Strategies for Diversity

A few years ago, I was at Chapman working towards my Single Subject Credential. One of the requirements was to student- teach at a high school.  And boy, was that an interesting experience! With two 9^th grade and one 11^th grade core English class, I had my experience with teaching a widely diverse group of students. While I think I was a little over my head, there were strategies I attempted to help give everyone a voice in the class.

With so much diversity, I thought that having the students free-write about a variety of topics we were discussing in class would help students find their voice about the topics. Everyone has something to say, even if it is some form of misreading. Tagging along self-exploration of these topics with low-stake writing, the students can get into groups of their choosing. Hopefully, this will cause students to contribute before a bigger class discussion.

Besides strategies for developing class discussions, I want all my students to develop their reading skills. I think using smaller, but challenging articles or readings that works with a double-entry journal. By encouraging students to read through the reading and just write what they think they read, takes off the pressure for understanding every specific little thing about the reading. We will also be re-reading material and developing our discussions about the reading.

As for writing, I think all of the students will benefit from process-driven writing that centers on multiple drafts and conversation about writing. We will also focus a lot on the rhetorical situation with context-driven writing. Writing situations that allow students more flexibility in their writing and dissecting the discourse that the context belongs will allow students from a variety of linguistical backgrounds to do the work.

Grading will be on individual improvement and based upon only those things taught in class. Small grammatical problems will only be assessed if students worked on these concepts beforehand. Comments written to the students on their essays will be individual with only a few things identified as needing to be changed/worked on.

A Look at Multi-Generational Issues for Chicano/Mexican Americans

            “Language Socialization Practices and Cultural Identity: Case Studies of Mexican-Descendent Families in California and Texas”, by Sandra Schecter and Robert Bayley, highlights the strong link between identity and language use. With the overlapping concern with language use and education, we should seriously consider our students’ identities within our own interests and awareness as part of the schooling institution. It seems that there are a multitude of experiences within this category of individuals, so we need to be able to discern the individual needs of our students to help them maintain their identities without a sense of “clashing” with this idea of the American culture and value system.

            “’Starting at the Top’: Identifying and Understanding Later Generation Chicano Students in Schools”, by Christina Chavez-Reyes, is an article that looks at the possible reasons why later-generation Chicano or Mexican American students might not fare as well as expected academically. While I can get some of the assumption breakdowns (the differences between culture do not create a great enough difference between students from a Mexican heritage versus American heritage), I am struggling with the official decree from the article.

            Chavez-Reyes, with a very small homogeneous sample, found that college counselors were not providing the needed guidance to these mostly general track students. The truth from my own experience is that I had very little interaction with my own guidance counselor. When I was a first semester senior I was called into his office for the first time. He inquired what my plan was going to be after high school and I told him. That was the extent of my counseling relationship.

            The problem I have with the article is the ease by which it places blame on counselors without a large enough sample. Also, it seems to completely disregard the budget constraints schools face. With a close friend going to school to be a counselor, I am curious what the student load happens to be for every counselor, who they spend their time with, and what other student experiences happen to be. I am living proof that a student can go through school with limited guidance and still push themselves for an education. That is not to say that there is not an issue going on to create obstacles for these later-generation students, or even that one of the obstacles is not the lack of guidance. I just require more evidence to begin condemning individuals I know, personally, that have a soft spot for student success.

            However, there are some interesting similarities between the issues with AAVE and multi-generational Chicano or Mexican American Descendants. The need to negatively characterize school personnel seems reminiscent of some of the feelings in the African American community. Refraining from my own desire to argue against these criticisms, I understand that there is some racial tension within the school institution that we need to be wary about, that needs to drive me (a white woman) into building trust and allowing students to maintain their identities.

            This conflict of interests, wanting a quality education while having trust issues with school personnel, gets more complicated when the identities of students are meshed within their cultural backgrounds and the histories that co-exist within them.

