Teaching Multicultured Students

Culturalism and Anti-culturalism in the School Classroom

Alex Moore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781135709112
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Offers suggestions for making classroom and teaching practice more effective for bilingual and bidialectical pupils. Case studies are used, which give voice to student and practising teacher perspectives which are often unheard. This book will help teachers develop practice that combats actual exclusion and the symbolic exclusion that some multicultured students experience.

1 Themes and Perspectives

[L]egal slavery may be in the past, but segregation and subordination have been allowed to persist.

(Hacker 1995, p.229)

Introduction: A Biographical Note

My active interest in bilingualism and bidialectalism started in April 1969, when I took up my first teaching post at an inner-London secondary school. Having received no formal teacher training and having had only a very limited experience of secondary schooling after attending a boys’ grammar school from the age of eleven to eighteen, I took into this post a common-sense and, with the benefit of hindsight, profoundly flawed notion of what teaching and learning ought to be about. This included perceiving surface errors in my students’ written work as symptoms of laziness, slovenliness or plain stupidity (at any rate, as unsightly blots deserving of the most rigorous red-inking at my disposal), and seeing any differences at all between my students’ performance and ‘standard’ English practices as deviations that must be rectified instantly and without explanation. Mine was an unquestioning acceptance of the received cultural practices of school and academic life as the only right cultural practices, and of other cultural practices as simply gone-wrong versions of that standard.

Fortunately, my students did not allow me to get away with this sort of thinking for too long. Under their determined, sometimes brutally frank guidance, my uneducated practice gradually gave way to more appropriate forms of pedagogy, linked to a much clearer understanding not only of how the learning process worked but of what was actually going on in the schools I worked in and the world I lived in. When I moved on to posts in other schools, working first with large numbers of bidialectal students and then with even larger numbers of bilingual students, that process gathered speed and focus. I still made mistakes, of course, the way all teachers do, and in many ways this book is about those mistakes and about the lessons they taught me. However, I like to think that the mistakes receded as the voices of my students continued to advise me and as I listened, increasingly, to voices wiser than my own within the profession.

Those voices taught me many things. They taught me, for instance, to value and appreciate my students’ ‘non-standard’ cultural practices and artefacts, rather than to respond to them in terms of correctness or incorrectness. Such a reorientation led me, in turn, to reconfigure my central pedagogic task, away from eliminating and replacing those non-standard practices, towards fostering and developing them in ways that simultaneously promoted expertise in the ‘standard’ practices my students would need to reproduce if they were to succeed academically—a pedagogic function I later came to understand as extending students’ cultural—linguistic repertoires. The voices of my students also reminded me that bilingual and bidialectal students are not minorities but minoritized, that they are not unicultured or even uncultured, but multi-cultured, and that although dominant educational systems and practices do marginalize and coerce large numbers of school students (in much the same ways as I had done in my initial practice), schools are not just sites of coercion, oppression and straightforward cultural reproduction: they are also, to quote Giroux and McLaren, ‘sites that contain the promise of counterhegemonic struggle’—places where teachers and marginalized students, working together, can promote, albeit within the constraints imposed upon them by the larger society, alternative agendas that involve a recognition of and deliberate opposition to the culturist practices to which large numbers of our students are habitually subjected (Giroux and McLaren 1992, p.xiii).

Each of these lessons has been underpinned by an understanding that schools do not exist independently of the larger society and are not seen, by students, as doing so. As Cummins has argued, ‘power relations in the broader society’ are inevitably

reflected in the organization of schooling…and in the mindset that educators bring to the teaching of culturally diverse students. These educational structures and the role definitions that educators adopt directly affect the interactions that culturally diverse students experience in schools.

(Cummins 1996, p.)

It seems not unreasonable to suppose that if students’ cultures are marginalized in the classroom, those same students are likely to feel that their presence and contribution will be considered marginal in the wider community. It is also reasonable to suppose that many students, because of their awareness of the marginalizations to which they and their cultures are subjected, may be fundamentally suspicious of teachers—including those who purport to share their understandings and who openly commit themselves to a joint struggle for improvement: not all students, for example, may wish to accept their (typically white) teachers’ understandings of coercion and marginalization, or their strategies for ‘empowerment’.

