Dimensions of Justice: English Teachers' Perspectives on Cultural Diversity

By Rita Thorpe Lamb

Teacher leaders are practicing researchers. They constantly investigate and reflect on innovative strategies for student success. During a season of drastic change in Durham, North Carolina, public school teachers were forced to reconceptualize the curriculum. Two separate and unequal school districts merged forcing a paradigm shift. What can we learn from these teacher leaders as they reflected on the impact of the texts selected for their more diverse classes?

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Dec 3, 2010
• ISBN: 9781452073156

Rita Thorpe Lamb

Dr. Rita Thorpe Lamb is an experienced educator. Her career path has been from public school teacher to university administrator. She has served as University Supervisor of English Education, Director, Assistant Dean and Interim Dean. At North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, she led the redesign of and directed the student success center. She provided the vision and leadership for university-wide retention initiatives and led the development of the universitys comprehensive retention plan for seven years. She also served as retention consultant to other universities. She currently serves as Interim Dean of the School of the Arts and Professions at the University of Maryland Eastern Shore. Among other publications, she is published in HBCUs Model for Success: Supporting Achievement and Retention of Black Males (Thurgood Marshall Scholarship Fund, 2006). Dr. Lamb is a graduate of Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia, North Carolina Central University in Durham, North Carolina and New York University where she earned a Doctorate of Philosophy in English Education. She also studied at Duke University, Oxford University, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has presented at numerous conferences on academic advising and retention, student success, multicultural literature and leadership. She is the recipient of several awards and honors for her professional service, including the Woman of Achievement Award (Greensboro, NC).

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Foreword

The recognition of cultural diversity around the world has increased in the last three decades. The impact of an increasingly ethnically diverse population in schools, colleges, and universities in the United States and around the world is intense. The growth of ethnic, racial, and linguistic minorities in Western nations is increasing at a much faster rate than mainstream groups. In the 21st century and the third millennium, the majority population of the United States is projected to become the new minority (U.S. Census Bureau, 2008). In response, America began to reconceptualize American history and literature. In a reform movement designed to make major curricular and structural changes in schools, colleges, and universities, multicultural education emerged. The aim is to reconstruct the educational system by transforming the curriculum to create a school culture that empowers students from diverse racial, ethnic, and cultural groups. This new culture will affirm diversity and honor multiple perspectives. Multicultural approaches to learning are necessary strategies that will enable us to see around the cultural blinders that distort our vision to the extent of obliterating from the curricula more than half of humankind.

The impetus of this study was the controversy surrounding the forced merger of two separate and unequal school districts in Durham, North Carolina. These two districts were formerly Durham City Schools and Durham County Schools. This merger was debated for decades.

Six English/Language Arts teachers from five different secondary schools in Durham were selected. They were a diverse population of male and female teachers from differing class, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds, with varying levels of teaching experience.

In-depth personal interviews with a small sample of English/Language Arts teachers were conducted with the following broad question in mind: What perspectives on multicultural approaches to learning are held by secondary-school English/Language Arts teachers in a changing school system?

How do these teachers define multiculturalism?

What experiences have these teachers had in their own classes with multicultural approaches to learning?

Transcripts of the interviews were analyzed using five coding categories. All of the teachers interviewed revealed that at some point their students questioned them about the content of the curriculum, either to request more diversity or to challenge the inclusion of required literature. Success for these teachers was exemplified by their students’ reading, exploring, and expanding their existing worlds by studying how history, culture, class, religion, gender and other factors impact their lives.

Dimensions

of Justice

English Teachers’ Perspectives on Cultural Diversity

Rita Thorpe Lamb, Ph.D.

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© 2010 Rita Thorpe Lamb, Ph.D.. All rights reserved.

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First published by AuthorHouse 11/20/2010

ISBN: 978-1-4520-7313-2 (dj)

ISBN: 978-1-4520-7314-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4520-7315-6 (e)

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Dedication

Thank you to my husband, Dr. Claude N. Lamb, for your unwavering support and inspiring love. To my sons, Douglas and Shaan, who journeyed with me to Europe to study in England, I salute your confidence, courage and ingenuity. Natasha, Lauren Olivia and Sonya, you are my joy.

