Issues of race have hindered students’ access to an excellent education. Gould (1981) pointed out that racism has been around as long as “recorded human history,” (p. 31) however it has only been in recent history that there has been a biological justification by scientists that attempted to make an argument that people of color are biologically inferior. This shows that there was ‘proof’ for racism that the scholar community provided. Even President Lincoln, who had respect for freedmen who fought in the Civil War, believed that “freedom does not imply biological equality” (Gould, 1981, p. 35). These beliefs, held by historically respected academics and leaders, are sure to have been passed on to many in society, both the educated and non. Therefore, we can infer that minority groups have been long viewed as not deserving of an excellent education.
Gould (1981) described that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that “arguments did not contrast equality with inequality” (p. 31). With that, we can see that equality and access are fairly new concepts. So, as a teacher who got into teaching to serve students of color who are mostly poor, I questioned, are educators concerned about making equality a priority? What can we do to ensure that educators are concerned about this? Garcia and Ortiz (2013) made it clear that educators need to think about students’ cultural context in order to make the right decisions for them, especially students with disabilities, but unfortunately do not. Instead, “researchers and practitioners tend to locate the source of achievement and behavioral difficulties within students, without examining performance in the context of teaching and learning environments in which that performance occurs” (Garcia & Ortiz, 2013, p. 38). As Howard (2003) made it clear that our future teaching force will continue to be mostly middle class women and that our student population will increasingly be low income students of color, it is important that our educators confront their biases in order to ensure that every decision we make is in students’ best interest.
The idea of educators confronting biases in order to be culturally relevant practitioners is something that must be made a priority. As the EdD “focuses on preparing practitioners…who can use existing knowledge to solve educational problems” (Shulman, Golde, Bueschel, & Garabedian, 2006, p. 26), I cannot begin to use this degree to solve the problem of early literacy for low-income students without examining the context that many of my students are living and learning in. For example, are they given the proper support at home? If not, are the schools supporting the parents with strategies to increase their children’s literacy? Last, are educators providing the right methodologies and interventions that respect the cultural context of their students? It seems unlikely that educators are currently making unbiased decisions with their students or even trying to. For example, in the study conducted by Paufler and Amrein-Beardsley (2013), the majority of principals were against randomly assigning students to classes, meaning that teachers and principals make those decisions. This means that students will undoubtedly be grouped based on many subjective factors, which will surely be somewhat biased.
Therefore, in thinking about my own research in investigating the best ways to teach students how to read, I will need to consider how and why students were grouped. I will need to consider their educational settings, such as Special Education (SPED) inclusion, English Language Development (ELD), cluster (gifted), heterogeneous, homogenous, etc. and the rationale for putting students into those settings. Lastly, I will need to look at the training and beliefs of the teacher to get a sense of why they are implementing certain instructional strategies. Overall, this week’s readings made me see that action research must consider the culture of students in order to actually make change.
References
Garcia, S. B., & Ortiz, A. A. (2013). Intersectionality as a Framework for Transformative Research in Special Education. Multiple Voices for Ethnically Diverse Exceptional Learners, 13(2), 32–47.
Gould, S. (1981). The Mismeasure of Man. New York: W. W. Norton and Company.
Howard, T. C. (2003). Culturally Relevant Pedagogy: Ingredients for Critical Teacher Reflection. Teacher Reflection and Race in Cultural Contexts, 42(3), 195–202.
Paufler, N. A., & Amrein-Beardsley, A. (2013). The Random Assignment of Students Into Elementary Classrooms: Implications for Value-Added Analyses and Interpretations. American Educational Research Journal, 51(2), 328–362. doi:10.3102/0002831213508299
Shulman, L. S., Golde, C. M., Bueschel, A. C., & Garabedian, K. J. (2006). Reclaiming Education’s Doctorates: A Critique and a Proposal. Educational Researcher, 35(3), 25–32. doi:10.3102/0013189X035003025
Raquel Ellis
Latest posts by Raquel Ellis (see all)
- Race and class impacts instructional decisions – June 14, 2014
- ‘High ability’ does not equal ‘high achieving’ – June 13, 2014
- Pop up books do not support emergent literacy! – June 9, 2014
- Uncertainty is a good thing – June 9, 2014
- Belief and practice – June 5, 2014
Another big theme that comes up frequently when talking about equality, (particularly in education) is ‘equal opportunity’ versus ‘equal outcomes’. We spoke recently about the NYT article discussing potential factors that contribute to the declining rate of Indigenous peoples pursuing doctorate education – highlighting how complex these issues really are. As researchers in this field, we have to always think about what are the best indicators of the characteristics we are truly interested in and how do we account for cultural and personal differences.