Can+a+school+teach+cultural+diversity+in+a+segregated+state?

media type="custom" key="7642305" Here is a short video clip related to the ideas associated with segregation and racism produced by "Avenue Q"

NEWSPAPER ARTICLE

Coeyman, M. (1998, July 21). Brooklyn kids absorb culture to African beat. // Christian Science Monitor //, p. B8. Retrieved from Academic Search Complete database.

In this article out of the Christian Science Monitor, Marjorie Coeyman tells the story of the re-culturing of several hundred African American New York youth with a program called Dance Africa. Dance Africa has been around for 20 years and is a collaboration between the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Bedford-Stuyvesant Restoration Corp. that aims to teach disenfranchised youth African history, art, geography, language, and dance. The ultimate goal of the Dance Africa project is to "make [the children's] worlds bigger" and "to build self esteem" which is accomplished at the end of the program when the children that partake go through a traditional rite-of-passage ceremony. The year this paper was written (1998) 16 adolescents went through the ceremony while several hundred youth took part in the program.

This article tells the story of a group that is working to re-educate a group of people that have been forgotten by the education system. In a society where almost everything revolves around the European point of view it is easy to forget where others are from and their traditions. I like this article because it proves that culture can be taught through alternate methods rather than the out-of-book methods that most schools attempt. This also goes good with one of the minor questions we are answering because it was done with a single ethnicity. And while many may say that African Americans learning African culture is easier to teach than say African Culture to whites, do not realize how little African Americans know about their roots after being separated from them for over 300 years.

JOURNAL ARTICLE (1)

de Freitas, Elizabeth, & McAuley, Alexander. (2008). Teaching for diversity by troubling whiteness: strategies for classrooms in isolated white communities. //Race Ethnicity and Education//, //11//(4), 429-442. Retrieved from Academic Search Complete database.

This journal article is the methodology and results from a class that aims to teach teachers an anti-racist agenda while practicing in a predominantly white community. The class started off with learning an important etymology about the word diversity, stating that they are "contextual terms that help us to name and embrace those who have been excluded from our communities." The class goes on to teach that traditional ways of dealing with race such as "we are all the same underneath" avoids the touchy subject of race and difference all together and in fact denies all historical fact. Once the teachers have this base of knowledge on how certain teaching methods are racist by apathy the class progresses to a point where they must all go through a gambit of inward looking assignments that shake their identities. They are (1) write a personal narrative about their own privilege; (2) watch a foreign film and answer a series of questions about the dilemmas of empathizing with and representing 'other' cultures; (3) select a pop culture text and design a lesson that engenders a critical reading of this text; (4)write a paper in which they apply sociological and social psychological theoretical frameworks to their past teaching experiences. In conclusion this class taught the teachers to become racially aware of their own race and those of minorities and gave them the tools to help their students go through the same development. However in order to achieve this a certain level of discomfort must first be felt and the instructors did this through 3 main foci; (1) relations of power and privilege; (2) critical media literacy and youth culture; (3) theory as an interpretive tool and through these the teachers were taught how to uphold and anti-racist pedagogy.

Reading this article I felt as these teachers must have felt when the course instructors told them their methods were racist, ashamed and attacked. However, the instructors do not hold us at fault for this, rather they hold poor teaching method of the past at fault, which is why they are teaching this course. The premise of this class starts with beginning to think of whiteness as a race and in doing so a lot of previous misconceptions about race either fall apart or are rewritten. Reading this article made me think of instances in which my race has unintentionally benefitted me and made me wonder if I understood as much as I thought I did in books such as //To Kill a Mocking Bird// when I was in high school. After reading this article and the responses of the teacher-students from taking this class I want every teacher to go through such training as a prerequisite to any teaching position, because it really instills the belief that we do not know as much about other races and their histories as we should and I believe this needs to be remedied.

JOURNAL ARTICLE (2)

Bracey, Gerald W. (2009). Our resegregated schools. //Phi Delta Kappan//, //90//(9), 691-692. Retrieved from Academic Search Complete database

Bracey writes about the continuation of segregated schools in the United States public school system 50 years after the //Brown vs. Board of Education// supreme court decision. The article is full of figures from Los Angeles' school system that show definitively that minorities and whites are clearly not evenly distributed in the schools. He also offers a explanation as to why segregation is seen even more so in suburban schools than urban. According to Bracey, the supreme court decision occurred when most minorities were living in cities and thus the decision was only enforced in the major problem areas, the cities. He states that the courts turned a blind eye to suburban schools because hardly any minorities lived there, furthermore no desegregation plan was ever put into place for suburban schools because they never thought them to be a problem. Therefore while the suburbs have been being minoritized over the past 50 years they have also been unchecked amounts of segregation, this is most definitely backed by the numbers Bracey provides.