Ogbu's Theories of Speech Communities: A Voluntary and Involuntary Approach

           Ogbu’s two articles: “Beyond Language: Ebonics, Proper English, and Identity in a Black-American Speech Community” and “Voluntary and Involuntary Minorities: A Cultural-Ecological Theory of School Performance” both look at the role of immigration status as a way to begin characterizing how students may do. Acknowledging that students are individuals, Ogbu begins to characterize different minority groups, based on the relationship they have with the “majority”/those in power. Both articles critique the difference children of these two types of minority identities face when they are in school.

            Looking through these two articles, Ogbu particularly defines the different struggles immigrants face in the United States. Voluntary immigrants are those immigrants who choose to come to the U.S. for their own reasons. Some families come to the U.S. for job or education opportunities, so it stands to reason that these families take a different approach to understanding and using “Standard English”. With “Standard English” as the language of power, the language that is identified as the means to succeed in school and employment in the U.S., voluntary immigrants find that learning ‘standard English’ allows them to keep their own culture and language, but a worthy enough thing to learn.

            Involuntary immigrants are different. For the U.S., involuntary immigrants include Black Americans, Native Americans, and some Mexican Americans. Specifically, involuntary immigrants are those here because of colonization, conquest, or enslavement. The feelings created by being a part of this group can conflict with the ways they feel they can get ahead in employment or school. Of course, these feelings directly correlate with the relationship of two other concepts that Ogbu defines.

            Specifically, the combination of bilingualism and diglossia can create generalized feelings for the groups who have particular combinations as representative of their native language. When there are “separate cultural rules governing the use of minority dialects and standard English” (1999), groups may be experiencing bilingualism. It is not only two different ‘languages’, but the knowledge of languages with different cultural rules that may determine bilingualism. “Diaglossia is the relationship between two dialects” (1999), specifically if there are two dialects that are used for different purposes.

            While Ogbu’s theories recognize four types of relationships between bilingualism and diglossia (speech communities that represent: ‘both diglossia and bilingualism’, ‘bilingualism without diglossia’, ‘diglossia without bilingualism’, and ‘neither diglossia nor bilingualism’) as being referred by another theorist, he is mostly concerned with a fifth type: “diglossia, bilingualism, and collective identity”. It is the idea of collective identity that Ogbu is particularly interested in exploring. With speech communities that are characterized by multiple languages that typically have relationship among one another, Ogbu recognizes that groups may have developed collective identities that influence their patterns of success.

            Particularly, Ogbu seems concerned with Black Americans.  With an ethnographic study to prove that most Black Americans experience a type of bilingualism, he shows that there is a negative relationship between “standard English” and what many of the individuals called “slang English”. The community observed, from Oakland, considered “standard English” the language of those in power and “slang English” with their community. They believed strongly in their collective identity being wrapped up in this dialect of “slang English”.

            These characteristics would not necessarily be a concern for instructors, if it were not for the relationship perceived by this speech community between their language and the language of the “oppressor”. Believing that a power struggle exists within the communities and that those in power continue to discriminate, many of those in the speech community are suspicious of individuals like teachers. Uniquely, there also seems to be a void existing within these communities of role models who have found a way to make it professionally, without ‘acting white’. After all, it is this concept of ‘acting white’ that seems to stigmatize individuals in their own communities.

            Ogbu seems to suggest that as teachers, this issue can be complex. However, we can take certain actions to make learning a positive experience. One way we can do this is by gaining the students’ trust. They need to know that we are on their side and that we value their language. By acknowledging that they have a cultural identity with their language, we are acknowledging them as individuals. With this in mind, we have to let students know that different languages are acceptable in different place. Many of the perceptions by the community of the standards of acceptance happen to be true. Professionals are expected to speak a certain way. That does not mean that our students have to lose to their identities.

            We should also create avenues for role models to shine. Consequently, I am thinking about Tupac and an instructor here at SFSU. We have to encourage the young students to go out, get educated, and come back to their communities. Give them strength to stand and speak up, multi-linguistically!