Sources of Field Data: The Investigation of Symbolic Exclusion

In exploring in this book the issues related to these important lessons, I have continued to draw on my own experience of classroom practice. In particular, I have made use of data and analysis arising from my involvement in two interrelated research projects. The first of these was work undertaken with bidialectal students and their teachers at a school in which I originally worked as an English teacher (Moore 1987b). I knew these students well and had tracked their progress unofficially through the third and fourth years of their secondary schooling. The project was undertaken when they were in their fifth year at the school (Year 11), working towards public examinations, and arose from a growing awareness on the part of one of their teachers not only that there were huge differences between what these young people considered to be good writing and what their teachers and examiners considered to be good writing, but also that the students themselves had remained unhelpfully unaware of these differences throughout their school careers. A practical sharing of examination assessment criteria with the students illuminated the precise ways in which, through formal assessment procedures, the students’ preferred cultural practices and skills were marginalized, as well as highlighting the potential advantages and inherent difficulties of developing marginalized students’ language repertoires in this particular fashion. A flavour of this work and of work subsequently carried out with much younger bidialectal students is given in Chapters 7 and 8.

The second project arose from working with bilingual students and their teachers at a neighbouring school. These students were arriving in the UK at secondary-school age, typically with little or no spoken or written English and occasionally with no first-language literacy (students described in the jargon of the time as ‘Stage 1 bilingual learners’).¹ Given that it is likely, in current circumstances, for such students to take between five and ten years to ‘catch up with’ their monolingual peers adequately enough to be able to benefit equally from main-language engagement with the curriculum (Klesmer 1994, Cummins 1996), large numbers of these students were clearly at risk on arrival. As James Cummins has observed, young bilinguals of this kind, who arrive in a new country after the age of twelve, ‘often [run] out of time before they [can] catch up academically in language-based areas of the curriculum’ (Cummins 1996, p.; see also Collier 1987). What teachers do with their limited and very precious time with such students is consequently of critical importance.

While one of my initial research interests was in comparing different kinds of provision or organization for bilingual students—in particular, comparing the relative merits and demerits of working with bilingual students in mainstream classes alongside majority-monolingual peers and of withdrawing bilingual students for specialist language support (Moore 1995)—it quickly became apparent that examples of effective and ineffective pedagogy could be found in either organizational system. It was also evident that much ineffective pedagogy was ineffective because it was fundamentally culturist in nature—that is, it treated alternative cultural practices not as signs of difference, but as indications of inadequacy or deficit—while much of the most effective teaching took a deliberately anti-culturist stance—recognizing and valuing alternative cultural practices and seeking ways of adding to or extending them. In the culturist classrooms, bilingual students—and often bidialectal students—were effectively ‘ghettoized’ in much the same way that Sharp and Green have described the ghettoization of ‘low ability’ students in so-called mixed ability classrooms (Sharp and Green 1975): that is to say, not only were the bilingual students treated very differently—often quite patronizingly—by their teacher and given radically different work to do; they were also allowed to become isolated physically from the rest of the class, with whom they consequently had little or no communicative contact. In the anti-culturist classrooms, by contrast, teachers had high expectations of their bilingual students, valued their cultures and previous language and learning experiences, and sought actively to involve their students in interactions with other students in the class.

As a consequence of these observations, and in the light of what has already been said about the ‘catch-up’ situation of developing bilingual learners, my interest turned away from organizational issues, first toward practical pedagogic issues, then to the philosophical underpinnings of pedagogy and to the relationships between pedagogy and the views and perceived needs of the larger society. This shift of emphasis in my own research may be seen to reflect a corresponding history of deliberate exclusion and subsequent partial inclusion of bilingual and bidialectal students in mainstream British education—a history explored in a little more depth in Chapter 2. This movement, which began with the total physical exclusion of newly arrived bilingual students in off-site centres, has now moved, via on-site withdrawal classes, to students being supported by EAL (English-as-an-additional-language) experts in mainstream classes alongside monolingual peers. My own research evidence suggests that although the physical inclusion of bilingual and bidialectal students may have been achieved in many institutions, such students typically continue to be excluded and marginalized in other ways, partly through the persistence of a culturally biased school curriculum but also through forms of pedagogy that render students and their existing cultural experiences ‘invisible’. I have called this kind of exclusion symbolic exclusion for two reasons. First, I want to distinguish it from physical exclusion, which involves an act of bodily displacement such as sending someone home or to another room (symbolic exclusion excludes pupils not by physically removing them from the classroom but by invalidating major ‘non-standard’ aspects their cultures and/or languages). Second, I want to stress that through such processes students effectively have their own favoured and familiar symbolic systems (systems through which they have constructed understandings and interpretations of the world) excluded from the classroom by a privileging of the arbitrarily dominant symbolic systems of the school. (They may also, of course, be effectively excluded from access to those dominant systems—such as when they are ignored by the teacher.) We could say that symbolic exclusion represents the exclusion through a dominant symbolic system of ‘alternative’ symbolic systems and processes.

