Workforce Language Services

A recent series of workshops aimed at educating Indiana teachers in how to be more culturally competent and sensitive to their students’ backgrounds and cultures.  Cultural competency training is even more imperative in school districts where teachers are overwhelmingly Caucasian compared to less than half of their students. 

A lack of cultural competency can severely affect students’ performance and self-esteem, thus perpetuating the cycle of low attainment for minority students:

Education experts say that teachers have a moral obligation to avoid unfair assumptions about students from other cultures.

Traditional efforts to raise teacher awareness of other cultures have focused on helping the predominantly white teachers in urban schools understand the backgrounds of black children.

But they now focus as much on helping middle-class teachers understand the impacts of poverty, American-born teachers to realize differences in Latin American cultures and teachers of all races to see contrasts in parenting styles.

It is essential for every teacher of any race to examine the stereotypes they may hold, and how those affect their classroom interactions, said Khaula Murtadha, an education professor at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis.

“With those assumptions that are made about children of different cultural backgrounds, we can see lower grades, we see higher dropout rate,” she said. Because teachers build on what children already know, when they understand “a child’s cultural background, they scaffold on that child’s knowledge.”

Within the article, there are specific examples of insensitive treatment by teachers and assumptions that teachers make about students based on their country of origin or socio-economic class.  Despite the fact that incidents such as these are commonplace across the country, it still deeply disturbs me that there are still practictioners of “helping professions” who choose not to honor each student’s unique perspective and background.