Promoting Cross-Cultural Competence and Awareness in Teacher Education: Toward the Integration of Western and Non-Western Perspectives

Abstract

Calls for culturally competent teachers persist amidst the ongoing diversification of the P-12 student population (Aud et al. 2010), continued racial homogeneity of the teacher workforce (Boser, 2011), chronic academic achievement disparities between majority and minority student groups (Vanneman et al., 2009), and persistent racial disproportionality in school discipline practices (Losen et al, 2012). In an effort to encourage and promote cross-cultural competence and awareness, we describe a graduate seminar we designed and taught around the integration of western and nonwestern perspectives on cognition, development and learning. We share a number of insights gained from the seminar experience and conclude with an appeal for a critical examination of existing practices in teacher education. An hour into our weekly graduate seminar our teachers begin to explicate a chapter on the Islamic educational tradition, which they had read as an assignment in preparation for the class. In small “fishbowl” like circles groups of three to four respond to the prompt asking them to identify and consider the fundamental beliefs and values of an Islamic education, while others outside the inner-circle analyze the conversation. Sue, an experienced elementary teacher, begins by calling attention to the idea of “unity” in the reading and how everything for her “is connected in Islam.” Jonathan, also an elementary teacher, responds by reading from the text about the openness of learning from within the Islamic/Koranic tradition but then positions himself critically by observing “it’s open if it fits the Koranic perspective but I don’t know how it’s really open if it has to fit the Koranic perspective.” Drew, a middle school language arts teacher, echoes Jonathan’s concerns about the lack of openness to which Jonathan sarcastically responds, “We all use text but they do everything with the Koran. I can’t imagine what would happen in our schools if we did that...that’s what we call a ‘true canned curriculum.’ It’s based on one book!” The outer circle of teachers then joins the dialogue. Belinda asks, “So, where does the concern for the holistic child fit in?” Janet quickly replies, “the five pillars that’s where everything comes together” before recalling how two Muslim students in her college religion class accepted the Koran with “their whole being.” Looking up from his book, Jonathan adds, “I realize that’s a small population sample but doesn’t that confirm what we’re saying?” This excerpt from our field notes occurred in a course we designed and co-taught for two years in a graduate program for inservice teachers at Pacific Lutheran University. Our goal was to promote cross-cultural competence by developing deeper understandings of cognition, 1 Woolworth and Thirumurthy: Promoting Cross-Cultural Competence and Awareness in Teacher Educ Published by PDXScholar, 2012 SPRING 2012 111 development and learning through the study of teaching and learning across home, school and community contexts in diverse cultures. We describe our experience from the course in the hope that sharing what we learned will spur more discussion about adopting a more globalized approach as one way to address the challenges of teaching diverse student populations. We conclude with a number of insights gained from our seminar experience and close with an appeal for a deeper and more critical examination of existing curricular practices in teacher education. Addressing Cultural Differences in Teaching and Teacher Education Calls for culturally competent teachers persist amidst the ongoing diversification of the P12 student population (Aud et al. 2010), continued racial homogeneity of the teacher workforce (Boser, 2011), chronic academic achievement disparities between majority and minority student groups (Vanneman et al., 2009), and persistent racial disproportionality in school discipline practices (Losen et al, 2012). In the face of these trends we believe too many teacher preparation programs still operate from mostly Eurocentric perspectives but convey expectations to candidates that they adapt a more non-Eurocentric or “culturally responsive” approach to teaching (Cross, 2005; Howard, 2010). As practitioners we operate from the standpoint that we have a professional—if not moral—responsibility to assist current and future teachers in examining their own cultural identity (Spindler \& Spindler, 1994), deepening their knowledge of other cultural systems and developing frames of reference that will inform and guide their instruction, curricular interventions and capacity for self-reflection and critique (Nieto, 1999). We believe these processes facilitate the development of cross-cultural competency—or the attitudes, behaviors and practices that Cross et al. (1989) attribute to effective and empowering work in cross-cultural settings. Yet, in our view, many of the efforts designed to promote