Promoting Multiculturalism

I’ll begin by stating I agree with about everything Christensen and Hade had to offer in their writings.  We have a problem concerning race, class and gender that is “supposedly” being recognized in our classrooms and society, but never really materializes.  Using Christensen’s example of The Lion King, although we most likely follow the story with how it was intended to be perceived, we are still consumers of its underlying shades of gender roles that govern where a man and woman should reside.  To broaden this, we think we are doing enough to serve those from different cultural backgrounds in our society than what we are use to, but we are merely raising awareness of it without doing anything. 

An example of how we try to understand these different cultures is what Hade called a tourist’s view on trying to understand a different ethnicity’s perspective.  He provided us with examples from books that are written from a white person’s perspective trying to depict how the African Americans live, but this can often lead to perpetuating a stereotype of one ethnicity.  The African Americans expected to read this literature in the classroom could not identify with this view entirely because it never originated from them.  I have a feeling many white people would be upset if someone from another cultural background was trying to write their history, too.  That’s why I believe it’s essential to have the perspective of one from that background explain the culture in their book.  Can you imagine how it would be if we read The House on Mango Street if it was from an outsider trying to look in on their culture and create meaning from a standpoint that they know nothing about?  It just wouldn’t work; it would be unauthentic and contrived.

 Harper Lee offered us an insight in how the general populace during his time period viewed Tom Robinson.  When he was shot for trying to escape, people just brushed it off as that is how the mentality of an African American really is, no brains and cannot be patient for an appeal.  However, what if we were hearing it from Tom Robinson?  He would probably say something along the lines of being falsely accused of trying to rape a white woman that came onto him, and this all happened because I was just trying to offer a helping hand for my neighbor.  And when they didn’t believe his testimony, and the jury all found him guilty, he knew he had no other options.  He probably felt it was his duty to escape rather than waste away in prison and leave behind a wife and children. 

What if we continually did this on a larger scale, exposing these instances in our society?  We would break the barriers of stereotypes and racism if we were being more involved with stories that deal with the hardships people from different cultures face when they come to the states for a better life.  We read Esperanza’s view of how living in a small Latino community wasn’t the most optimal place for growing up, but the point was to strive for a better life so disparity and low education didn’t have to thrive in a place like that.  Rather, they would move beyond what they thought possible, like the four trees growing out of the cement, and become something other than a general stereotype that people like to pin on Latinos.  Yet, her duty was to not sever the ties with her past, but to enrich them with the inspiration to move beyond and do better.

Talking about going beyond the boundaries of what we are only expected to achieve, Christensen uses the example of how tracking does more harm than good.  Like Hade’s example of culture determining the value of signs and their place in our society, well tracking is basically doing that in our schools.  Our children are having the mindset that by being pitted in a low-level achieving class, the teacher won’t expect much out of the students, and vice versa.  Therefore, we are already designating our children in a class to which they did not choose.  The school will say, “Your reading and writing skills are less than adequate, so you will go into this class.” And this in turn gives our students the idea that they are confined to a place where they will forever be throughout their High School career.  I believe Christensen had the right goal in mind when he taught English in an untracked class; we gained insight as to why the low-level achievers rarely did much, as they were often intimidated for fear of making  a mistake due to an unwritten  “body of rules” that govern how language should be communicated.  Therefore, by compromising their creativity in writing, they only wrote in safe sentences, and when they spoke, they feared their culture’s influence on their language would get them reprimanded and corrected.  Back to Christensen’s mixed classroom now (low-level students with advanced) we learned a lot how the students were able to change their perspectives and be more open and understanding to students from a different background.  The students saw they weren’t stupid, they just didn’t do well for fear of social stigma – possibly due to the color of their skin, religion, gender, and they oblige to the fallacy that society represents, that they cannot possibly do as good or ever perform on a level of a white student from a middle class family.  Also, before I wrap this up because I have been going on for a long time now, we saw how interested the students were when they were presented with material from backgrounds similar to the one’s they came from, not just learning about our history’s (dead) white people. 

Lastly, as Christensen described, a lot of times these students from different cultural backgrounds are put in low-level classes that are often paired with a bad teacher, and nothing really productive arises from their time being in there.  Christensen said it was our duty to see the strengths in students, and not their deficits when they enter a classroom.  That’s why he thought every student can coexist in a classroom coming from different cultural or academic backgrounds: because we all have potential.  Some students will just need to be taught from a different angle than that of another student.  We need to adjust our teaching styles to accommodate all students, and certainly not try to teach something that bears little significance on our students.  In the scenario that we have a classroom full of Latino and African Americans, why on earth would we expect them to be interested in six weeks’ worth of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson?  We need to diversify our classrooms along with the material we teach.  Not only would we broaden our horizons on learning about different perspectives from people of different cultural backgrounds, but allowing students the right to learn about history that is relevant to them, too.  Remember, as Christensen asserted, “The capacity was evident; the will and belief that he could succeed were not,” meaning it is our job to adapt strategies that assist every child in our classrooms so they can understand the relevance of having an education for their future.