Race Relations in the Classroom - Literature review Example

Race Relations in the Classroom 2009 Globalization has altered the social structure of all countries, more so in countries where there has been large-scale immigration into. While in the earlier phases of immigration, groups of people either assimilated into the mainstream society of the adopted country or maintained links with home countries. In an era of globalization, on the other hand, immigrant societies have become more and more complex, with pulls of nationalism and globalism invading into the social psyche thereby complicating the racial structure. Particularly in the context of the classroom, therefore, it is quite difficult to understand or deal with racism since racial patterns and behavior are no longer distinct and prominent. Especially in the context of the rise of right-wing conservative politics in countries like Australia that had in the earlier phases of development been predominantly a white society, multiculturalism and globalization have brought along the baggage of racism and ultra-nationalism in the classroom that is becoming increasingly difficult to tackle. In order to deal with racism in a multicultural country like Australia, teachers should consider the ‘big picture’ of globalization that affects education, curriculum and classroom. Appadurai (1993) defines globalization with the help of a number of ‘scapes’ – ethnoscape, ideoscape, finanscape, technoscape, mediascape, ecoscape and militaryscape. In this model, contrary to an erstwhile Americanisation of global culture as propounded by McDonaldization of the world, globalization does not necessarily lead to a homogenization of culture. Through the global movement of people, ideas, technology, finance, media, pollution and even war, there are islands of people and cultures within each society that are pulled by different ideas and notions. Hence, in Appadurai’s (1993) scheme, a Lebanese family living in Australia can be composed of one son believing in a fundamentalist approach to Islam, another in Sufism and the father a liberal. Ideas flow through the Internet and television faster than it did a decade or more ago through the print media. At the same time, nationalist or sub-nationalist pulls act as a result of as well as incite ultra-conservative ideas. Further, the immigration of people from poorer countries attracts New Right attitudes, which have grown in most developed countries including the United States and the United Kingdom that attack welfare policies and even more instigate conservative policies and attitudes. The New Right attitude has been different from the neo-conservatives in the sense that the former use racial fears and attitudes in the subtext of the policies but not openly like the latter, which makes the issue even more complicated (Winant). The cultural discords are mostly felt within immigrant families with the brunt falling on the women who have traditionally persevered to hold on to family values. Such a situation has come to be with the fast growth of communication, information flows and capital that do not require ideas or technologies to be necessarily dependent on the movement of people. Australian has been a multicultural country since the 18th century with the advent of white Europeans to a land of indigenous people. The arrival of Asians from the second half of the 19th century has made the society complex as white dominance became strained. The White Australian Policy (WAP), instituted in 1901 and abolished in 1973 was aimed to keep Australia a homogenous white society that could grow economically on the basis of a common purpose. However, as the society became more multicultural, much due to the requirement of Asian labor and also as Asian countries too began to grow economically, there were growing economic bonds with these nations. Naturally, there was an urgent necessity to make the country multicultural. Yet, tension between the white and the non-white population has remained, which has only become more visible in the form of backlash against Asian students. As Australian immigration policy has endeavored to make it a multicultural society, the composition of immigrants in the country has changed since the Second World War. In 1947, there were 7.6 million people in Australia, of which 90 percent were born in Australia and among those born overseas, most were from Great Britain or Ireland. In 1971, 85 percent of the immigrant population were from Europe, half being from the United Kingdom. In 2001, of a total population of 18.8 million, 4 million (23.1 percent) were born overseas. And the share of European immigrants fell to 52 percent, 25 percent being from the United Kingdom. On the other hand, immigrants from Asia and the Middle East comprised 29 percent and those from New Zealand 9 percent. Only 2.2 percent of the total population were the aboriginals, the true ‘non-immigrants’ in the country (Gibney & Hansen, 2005). In the 1950s and 1960s, the focus of multiculturalism was towards assimilation as most immigrants were Europeans. Since the 1970s, ethnic communities have been involved into governance, attracting protests from the white population. A large majority of Asian immigrants into Australia are engaged in semi-skilled jobs. Although these ethnic communities have been crucial in the industrialization of the country, they have been largely left out of the political process. Besides, access to education and health services for the ethnic groups has been much lower than for the white population (Thorpe et al, 1985). The thrust on multiculturalism and cultural pluralism in a sense has been a contrarian policy of assimilation, on the understanding that racial differences exist in matters of culture. Race has continued to be an exclusivity marker in the society even while admitting more immigrants has been a reality in Australia. Since the nation is primarily an immigrant society, it has strived to form a multicultural base rather than forming a new one independent of the origins (Stratton, 1998). Since the 1990s, the conservative attitude towards multiculturalism has been gaining ground in Australia. The Liberal-Coalition government has focused on the ‘ordinary’ Australians, considered synonymous with white Australians. Anti-minority backlash led to