are fully involved in their studies. Their academic progress will then be recorded based on specified time period. For this, we will need support from school authorities as well as teachers who will actually use these techniques. Thus a 5 day seminar will first be organized for the teachers to explain the new methodology to them and make them more culturally sensitive. Depending upon the response and the requirement, such sessions may be held twice a month to ensure proper adherence to new methodology. To ensure proper support from families of these students, we will organize multiple session educational experience for the parents as well. These sessions could be held weekly or fortnightly depending upon the response. COOPERATIVE LEARNING STRATEGY Cooperative learning is recognized as one of the most promising practices in the field of education. Actually the concept of cooperative learning is nothing new and its effectiveness has been proved by many research studies before as well. (Johnson & Johnson, 1986; Kagan, 1986; Slavin, 1988). But its use has not been documented for groups involving culturally diverse students. But with the increase in such multicultural classrooms, there is a need to use this methodology for teaching secondary students. And as McGroarty, (1993) noted that teachers should explore other alternative methods to reach students from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds besides the traditional method of teaching. Cooperative learning is one such alternative that has been explored by the teachers to teach the diverse student population and we too would be using this strategy in our research process. This methodology has been shown to improve academic achievement and social development. Cooperative learning actually uses strategies that try to improve students learning over language and content by forming heterogeneous groups of students who perform varied tasks together and thus learn to work with each other and understand each other more effectively. In cooperative teams, students with lower levels of proficiency can interact with students with higher levels in order to negotiate the meaning of content. The teachers generally form small groups and provide them with tasks that help to promote friendship, understanding and tolerance of each other’s diversity. These activities can last for five minutes, half an hour, 2 hours or one week. Previous studies have shown that students benefit from participation in both short-term and long-term experiences in cooperative teams. COOPERATIVE STRUCTURES AND ACTIVITIES Cooperative learning strategies are many and varied and they may be used in lots of different ways such as team building exercise, an exercise to understand the content through quizzes, or group discussions to apply the knowledge in real time or everyday activities etc. Their durations will depend on the objective it is trying to fulfill and the method to be used. It could vary from a five minute introduction to a 2 hour group discussions. For example – let us consider the language diverse group of students. The main objective would be to learn and comprehend English language in an effective manner. The students are encouraged to use oral language to complete tasks. The exercise will help to develop social skills for teamwork as they improve comprehension and oral production skills. Activity 1: Make a group of four students each. Use Name tags to introduce oneself. The students are asked to write their First name and last name, their favorite sports and color, their hobbies, and interests. Each student is asked to keep their tags in their hands and display them when required. They are then asked to introduce themselves to other members of the group using their name tags. A time of two minutes is allowed per introduction. This will help students to speak and try to make contact with different students and be more knowledgeable and friendly with each other. Activity 2: Make a group of four students each. Use Name tags to introduce oneself. The students are asked to write their First name and last name, their favorite sports and color, their hobbies, and interests. Next ask one student from each group to introduce other members of the team to the whole class. This will help students to gain confidence in speaking before others and secondly, to speak about others, the students will need to know about them and this will motivate him/her to talk to them. Let each and every student go through this exercise. Encourage them to explore each other more openly by giving them time among themselves and declare the student who provides maximum information as the winner. Activity 3 : Use Crossword puzzles to increase the vocabulary of the students. This activity can be done within each group of 4 students. Divide them into two pairs and give them horizontal and vertical puzzles to solve. The first pair should give the clues to the second pair without telling them the actual words. The second pair should try to guess the word through the clues. This way , students will learn lots of words from each other. The activity can then be repeated in the inverse manner with the second pair now providing clues for the first pair to solve. Activity 4 : Again make a heterogeneous group of four students each and divide them into two pairs within the group. Provide one pair with a picture and other with a blank sheet. Now, similar to activity 3 above, the clues can be given by one pair of students by actions or drawing a picture without speaking. The second pair must guess the word based on the actions or the drawing. Again it should be repeated with second pair providing the clues while first pair should guess the word. The above two activities help to stimulate child’s thinking ability and connect them or link the actions and drawings with words to enrich their vocabulary. Teachers may choose to use commercially produced puzzles. But it is more advisable to make their own puzzles based on previously introduced words in their lessons. Another set of activities that can be used are the ones that focus on comprehension, reinforcing team spirit by helping team members and problem solving skills of students. Activity 5 : Divide students in a group of four students each with each group having a weak and strong English language student. Each group should be given a short story to read and understand. Give them 10 minutes to fully understand the story. The good students should help the weak ones to comprehend the meanings. Then a quiz can be organized to ask questions based on the story. Four questions should be asked and all four members of a team should answer one by one. This is to see that all of them have understood the story and winner should be the team who is able to answer all the questions. This should motivate students to help their own team members to win. Activity 6: Divide students in a group of four students each with each group having a weak and strong English language student. Each group should be given a short story with an open ending or no ending. And they should be asked to produce a suitable ending to the story. The team that comes up with most