Nurturing the Whole Student by Mayes Clifford ;Williams Ellen;

Author:Mayes, Clifford,;Williams, Ellen;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: R&L Education
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Culture and Education in the Organic Domain

At the sensory-motor domain, perhaps the first thing to notice is that a great deal of what happens in the typical classroom is carried on verbally, not at the sensory-motor level—and more and more so with each higher grade. This is not true of all cultures, however. Hence, the extreme emphasis on language in the normative American classroom can create educational problems for students where language is used less frequently, or used differently, than in the standard American classroom.

In Native American culture, for instance, a child learns many of his most important lessons nonverbally from parents and elders, largely through eye contact, body language, and even silence as a sign of approval or disapproval of the child’s performance on a certain task. Entering a typical public school, therefore, a Native American student often experiences obstacles because, based on his culture’s views of teaching and learning, he comes to the classroom “expecting freedom of movement, but discover[s] restrictive movement; where visual spatial kinesthetic learning was the mode, the verbal dimension is stressed; where direct experience had been the route for learning, now most experience is indirect. . .” (Pepper, 1989, p. 37).

Native American modes of teaching and learning styles are visual largely because there is a premium placed on observing how elders do things and then observing the elders’ body language and facial gestures regarding one’s performance. In general, indeed, Native American culture puts much greater stock in actual performance than in mere talk. It is not surprising, therefore, that “Native children are able to efficiently and effectively process and retain information presented through visual formats” and less through classroom talk (Kaulback, 1989, p. 141).

Especially from the middle-school years on, however, a great deal of teaching in standard classrooms consists of unbroken streams of teacher-talk, with little chance for the student to learn through observation or to demonstrate mastery through performance. When this is the case, the cultural discontinuity between the Native American’s preferred sensory modes of learning, on one hand, and the talk that dominates the typical classroom, on the other hand, may be so great that the Native American student may feel disoriented, excluded, or threatened.

The result is this student failing academically, which may easily be misinterpreted as stemming from cognitive deficiency or a bad attitude in the student whereas, in fact, the problem may well be the radical discontinuity between his culture’s understanding of the process of education and that which governs the culture of the classroom.

But in a classroom where at least some of the teaching and learning are conducted in kinesthetic and visual modes, then the Native American student, able to “hold onto” something and more likely to feel included in what is going on in the classroom, is more apt to build upon those positive feelings and to succeed. What is more, other students—whose personal or cultural preferences may not be visual or kinesthetic—can benefit by learning to operate in nonverbal ways, too.

And this highlights one of the great

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