the formation of the political party, One Nation led by Pauline Hanson that verbally attacked the aboriginals and Asian immigrants in one note. It was perceived that attempts to redress the disadvantages of the aboriginals and immigrants were in reality “handouts” and made them welfare-dependent. Even though the One Nation party diminished in size, the Howard government that came into power in 2001 continued the anti-immigration rhetoric (Leach et al, 2000). Since the 1980s, racial policies induced by such conservative politics have affected education curriculum and campus policies. In the academic literature, it was found that students from ethnic communities with English as Second Language (ESL) were showing better academic performance than those from monolingual – read white – communities (Keceli and Cahill, 1998). Researchers attributed this success to strong family support systems in ethnic as well as white immigrant communities although it was also recognized that there existed a strong underclass among the ethnic communities. Distinction was made also between the educational achievements of students who were first-generation immigrants and those who were second or third generation immigrants. In a case study on second generation Turkish immigrant student community in Australia, Keceli and Cahill (1998) found that this cohort of immigrant students did not achieve higher educational attainments from their parents despite having the positive qualities of Asian communities, like family support and ethics. This was primarily because the Turkish Australian students were attending schools that were designated “disadvantaged” because their parents resided in such localities. Surveys of students showed that students faced subtle racism that discouraged their education process. Besides, teachers and other school authorities were more focused on making them employable, given their lower family incomes, rather than making them achievers. A Turkish student studying at a school where there were a large number of Turkish students and teachers is quoted to have said that although he aspired to be an accountant, he was encouraged to go to a technical school instead (Keceli and Cahill, 1998). Besides, the second generation students faced discouraging family support as the education system that their parents were familiar back home was quite different from that in Australia. It must be noted here that Turkish immigrants have typically maintained their links with home countries and assimilated less with the adopted country than other Asian countries (Appadurai, 1993). In the case of education pedagogy, cultural diversity has an important implication in the areas that it focuses. Since the 1990s, students in Australia are taught to be multi-skilled as competency-based education has been focused at. The pedagogy therefore is created in a manner that students develop skills that can be used in a variety of fields. Such generic compency-based education discounts the cultural parameters of the students and their inclinations. By developing social orientations that are culture-neutral, there is a conscious attempt to homogenize the student population, a policy that might end up being self-defeating (Dooley, 1999). Racism may not be overt in most countries that follow anti-racism policies. Yet, covert racism may continue to exist in behavioral and verbal attitude. Even interpersonal discourse may approach race talks in a multicultural country when the dominant orientation is not stable but may co-exist with a high degree of variability within group discourses (Weatherell & Potter, 1998, cited in Verkuyten, 1999). In this approach, people are expected to enter into different discourses and alter their speech so that their attitudinal orientation is no longer stable. Typically, people express strong racist or anti-racist views in discourses if they have frequent encounters with the attitude object. In a study of the attitudes of local inhabitants in a working class area of the Netherlands, which has strong anti-racist policies, in group discourses, Verkuyten (1999) attempted to analyze how racist and anti-racist views are expressed in an argumentative discourse. He found that in most cases, speech expresses the underlying attitudes. Further, personal experiences have powerful rhetorical value than arguments do. For our purpose, we might interpret this result as the verbal expressions in the classroom in the context of widely different discourses may reflect racist attitudes that are not always overt. Similar case of overt racism has been found in the case of a predominantly white school in a suburban location in the United States. Even as the community denied having any racial bias, a year-long ethnographic study on individuals found that “race talk” inherently colored social practices. This resulted in a bias among school students not only in the discourses but also in their racial attitude (Lewis, 2001). Primarily because of large-scale immigration and also on the basis of realization that there are business opportunities in tapping the large pool of students in the emerging economies of Asia, the Australian education system has become increasingly international. Large number of schools and universities are enrolling international students and also opening offshore campuses. While this has certainly increased the education sector, it has also brought about multicultural issues including modification in the pedagogy of learning and teaching environment. From the perspective of the teacher, the student-centric curriculum and teaching environment needs to be substantially altered when the customer base is highly skewed towards the “Other” (Tsolids). The problem is even more compounded by the fact that web-enabled education has reduced the student-teacher interface to a large extent with the reduced face-to-face interaction with students who interact and challenge the thoughts. This conforms to Appadurai’s (1993) concept of “scapes” that confounds the racial markers of individuals, both students and teachers. Typically, the pedagogy that has developed on the assumption that embodied students participate in the learning process directly fails to serve the purpose in the new environment. The divisions between the mainstream and the “other” students that earlier