Guest Speakers

1. Guest Speakers • October 1 (Wednesday) 4:30-5:20 PM, in Lecture Room I Van Allen (panel of teachers) • October 29 (Wednesday) 6:00-8:30 PM in Lecture Room I Van Allen (documentary and Dan Gable) • NO CLASS will be held on: • Friday, October 24 • Friday, November 7 • Monday, November 10

2. Culture and Community • How many of you have had an experience with bullying in your K-12 education? • 30% of American children are regularly involved in bullying, either as bullies, victims, or both (National Center for Safe Schools, 2001). • Classroom teachers identified and intervened in only 4 percent of bullying incidents (Skiba & Fontanini, 2000).

3. Consequences of Bullying • lower attendance • lower student achievement • lower self-esteem • depression • increased incidence of violence and juvenile and adult crime

4. Children who bully are more likely to become violent adults. • Victims of bullying often suffer from anxiety, low self-esteem, and depression well into adulthood (Banks, 2000; NRCSS, 1999)

5. Children who regularly witness bullying at school suffer from: • a less secure learning environment • the fear that the bully may target them next • the knowledge that teachers and other adults are either unwilling or unable to control bullying behavior (USDOE, 1998).

6. Primary indicators include: • duration • power • intent to harm • Bullying, unlike isolated conflicts between individuals, occurs when a student or group of students targets an individual repeatedly over time, using physical or psychological aggression to dominate the victim.

7. How would you address bullying in your school? • 1. Initiate conversations with students about bullying. • 2. Be prepared to intervene. • 3. Don’t expect students to solve things themselves. • 4. Encourage students to report incidents of bullying. • 5. Express strong disapproval of bullying when it occurs or comes up in a conversation.

8. 6. Work with students on developing assertiveness and conflict resolution skills. • 7. Focus on developing empathy and respect for others. • 8. Avoid physical forms of discipline. • 9. Keep a log of bullying incidents. • 10. Deal with bulling incidents consistently, in a manner appropriate to the situation.

9. Small Group Discussion Questions • 1. Define culture and discuss the issues that prompted belief in the cultural deficit model. What are the prevailing beliefs of educational researchers and theorists today about this issue? • Culture refers to the knowledge, rules, traditions, and attitudes that guide behavior in a particular group of people.

10. The assumption of the cultural deficit model, supported by some educators in the 1960s and 1970s, was that minority students and others from different backgrounds than white students were culturally disadvantaged as a result of coming from an inferior culture. Today this idea is rejected in favor of the belief that no culture is deficient. Rather, there may be some incompatibility between the students’ culture and the dominant culture of the school.

11. 2. Discuss the assumptions and goals of multicultural education. • The idea of multicultural education is that all students should have an equal opportunity to learn in school and be respected. Multicultural education is also a reform movement that attempts to promote acceptance of all cultures in what is taught in schools. Recently, Banks (1994) proposed that multicultural education is more than a change in curriculum. It must involve content integration, the knowledge construction process, an equity pedagogy, prejudice reduction, and an empowering school culture and social culture.

12. 3. Identify some of the factors that may lead low-income students to perform less well in school than middle-income students with the same abilities. • Factors that may lead low-income students to perform less successfully in school include the following: poor health; limited resources, low self-esteem; learned helplessness, resistance cultures (rejects middle class); tracking practices; child rearing practices that do not promote independent thinking and low expectations.

13. Social class is one of the best predictors of cultural differences. Ethnicity, gender, and level of intellectual functioning are variables that contribute to cultural differences, but social class remains the strongest predictor of academic achievement. • 65% of poor children are ________. • white

14. 4. Define gender bias and describe how it has been expressed in school. Gender bias occurs when males and females are treated differently, mainly due to stereotypes ascribed to each sex. For example, male infants are treated more physically by parents whereas female infants are protected more. In general, males are encouraged to become more independent, females dependent. At school, textbooks frequently portray females in roles that depict them as passive or domestic. Teachers are more likely to verbally interact with males and assign them more active classroom responsibilities. Expectancies to do well in math and science are more likely to be conveyed to males than to females.

15. 5. Compare alternative approaches to teaching bilingual children. Should a child’s use of his/her non-English language in classroom learning be discouraged or directly integrated with learning in Standard English?

16. Most bilingual programs today attempt to introduce the use of English as early as possible. However, there are concerns that forcing children to learn a difficult subject in an unfamiliar language may be detrimental. Students may also feel that their language is not valued if they are not permitted to use it. The best approach, it appears, is to integrate the use of both languages (native and Standard English). If possible, classes might be created that mix students who are trying to learn a second language with native speakers of that language. The goal would be to produce fluent speakers of both languages.

17. 6. Discuss major findings from learning styles research regarding Hispanic, African American, and Native American students. Specifically, what types of learning styles appear dominant or more common for each of these groups? • A. Hispanic Americans: field-dependent and people oriented. • B. African Americans: visual/global, not verbal/analytic, focus on people, and non-verbal communication. • C. Native Americans: visual/global and preference for learning privately. • D. Asian Americans: field-dependent, global, and do well with cooperative learning.

18. Cautions are suggested regarding the use of learning style results to adapt instruction. • First, the research is not highly conclusive. • Second, there is a danger of stereotyping. • Third, individual differences may be greater than cultural differences.

19. 7. What strategies might you use to help these new students to succeed in your class? • It is important to take a broad multicultural education approach rather than simply addressing language issues. In particular, James Banks argues a comprehensive multicultural education includes the following:

20. 1. integrating content for a variety of cultures and groups. • 2. helping students understand how the discipline-specific implicit cultural assumptions influence knowledge constructed within the discipline. • 3. reducing prejudice by identifying and creating a school culture that empowers students from all groups • 4. providing an equity pedagogy that matches teaching styles to students’ learning styles and individual differences.

21. In regards to specific classrooms, Banks suggests teachers use examples and content from many cultures and groups to illustrate key concepts, principles, and general theories in their subject area. • Researchers also recommend teachers become familiar with stereotype threat, which is the extra emotional and cognitive burden that a student of a minority group may experience when feeling apprehensive about confirming a stereotype.

22. This burden can induce a student’s test anxiety and undermine their academic performance. • Woolfolk suggests the strategies teachers use for decreasing test anxiety (i.e., no time limit for exams; the belief that intelligence can be improved, etc.) can help students resist stereotype threat.