cultural competency in both university programs and district-based workshops are superficial and largely additive in scope. As Michael Vavrus observes (2002), “Teacher education programs have generally perceived multicultural education as a possible elective or singular addition within a Eurocentric core curriculum that is supported by conventional pedagogies and systems of evaluation” (p.1). Asking teachers, for example, to affirm students with classroom posters of famous identities from their social group, to showcase students’ home cultures on cultural holidays or even to mimic students’ home talk in their instruction encourage at best a shallow and tourist-like approach to teaching. These efforts are often well meaning and speak to the importance of creating inclusive classroom communities, but such strategies rarely extend to the deeper and more impactful question of how we as educators develop communicative and epistemological frames of reference necessary to establish pedagogical conditions for the educational empowerment of all children (Villegas \& Lucas, 2002). Teachers in today’s classroom must have some familiarity with how students’ ways of knowing are shaped by the traditional or “home” culture’s approach to teaching and learning, and also how to use these insights to design instructional environments that promote deep and powerful learning (Marzano, 2004). In designing our seminar we wanted to push our teachers as well as ourselves to go beyond typical “diversity” exercises like the listing of racial stereotypes on butcher paper or reading the latest crushing indictment of the educational system to critically analyzing the myriad of ways human development, culture and schooling intersect each day in the context of one’s classroom or instructional practice. We therefore started from the premise that cultural awareness needs to be instilled in every aspect of the curriculum. 2 Northwest Journal of Teacher Education, Vol. 10, Iss. 1 [2012], Art. 11 https://pdxscholar.library.pdx.edu/nwjte/vol10/iss1/11 DOI: 10.15760/nwjte.2012.10.1.11 112 NORTHWEST PASSAGE, 10(1) Structure and Content of the Seminar Our seminar met once a week for three hours over the course of a fourteen-week semester. Each course in the program was connected to one of four curricular themes—ours was linked to the theme of “advanced cognition, development and learning.” However, rather than focus solely on the western tradition in cognitive and behavioral psychology as past practice had established, we transformed the seminar into an international/intercultural comparative approach to support and foster the integration of western and non-western perspectives. In doing so we were guided by a number of questions like: How can an anthropological and globalized approach to educational inquiry promote cross-cultural competence and awareness? And, how might our students integrate and apply knowledge from different traditions in their own instructional practice? Given the rapidly shifting demographics of many school districts in the Pacific Northwest like those along the thirty mile “I-5 corridor” between Seattle and Tacoma where seven school districts now enroll minority majority populations (Shaw, 2009), we believed a singular focus on and commitment to the theories and approaches of mainstream educational psychology would limit teachers’ understanding of diversity in their classrooms. But as we embarked on this collaboration our search for a curricular model linking western and non-western perspectives yielded few leads. Although this posed some challenges, not having a predetermined curricular template provided opportunities to be creative and to draw from multiple perspectives in designing the course. While the curricular materials changed a bit from our first to second year, the central focus did not. We juxtaposed one text representing what we would consider the Western tradition in educational psychology, How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience and School (Bransford et al. 2000) against another, Non-Western Educational Traditions: Indigenous Approaches to Educational Thought and Practice (Regan, 2005). We also layered in an assortment of articles, book chapters and position papers depending on the learning objectives of each class session. We started the seminar with foundational work around the history of learning theory and conceptualizing culture, which involved defining terms like “cultural and epistemological ethnocentrism” and considering multicultural perspectives on teaching and learning (Gay, 2000; Ladson-Billings, 1994; Nieto, 1999). The assignment for this part of the course included a cultural autobiography in which the teachers were asked to analyze their experiences with group membership (e.g., ethnic, class, religious, gender, linguistic, etc.) and to identify how that membership has shaped their view of schools and the kinds of assumptions they hold about teaching and learning. By the third week we shifted the focus to the integration of western and nonwestern educati