The Moral Dimensions of Teaching by Buzzelli Cary;Johnston Bill;

Author:Buzzelli, Cary;Johnston, Bill;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2013-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Participation in Classroom Discourse

There is a narrow sense of “participation” that simply means taking part in class activities. Even this kind of participation, though, is rife with potential cultural mismatches and misunderstandings; nor does a knowledge of English necessarily equip students for it. Certain cultures have a preference for (and thus socialize their children into) communal, collaborative approaches to problem solving rather than the individualism preferred (often exclusively) in mainstream classrooms; this preference has been claimed, for example, for African-American culture and for Native-American cultures (Philips, 1983), and is also true of many cultures from outside the United States. This preference considerably impedes the ability of young children to succeed in school, where value is placed overwhelmingly upon individual work and individual achievement (and, as we have said, anything that carries value is moral in nature).

A related cultural issue is that of active participation in the form of asking questions, volunteering answers, and making contributions to discussions. Of course, children’s participation in these ways is affected by personality (whether they are shy or outgoing, for example), but it is also the case that their previous cultural experiences may have a powerful impact. Many immigrant children, for example, come to the United States after years of very traditional, formal education in which teachers are to be listened to and in which it is seen as insolent and disrespectful for a child to speak without being spoken to, let alone to disagree with a teacher. We have encountered this frequently with international graduate students; how much more awkward, then, must disempowered young children feel in such situations? Yet another related cultural difference is the oft-mentioned matter of eye contact and gaze: Many teachers complain that children “will not look them in the eye,” but in many cultures such eye contact between a higher status teacher and a lower status student is frowned upon, and the avoidance of eye contact is simply an indication of respect.

One well-documented culturally influenced aspect of classroom participation is the African-American “topic-associated” style of story telling, which entails “a series of implicitly associated anecdotal segments, with no explicit statement of an overall theme or point” (Michaels, 1981, p. 221; cited in Davis & Golden, 1994, p. 268). An example of this appears in Gallas (1998), who describes stories told by an African-American child called Germaine. Germaine’s stories “seemed disjointed in their development, jumping from one scenario to another” (p. 91). Gallas says they were “not linear stories, beginning with a problem and then proceeding logically toward the problem’s resolution, but were rather what I would call circular stories, creating intertextual relationships among many other aspects of his own and the other children’s lives” (p. 91). Gallas emphasizes that the stories “were always compelling because he included his classmates as central characters” (p. 91). While Gallas is capable of appreciating the stories for what they were, it is certain many other teachers would be more like the two white teachers studied by Davis and Golden (1994), who said that some (minority) students’ “thought processes are all cobwebby in there” (p.

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