My bold and powerful sister and friends, Gloria, Akinye and Ernestine, thank you for your faith and insightfulness.

This book is dedicated to a pillar of strength, my mother, Mrs. Vivian Branch Thorpe, musician and educator, and to the memory of my father, Dr. Earlie Endris Thorpe, educator, historian and author, whose careers and ministries have impacted many lives.

Table of Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Chapter I. INTRODUCTION

The Issue of Conceptualization

The Questions

Definitions

Chapter II. REFORMING THE CURRICULUM

Dimensions of Multicultural Education

Efforts to Establish a Multicultural Curriculum

Levels of Integration of Ethnic Content

Rationale for Selection of Multicultural Literary Texts

The Changing Social Structure of the World

Social Change Promotes Educational Change

Some Major Multicultural Anthologies Currently Being Used

Chapter III. THE METHOD

The Setting

Criteria for Selection of Participants and Site

Collection of Data

Interview Questions

Data Analysis

Coding Categories

Presentation of the Data

Chapter IV. EXPERIENCES AND THEMES

Connecting School to Home, Community, and the World Beyond

Transcending Our Shells

Maximizing Critical Thinking

Integrating the Curriculum with Ethnic Content

Questioning Existing Curricula

Chapter V. IN CONCLUSION1

Discussion of Findings5

Personal Cultural Backgrounds5

Goals and Objectives7

Teacher as Facilitator8

Ideological Resistance1

Success and Failure2

Theory and Practice6

Where Do We Go From Here?6

Alternative Goals for Language Arts Programs2

Suggestions for Further Research5

Closing Remarks8

BIBLIOGRAPHY1

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

Chaos with transportation and student transfers during the first week of the new school year overshadowed what officials say was a historic event for Durham—the beginning of a truly integrated public school system (The Herald-Sun, August 29, 1994, B-1). In the wake of a blazing controversy about how to put everything into motion, Durham city and county schools merged.

This is the best of times and the worst of times. … said Superintendent C. Owen Phillips about the first week of the 1994–1995 school year (Ibid). For better or worse, change was the operative word in Durham Public Schools. The school district was in a state of perpetual motion as parents, students, principals, teachers, and other school personnel experienced the first school year under Phase II of the forced merger of two separate and unequal school districts, which called for a new student reassignment plan. During the previous two years, school administrators were moved, replaced, promoted, and demoted in an effort to merge the two separate districts.

The extremely controversial merger plan, which was designed to racially balance Durham’s public schools, sent 6,000 students in the fall of 1995 to different schools. To many parents and community members, the future of the school district depended on the success or failure of the student reassignment plan. Many community leaders believed that it was still too soon to merge the districts, even after decades of planning.

In the third millennium, there seems to be an accelerated rush toward changing or reinventing the way America works. Among the Clinton Administration’s primary goals was the development of a 21st-century telecommunications and information infrastructure that would serve all Americans, according to the late Ron Brown, former U.S. Secretary of Commerce. This National Information Infrastructure was envisioned by the Administration as a tool to help break down barriers of language, distance, and economics by encouraging exchanges of ideas, nurturing cultural appreciation, and fostering an awareness of commonality (Brown, 1994).

A continuing theme throughout the 20th and 21st centuries has been the demand for the reform of schooling in the United States. One of the reforms pushed by various ethnic groups as an alternative to the traditional education written into many school policies was the concept of multicultural education. More and more ethnic groups began to demand inclusion of their histories and cultures in the curriculum. There have been many widely differing conceptualizations of multicultural education. Some of these will be discussed in Part I. Many of the programs seem to have conflicting priorities and purposes. As a consequence, some educators consider multicultural education a quick fix, lacking substance. Furthermore, superfluous activities, such as highlighting holidays only, contribute little to any serious development of the field. As Henry Louis Gates (1990) says, "The mindless celebration of difference for its own sake is no more tenable than the nostalgic return to some monochrome homogeneity (p. xix).