If I ever ignorantly turned a blind eye to the resegregation of America's schools, this article from Bracey certainly woke me up. The staggering numbers that he presents in this article are hard to ignore. Not only does he provide evidence for his conclusion of the resegregation, but he also provides a very plausible cause. Furthermore, Bracey says that while the numbers seem to be getting better, this is just an illusion that is being caused by the overall lowering of the white student population. Therefore, the percentages are artificially being raised for minority students vs. white students. The only thing I am sure about after reading this article is that something needs to be done, because America's schools are certainly resegregated and nothing has yet addressed this problem even after //Brown vs. the Board of Education//.

EDITORIAL ARTICLE

Educating Students for Cross-Cultural Proficiency [Editorial]. (2006 November/December, Volume 35, Issue 2). //Knowledge Quest//. p10-13. Retrieved from Wilson Web.

Destructiveness, incapacity, blindness, precompetence, competence, proficiency. This is the continuum of cultural proficiency according to Debbie Abilock the editor for Knowledge Quest, Broadening Perspectives across Cultures and Countries. She writes about the need for students in today's world to open their minds and receive and understand other cultures. She tells the story of her own class in which she taught the students about eastern cultures by reading translated fables and teaching them to read and write in Chinese characters, a visual language rather than phonetic. By immersing the students in a completely different style of thinking she was making the students see language as an expression of beliefs and practices that make up an entirely different culture, thus sending them down the road to cultural proficiency. Abilock believes that those who resist change in cultures do so because of a lack of awareness which is only engorged due to a lack of resources that educate about other cultures, i.e.: Middle Eastern countries. Abilock then moves on to the big questions when talking about making our students culturally proficient, such as how do we teach students that their response as a reader is colored by their culture without marginalizing that response? and how can we sensitize them to other cultures' images and behaviors without stereotyping said culture? She recognizes that this idea of cultural proficiency is young in the United States, but knows that the payoffs of proficiency for the youth of our country in this "flattening" world are great.

This is by far the greatest article for my research. It seems that Abilock does not even consider the implications of single ethnicity classes in her quest for cultural proficiency. With exercises like the ones she practices in her classroom, they can translate to any setting because they are designed to teach culture from the target cultures point of view, not vise-versa. Actually after writing that last sentence I feel that my assigned question, after doing this research, may be a bit culturally ignorant because I now realize that I was looking at teaching culture from the students point of view, not from the targeted cultures. If I were to teach culture from the way that I originally proposed (for example teaching a class of white students Chinese culture from a white persons point of view) then the whole lesson would be heavily stereotyped. This article made me realize the immersion that must take place to teach culture, just like the workers from Dance Africa (my first article cited) did. Now it becomes not a question of whether or not it can be done but whether or not a teacher can sensitize students of a single ethnicity all at the same time. I say this because in all the articles I have read thus far it seems that a single ethnicity put all together in the same room without difference will be more resisting to anything that challenges their identity culturally or racially. This editorial put this whole project in perspective for me.

SUMMARY ARTICLE

Jost, K. (2007). Racial Diversity in Public Schools. //CQ Researcher//, //17//(32), 747-754. Retrieved from Academic Search Complete database.

This article comes from the //CQ Researcher// and presents an unbiased report on the issue of segregation in America's public schools. The main issue presented in this summary is how schools can legally maintain racial diversity. The opening of the summary focuses on two big cases brought up in recent history, one in Seattle and one in Jefferson County (Ky). Both of these school systems have been chided by the supreme court for practicing unconstitutional means of achieving racially diverse schools, they were using race as a means of entrance conditions. Rather than only explaining how the issue was voted on, which was a 5-4 vote, //CQ Researcher// shows without prejudice both sides of the voting scheme and why each member voted the way they did. Once these cases were fully explained the summary goes into detail on the most accepted legal method in which to racially integrate schools without the usage of race, socioeconomic attendance boundaries. While proponents of this method praise it for its success in both integrating schools and raising the scores of low-income children, the adversaries call it a legal loophole to racial profiling. The summary offers many charts, tables, and news articles that offer more inputs on the issues at hand. There is also a in depth history of the entire segregation issue since it was made illegal in 1954 with //Brown vs. the Board of Education// along with an update with recent movements in the past 3 years since the summary's original writing.

This article offered a great insight into our groups main topic in dealing with segregation in public schools, while also offering some differing views on the quality of education in a segregated state. Many argue that segregating education is an abomination to our nation, while others say that forcing desegregation in public schools only furthers prejudices and does nothing, even hinders, the betterment of education in general. The unbiased nature of the summary made it difficult for me to take a stand on which of these two viewpoints I gravitate towards, because for every point one side offered an equally effective point was brought up by the other. I will say though that if forcefully diversifying schools proves to be beneficial to majority of the parties affected then socioeconomic means of diversification should be the means by which it is implemented, because not only does this help the more so low-income minorities, it dually benefits anyone that is low-income (where we find our worst schools in the country). This summary made it clear to me how dire it is that we as a country find a way to bring equal education to all Americans. However, only one question is left to me after reading this summary, is it better to do this by forcing diversity or by building a better system?

Scoring Rubric