existed in the classroom has got blurred. The ideas that arose from the division could be challenged and understood. In the new environment, on the other hand, much more subtle techniques (Tsolidis, 2001). Personal experiences of students and teachers may foil pre-conceived notions of race while interacting in a multicultural classroom. Typically in pre-service training, teachers have no prior exposure to a multicultural environment, which may often hinder teacher’s learning process. While such teachers have the desire to develop friendly relationships with students, placing them in a non-friendly atmosphere and making them subject to racist discourses lower their self-confidence. The problem is all the more compounded in inner-city schools where students come from deprived families that lead to racial overtones in their interaction with white students and teachers. Through a personal narrative of a pre-service teacher in an inner-city school in the United States, Rushton (2001) describes ways how a teacher can handle racism in classroom. In the narrative, Rushton (2001) found that the teacher’s narrative described students by color and were based on pre-conceived notions about racism. It was found that even though the teacher, being a white who held liberal views in matters of race, had pre-conceived notions about “others” and their social and cultural values even though she admitted of having a dysfunctional family and an unhappy childhood. The pre-service training brought about a conflict in the mind of the teacher as well as in the interaction with students and teachers from other communities. Cochran-Smith (2000) too describes personal narratives in a bid to show how teachers need to unlearn racist attitude in order to become good multicultural teachers. Teachers often find a roadblock in the classroom in the form of attitude of defensiveness from culturally diverse students, presenting a challenge to teachers. This follows from the fact that in the pre-encounter stage, students from ethnic communities have the notion that the world is composed of a minority and non-minority. In the initial encounter stage, individuals are therefore rejects cultural markers that are unfamiliar. An internalization of the multicultural framework occurs only when the individual feels secure in the new setting. Similar defensiveness in the minority-majority is prevalent also in the minds of the students and teachers from the non-minority community (Mio and Awakuni, 1999). To deal with a culturally diverse classroom, it is essential to have a caring approach. Teacher care is essential for any learning environment but more so for a culturally diverse one (Perez, 2000). For many cultural different student, lack of interaction leads to lack of participation in the learning process. A closer student-teacher bonding may be brought about in various ways to increase caring. This can be done by reducing the student-teacher ratio or forming groups of students and teachers that remain stable for more than one year. Parent-teacher interaction and creating dossiers on individual students may also help teachers in caring for the culturally diverse students (Perez, 2000). Thus, in the context of education in a multicultural environment that is increasingly complex, with the rise of conservative politics and protests against welfare policies for minorities, tackling racism in the classroom is not easy. In most cases, teachers need to shed pre-conceived notions of racism based on color. Culture is no longer homogenous even when considered on the basis of ethnicity. Globalization has changed the entire fabric of global culture so much so that the interaction and communication between individuals across countries, even continents, has made culture even more heterogeneous. There might be islands of heterogeneity in a seemingly homogenous environment while what seems to be heterogeneous may be composed of shared images and ideas. In such situations, both teachers and students need to internalize the communication process, interact about cultural diversity and accept the fact that different cultures share many similarities of markers. Works Cited Appadurai, A (1993). ‘Disjunctive and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy”, in Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, P Williams and L Chrisman (ed) Harvester Wheatsheaf Cochran-Smith (2000). “Blind vision: Unlearning racism in teacher education”, Harvard Educational Review, vol 70 No 2 Dooley, K and Wyatt-Smith, C (1999). “Cultural Compromise? The fate of the eighth Mayer Key Competencies”, Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education, vol 20 No 1 Gibney, M J and Hansen, R (2005) Immigration and Asylum, Reed Business Review Keceli, B and D, Cahill (1998). “Education and Inequality: A Case Study of Second Generation Turkish Australians”, Journal of Intercultural Studies, Vol 19 No 2 Leach, M et al (2000), The Rise and Fall of One Nation, University of Queensland Press Lewis, A (2001). There is no “Race” in the Schoolyard: Color-blind Ideology in an (Almost) white school, American Educational Research Journal, Winter, Vol 38 No 4 Mio, J S and G I Awakuni (1999). “Addressing resistance in classroom”, in Resistance to Multicuturalism: Issues and Interventions, Brunner/Mazel Perez, S A (2000). “An ethic of caring in teaching culturally diverse students”, Education, vol 121 Rushton, S P (2001). “Cultural Assimilation: A narrative case study of student-teaching in an inner-city school”, Teaching and Teacher Education: An International Journal of Research and Studies, vol 17, No 2 Stratton, J (1998). “Pauline Hanson, John Howard and the conservative politics of official multiculturalism”, in Race Daze: Australian Identity in Crisis, Pluto Press Thorpe, Rosamunde et al (1985), Community Work Or Social Change? Routledge Tsolidis, G, “New Cultures, new classrooms: International education and the possibility of radical pedagogies”, Pedagogy, Culture and Society, Vol 9 No 1 Verkuyten, M and de Jong, W and Masson, K (1994). “Racial discourse, attitude, and rhetorical maneuvers: Race talks in the Netherlands”, Journal of Language and Social Psychology, Vol 13, No 3 Winant, Howard (1997). “Whiteness and Contemporary US Racial Policies”, New Left Review, Vol 225, September-October Read More