Understanding the Whole Student by Mayes Clifford ;Cutri Ramona Maile;Goslin Neil;Montero Fidel;

Author:Mayes, Clifford,;Cutri, Ramona Maile;Goslin, Neil;Montero, Fidel;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: undefined
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

various types of body language and degrees of physical closeness;

certain words, expressions, and even grammatical forms that one will use depending upon the person with whom one is talking; and even

different visions of one’s place and purpose in the universe.

The psychologist Paolo Ferrucci has suggested the breathtaking emotional complexity inherent in our many roles in declaring that “each of us is a crowd!” (1982, p. 47), and all of this just in the course of sixteen hours in one day. Over a lifetime, the interaction of culture, role, identity, and emotion grows colossally complex and consequential for almost every individual.

Multicultural students are often required to play so many different roles during the day that it might well boggle the mind of a person from a dominant culture to consider. The multiple roles played by multicultural students in one day potentially involve at least three types of language—the language spoken at home, the language spoken by teachers and administrators, and the language spoken by peers. Being able to perform in different languages and dialects on demand is called “code switching.”

Educators who are aware of these complex and impressive psycho-social abilities in their multicultural students will be more ready and able to harness these strengths in classroom work.

Contrary to the popular understanding of a role, it is not a prescribed list of behaviors but rather a “repertoire of possibilities” upon which a person can draw as he finds himself “positioned” in various situations throughout the day and throughout his life. Thus, our roles make it possible for us to navigate the world with relative efficiency because they offer “predictive and sense-making capacities” that do not envisage every possibility but that do make it unlikely that much will happen that is not expectable (Hewitt, 1984, p. 62). Roles provide “typifications” that help us know what to expect from and feel about ourselves and others in certain situations.

When a person is thrown into a social situation in which his role is either unclear to him or awkward for him because it varies so much from his cultural norms, then he may feel considerable anguish and be unable or unwilling to perform—an important fact to consider, as we shall see, when trying to understand the experiences of children from minority cultures in classrooms where the rules and roles of the typical American classroom may differ greatly from the rules and roles that they knew and were expected to conform to in their native cultures.

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