Prioritizing Pedagogy: ‘Micro-oriented’ and ‘Macro-oriented’ Resistances

If, as I am suggesting, education systems continue to marginalize students, chiefly through the imposition of culturally fixed assessment criteria (Apple 1979, Atkinson 1998, Moore 1998), what can teachers do (1) to combat culturism in their own classrooms, and (2) to militate, with any degree of hope or success, for attitudinal change within that larger marginalizing system and within the larger society within which it is sited?

James Cummins is quite clear on this issue: it is not only incumbent on teachers to adopt—as far as they are able—anti-culturist practices within their own classrooms, but to militate for changes within the culturist system itself, through a willingness ‘individually and collectively, to challenge aspects of the power structure of the wider society’ (Cummins 1996, p.iii). This is a view predicated upon a belief that educators ‘have considerable power to affect change in the lives of those they interact with’ (Cummins 1996, p.222). It is a challenge that begins with a renewed self-belief on the part of hard-pressed teachers that they still comprise the social group ‘most dedicated to democratic values, most knowledgeable about cultural trends, and in the most strategic position to direct social change’ (Hunt and Metcalf 1968, p.278; see also Lucas, Henze and Donato 1990, McCarty 1993).

The kinds of pedagogic action implicit in Cummins’ call to arms might be categorized as ‘micro-oriented’ and ‘macro-oriented’. Micro-oriented action relates to what we can do with our students in the classroom, within the constraints of the larger system as it currently operates—and, typically, in line with the existing ethos and policies of our particular school (these policies and ethos may be multicultural, anti-culturist or even culturist in nature):² oppositional action, that is, which focuses on arming students, as far as is possible within the given ‘rules’, with the necessary political understandings and insights to challenge coercive societal practices independently. As the case studies will show, this does not necessarily involve acts of great daring or courage on the part of teachers, or place upon their shoulders the unreasonable burden of changing dominant ideologies single-handedly. More often than not, it is a matter of teachers adjusting their own cultural orientations (both individually and collectively) through processes of ‘cultural distancing’, and fashioning their pedagogic choices and approaches accordingly: that is, processes of problematizing or ‘making strange’ practices and procedures that are perceived and experienced as the natural way of things, and of beginning to see them as simply one possible set of practices or procedures among many.³ One potentially very useful way of achieving such (re)orientation is through the detailed study of the practice and experience of other teachers, leading to what Bourdieu has called ‘an awakening of consciousness and socioanalysis’ (Bourdieu 1990a, p.). Other ways include the (re)development of whole-school policies that take radical stock of the way in which the individual institution promotes or resists culturist practices that may be embedded in its own micro-culture.

The second kind of pedagogic action—which may be practised simultaneously with the first—is more specifically and more consciously oriented away from the institution, towards the larger social system itself. Here, the challenge is for teachers—working with their students, with colleagues in their own and other institutions, with parents, governors, councillors and any other interested parties—to seek to militate more directly for ideological, hegemonic changes that will produce a fairer, more pluralistic system of education and assessment for all students. This activity—included, like the former, in what Giroux has called ‘border pedagogy’ (Giroux 1992, pp.)—involves the active occupation, within existing legal frameworks, of whatever negotiation- and action-spaces are available, in order to ensure teachers’ own empowerment and to make their own wise, professional voices heard. Such activity might include efforts, channelled through (for example) teachers’ unions or subject-based pressure groups, to promote a return to the more pluralistic assessment procedures that were beginning to emerge in the UK in the 1980s (Moore 1998). It also, however, includes classroom-based activity (more normally associated with micro-oriented pedagogies) that actively seeks to empower and ‘activate’ students themselves in ways that are overtly political (a prime example would be explaining to students exactly how they are marginalized within the larger system). As Cummins puts it:

[C]oercive relations of power can operate only through the microinteractions between educators and students. Thus, educators, students and communities can challenge this coercive process. Although educational and social structures will impose constraints on resistance, these structures can never stifle the pursuit of empowering interactions on the part of educators and students. In short, educators always have options in t...