What is multiculturalism, and why are they saying such terrible things about it? We’ve been told it threatens to fragment American culture into a warren of ethnic enclaves, each separate and inviolate. We’ve been told that it menaces the Western tradition of literature and the arts. We’ve been told it aims to politicize the school curriculum, replacing honest historical scholarship with a feel good syllabus designed solely to bolster the self-esteem of minorities. The alarm has been sounded, and many scholars and educators, liberals as well as conservatives, have responded to it" (p. 174).

According to Professor John S. Mayher (1990) of New York University, the solution is to recognize that genuine cultural literacy only derives from meaningful encounters with the cultures one is to become literate in (p. 43). He continues, Cultural literacy must be understood as a two-way street; its acquisition, like the acquisition of the rest of language, is dialogic, based on both the learner’s growing sense of what she wants and needs to understand about the world she lives in and the culture’s prior experiences about how to best convey this (p. 44). Because cultures are fluid in that they can and do change, the culture appropriate for one generation might not be meaningful to its successors.

Gates suggests that we try to think of American culture as a conversation among different voices, each conditioned by a different perception of the world (1990, p. 175). What did the English teachers’ voices in Durham, North Carolina, say about multicultural approaches to learning?

The Issue of Conceptualization

In ordinary life, as in science, said Peter L. Berger and Hansfried Kellner in Sociology Reinterpreted: An Essay on Method and Vocation, there are no raw facts, only facts, within a specific conceptual framework—facts embodied in structures of relevance and meaning. It was the issue of conceptualization that gave impetus to this study. The purpose was to examine the perspectives on multicultural approaches to learning held by secondary-school English/Language Arts teachers in a changing school system. The dilemmas were the beliefs and values that teachers were bringing to the classroom. There was tension between the ideal and what could actually be achieved. Is it possible for schools, colleges, and universities to be re-formed so that students from diverse racial, ethnic, and social-class groups experience educational equality?

In Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Paulo Freire, a Brazilian educator, expounds a theory of cultural synthesis. He imagines a new social order where leaders and people are integrated and acting as coauthors of the action that both perform upon the world. In this synthesis, people are reborn in new knowledge and new action leading to transforming action resulting in a culture freed from alienation. This cultural synthesis—although it does not deny the differences between the views of the dominating and the oppressed—does deny the invasion of one by the other, and it affirms the undeniable support each gives to the other. It is to be a transformation of reality (Freire, 1968, pp. 182-183). The plan is, perhaps, too idealistic, and it would serve to dilute our existing rich cultures. One glance at the history of mankind’s societal interactions can cast suspicion on man’s ability or desire to implement Freire’s dream of a society where the dominant group yields its power.

A more realistic idea would be to create a more interdependent society that embraces and celebrates our cultural diversity. Gloria Naylor, one of the most astute observers of contemporary African American life and author of The Women of Brewster Place, Linden Hills, and Mama Day, urges African Americans to celebrate voraciously that which is their own.

Our educational system should be expanded—from extending our attempt to cultivate decency, tolerance, and some degree of respect for those different from us—to understanding, respecting, appreciating, learning from, and empowering other cultures. If we view various cultures as already possessing knowledge and develop a healthy intellectual curiosity about others, we can then become creators and re-creators of an improved society.

The following is a definition of multicultural education and suggests how it might effectively impact school and student success:

Multicultural education is a reform movement designed to change the total educational environment so that students from diverse racial and ethnic groups, students of both genders, exceptional students, and students from each social-class group will experience equal educational opportunities in schools, colleges, and universities. A major assumption of multicultural education is that some students—because of their particular racial, ethnic, gender, and cultural characteristics—have a better chance of succeeding in educational institutions as they are currently structured than do students who belong to other groups or who have different cultural and gender characteristics (Banks & Banks, 2010, p. 447).

A result of globalization and worldwide migration is the increase of racial, ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and religious diversity in nations around the world, including the United States (Banks, 2009). The increasing diversity and