innovative and creative ending should be declared the winner. This will need students to brainstorm and discuss ideas. They should be asked to list down at least four ideas for suitable ending and later explain why they chose the one they did and reject others. This way, no one student will be able to hijack the answers or take charge. The idea is to involve each and every member of the team, understand his view point and then accept or reject the idea on merit. Activity 7: Divide students in a group of four students each with each group having a weak and strong English language student. Each group should be given a short story with a moral. Now ask each group to read and understand the story. Give them 5-10 minutes each for this activity. Next ask the weakest student from each group to read their story aloud for other groups. This helps in improving their reading skills. Then ask the students of each group to enact that story be assuming the characters of the story. Let them speak the dialogues and try to tell the story effectively to other students. The group which is able to interpret the story correctly and present it effectively wins the game. These discussions would not only help students to understand the concept or the story but also make them comfortable with disagreements and learn ways to cope up and resolve the differences between them and work together in the interest of their team. This will also help them to think out of box or creatively to find suitable solutions to the problems presented to them. After every such activity, efforts should be made to sit with team and discuss how they worked and should be provided with the necessary feedback on their problems and how to resolve them. They should be encouraged to speak about their experience in such activities and how they have helped them or not helped them to learn something new. Thus we see that the needs of secondary school students are very complex and need to be met intelligently especially when it involves students with diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Thus efforts should be made by teachers to involve them in cooperative learning activities that can help them to acquire the English language, content area knowledge, and interpersonal skills needed for success in school. FAMILY AND PARENTAL SUPPORT INITIATIVES Now we come to the parental support initiatives that can be taken to increase parents and family support for culturally diverse secondary school students. Research has shown that academic excellence can be achieved when the developmental needs of the students match the expectations of school and teachers and are supported by the parents and family. Another study by Mattingly, Prislin, McKenzie, Rodriguez, & Kayzar (2002) has supported the positive impact that parent involvement has on the academic achievement of students. Thus in our research we would like to plan multiple sessions with the parents of both the minority as well as majority students and discuss and explain to them the sensitivity of the cultural and ethnic issues involved in student’s lives. The main objective is to increase student achievement, reduce discipline referrals, and decrease absenteeism of multicultural students. We would like to include individual and small group counseling, classroom guidance, tutoring, parent education, community linkages and outreach. Epstein (1996) discusses different types of parent involvement and sample practices. These practices help to train and support parents of culturally diverse students, encourage more and open communication between parents and school authorities, recruit parent volunteers to help other families and promote learning at home The importance of first session is tremendous. By bringing together the parents of minority and majority students, we will like to expose them to a culturally different surroundings. Again the first session will only focus on the introductions to each other and try to know each other better. We are expecting full support from minority community but are not sure if the white majority would like to participate. Thus we will have to provide participation motivation to parents as well to make these sessions mutually rewarding for all parties. Depending upon the response, we can organize more sessions and try to include some light activities similar to themes of cooperative learning strategies for secondary school students. In the second session, we will discuss the importance of sensitizing our children to different cultures and allow them to mix with children belonging to other minority groups. This will help them to attain tolerance and knowledge about each other’s customs and practices which in turn will bring respect towards each other. The third session will touch upon the subject of parenting styles and their effects on students academic life. It has been seen that the parent and child relationship affects the individual student outcomes such as academic achievement, as well as their participation in out-of-school time activities that can benefit them academically, socially, and emotionally. Those students who have an open and supportive family, are seen to participate more in out of school activities which benefits them and allows more emotional and social development. It makes them confident on academic front as well. The next session would focus on educating parents to get more involved with the activities of their children and try to find out what the kids are up to. Usually, the children will tell about the problems faced by them at school, to the parent if asked properly. Thus certain problems can be nipped in bud by the parents themselves by offering advice when required by the children. But sometimes, it may happen that the parents of low income minority groups are themselves not educated enough to provide answers to their children’s queries and problems. In such cases, we intend to educate them regarding the help groups available to them. Many states and schools have developed policies to help parents obtain the information they need to support their children's academic trajectories. It has been seen that when parents are more informed regarding their children's academic progress and learning opportunities, they are able to guide their children better and the students also have better chances for success. Rest of the sessions can be planned based on the response from parents and their requirements. REFERENCES Banks, J.A. (1991a). Teaching multicultural literacy to teachers. Teaching Education, 4, 135-144. Banks, J.A. (1993b). Multicultural education: Characteristics and goals. In J.A. Banks & C.A.M. Banks (Eds.), Multicultural education: Issues and perspectives (2nd ed., pp. 3-28). Boston: Allyn and Bacon Banks, J.A., & Banks, C.A.M. (Eds.). (1993). Multicultural education: Issues and perspectives (2nd ed.). Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Baruth, L.G., & Manning, M.L. (1992). Multicultural education of children and adolescents. Boston: Allyn and Bacon. Bennett, C.I. (1995). Comprehensive multicultural education theory and practice (3rd ed.). 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