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Here is an interview with my husband. He is an African American who has spent time working in urban schools (he supervised and AmeriCorp tutoring team in Oakland, California as I was working on my teaching credential and substitute teaching there). He also grew up in a large foster home with parents from the pre-WWII era who were from the rural south. He and most of his foster siblings attended college and most have professional careers. While he is not a researcher, I feel at least as comfortable offering his thoughts on these subjects, than I am sharing my own here (which I’ve already done many times). My posts on practice and pedagogy are apparently universally popular with the 10 folks who answered my survey. The popularity of politics and policy posts is not as clear, and this post will cover that territory as well, so we shall see.
alice_mercer: So, do black students learn differently than white students?
leroys_dad: Yes, just as some black students learn differently than other black students and some white students learn differently than other white students.
This reminds me of arguments that I and dh (dear husband) have had with others about yelling at kids. The argument goes something like this, “Black kids are used to getting yelled at so I can do it because it’s the volume level they are used to hearing, and it won’t hurt their feelings. EVERY class I’ve had with black students outside of Community Day, had at least one quiet, sensitive black student who HATED yelling, etc. Next, as one colleague (white boy who grew up in the ‘hood) wisely pointed out, even if they aren’t crying, they get used to tuning out the yelling, so when you raise your volume more, they are listening less.
alice_mercer: Do you think poor students learn differently than richer students, or do we just teach them differently?
leroys_dad: I think it’s possible that students from homes without a lot of written literature in them learn more from sound than sight. But that would require a lot of research to support.
alice_mercer: If they aren’t that different, why do “successful” school for black students look so different than middle class schools?
leroys_dad: Because they probably emphasize different values than white schools. Black bourgeois parents seem to put a -much- higher value on discipline and rote, which may seem to indicate that kids can lean any way, depending on the style they’re exposed to.
alice_mercer: Does it have to be that way?
leroys_dad: It doesn’t have to, but it can be challenging for a teacher teaching kids who come from different learning environments, even if they’re from the same economic class. The problem is that you can’t separate students and teach them differently -solely- by race in an integrated class or within groups. For example, Ma Hinkles provided us with lots of reading material and we probably learned more like white kids, using my analogy, than black.
My takeaways from this part of interview is that maybe we get lazy about trying to slice and dice our students into easy categories, so we’ll “know” how to teach them, instead of learning about our students and their needs.
This is the argument for differentiation and universal design. This is the only way we can make sure we are not segregating education, and that we are meeting the needs of all students.
Useful reads on this topic:
Mathew Needleman’s series on Differentiation
A post on Universal Design on Ira Socal’s blog via Loony Hiker on Diigo
4 responses so far ↓
1
Ira Socol
// Jun 2, 2008 at 4:51 pm
This is going to tread into very dangerous territory, but if, as your husband suggests, “Black bourgeois parents seem to put a -much- higher value on discipline and rote,” how did that form? Is this an unfortunate but undeniable result of the slave narrative and Jim Crow oppression? Often kids who grow up in abusive / “high-discipline” situations become abusers themselves - is this a national version of this?
I ask this because way-back-when, when I was in high school and a Neil Postman-designed alternative school was offered in a highly diverse community, the group that did not embrace the option was the African-American community which, just a generation before, had fought a classic northern desegregation battle. Even as the alternative option proved far more successful than the “regular education” model in terms of getting kids to four year colleges, very few black kids joined. At the time I put it down to the fact that parents had struggled to get their kids into that “regular school” (from the Vocational High School they had previously been dumped in), and were not going to give that status up. But looking from now, and reading your husband’s thoughts - and having just listened to an NPR segment today about “family narratives in our political culture,” I’m wondering if there might not have been something else at work.
2
alicemercer
// Jun 2, 2008 at 5:10 pm
Ira, that first thing I would say is that dh would say that not all people will fit into this box.
This is probably a better in-depth discussion for the sociologist? I think it does bring up the point that we as a majority culture sometimes make assumptions about what folks need (look at me, I’m doing it, at least it’s rooted in some practice).
BUT, maybe Socrates has a point in that KIPP parents know exactly what they are getting. I wonder though if non-college educated parents know what they don’t know (OH, can’t believe I quoted Donald Rumsfeld)?
Here is an interesting piece on political behavior and class with regards to working class whites: http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/11387 and how not all grouping are that homogeneous.
3
Ira Socol
// Jun 2, 2008 at 5:28 pm
Alice,
Oh yeah. Every attempt to generalise leads us to to trouble, but then, that’s what social sciences do, isn’t it? generalise and make absurd assumptions.
If we follow my “theory” we do get to Socrates point - the parents know exactly what they are getting. If we use your vision, then some do but most probably don’t. Either way, you are right, parents from the underclass - even parents now bourgeois but who grew up in the underclass - probably have little sense of what will work for their kids. They have not seen the choices that Wendy Kopp saw when she grew up.
I talked a bit about this on LD Live (I think), about how hard it is for someone who has done badly in school to make the right choices for their own child. You just don’t have the skill set, and all sorts of “experts” are ready to jump in and tell you what to do for the purposes of their own agenda. It is quite frightening.
4
alicemercer
// Jun 2, 2008 at 5:32 pm
Hey, here is a piece from Root’s on an African American parent looking at preschools (http://blogs.theroot.com/blogs/seeds/archive/2008/04/15/the-whole-issue-of-other-people-s-advice.aspx)
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