Nowadays, it becomes increasingly clear for educators that, in order for them to be able to adequately address their professional duties, they must be fully aware of what account for the discursive implications of multiculturalism in the classroom. This, however, is not only because teachers are expected to encourage students to ‘celebrate diversity, but because, as of today, there is a plenty of evidence that the particulars of students’ ethno-cultural affiliation do affect the manner in which they perceive the surrounding social reality and their place in it.
For example, as it was noted by Han (2007), there is indeed a certain rational in believing that, as opposed to what it is being the case with White students, their Asian counterparts tend to go about attaining knowledge in the clearly defined ‘holistic’ (or ‘high-context’) manner.
That is, they make little use of the categories of a formal logic, while focusing on what account for the contextual subtleties of the taught subject matter. This, of course, implies that when exposed to the euro-centric teaching strategy, concerned with encouraging learners to subjectualize themselves within the surrounding social environment (a ‘low-context’ learning mode), these students will experience the sensation of a cognitive dissonance. As a result, their chances to graduate would be somewhat undermined.
Therefore, as of today, educators in Western countries face the challenge of adjusting their teaching approaches to be observant of what happened to be the dialectically predetermined cognitive predispositions of ethnically diverse students. Hence, the teaching paradigm of ‘cultural responsiveness’, promoted by Villegas and Lucas (2002), “Culturally responsive teachers… help students interrogate the curriculum critically by having them address inaccuracies, omissions, and distortions in the text and by broadening it to include multiple perspectives (p. 29).
Nevertheless, even though it would prove impossible to disagree with the suggestion that educators need to take into account the specifics of their students’ ethno-cultural uniqueness, in order to help the latter to be able ‘digest’ the acquired knowledge, the application of a constructivist framework for doing it (as Villegas and Lucas suggest) appears rather unjustified. The reason for this is apparent – even though that the term ‘educational constructivism’ sounds thoroughly sophisticate, it is in fact being of a very limited utilitarian value. This could not be otherwise, as the term in question implies a complete overhaul of the teaching approaches, currently deployed in the Western educational curriculum – a hardly executable task.
Therefore, I suggest that, instead of adopting a culturally relativist posture, when the teaching of ethnically diverse students is being concerned, educators should strive to gain a rationalized awareness of what are the objective causes for these students to be different from their White peers, in the cognitive and perceptual senses of this word. While possessing such an awareness, teachers would be able to substantially increase the rate of graduation among the representatives of racial minorities in the classroom, without undermining the overall effectiveness of the educational process.
It is understood, of course, that this would require educators to take a basic course on psychology – regardless of what happened to be their field of specialization. In respect of the earlier suggestion, teachers should also be able to benefit from rationalizing the effects of their own racial/cultural identity on the way they perform professionally, as this will allow them to identify and address the subliminal anxieties of a perceptual biasness, on their part.
References
Han, S. (2010). Sociocultural influence on children’s social competence: A close look at kindergarten teachers’ beliefs. Journal of Research in Childhood Education, 24 (1), 80 – 96.
Villegas, A. & Lucas, T. (2002). Preparing culturally responsive teachers: Rethinking the curriculum. Journal of Teacher Education, 53 (1), 20-32.