Is Cultural Competency Just Another Buzz Word?

             

     Is Cultural Competency Just Another Buzz Word?

           As education reform in the United States continues to move, even if the movement is in circles, along with reform comes new buzz words and phrases. One of the hot phrases of today is cultural competency. Educators, teacher educators, and education institutions claim to be in pursuit of some notion of cultural competency, but just what is it? Why is it imperative that educators become culturally competent, what does it mean to be culturally competent, and how does one become culturally competent?

          Many future and practicing educators don’t see the importance of becoming culturally competent [, but school statistics demonstrate the need to pay attention to this aspect of teaching]. Today teachers of color make up only 10% of the public teacher population in the U.S.; this is down from the past few years where it reached record highs at 14% (NAEP, 1999, 2006). In 2006, while 40% of the students enrolled in public schools in the U.S. were students of color, 90% of public school teachers are European American. The percentage of students of color is increasing each year, primarily due to the influx of Latino students (Gay, 2000; NAEP, 2006).

           An increasing number of students come from backgrounds and cultures that many European American teachers often aren’t familiar with (Cross, 2003, 2004; Delpit, 1995). Simultaneously, many of these students come from backgrounds that leave them lacking the social and cultural capital to identify and understand the nuances of U.S. dominant culture[1]. Well known and esteemed anthropologists George and Louise Spindler, quoted in Culturally Responsive Teaching, make this finding clear when they assert:

           “Teachers carry into the classroom their personal cultural background. They perceive   students, all of whom are cultural agents, with inevitable prejudice and preconception. Students likewise come to school with personal cultural backgrounds that influence their perceptions of teachers, other students, and the school itself. Together, students and teachers construct, mostly without being conscious of doing it, an environment of meanings enacted in individual and group behaviors, of conflict and accommodation, rejection and acceptance, alienation and withdrawal. (Gay, 2000, p. 9)

This reality creates a cultural mismatch[2]. Research has shown that this mismatch often has extremely negative effects on students (Delpit & Dowdy, 2002; Pransky, 2003). A non-exhaustive list of these effects consists of: behavior issues, academic failure or low achievement, loss of home language and culture, a high dropout rate, negative stereotyping from teachers, cultural misunderstandings, alienation, and tests not norm-referenced to their group (Cross, 2004; Delpit, 1995; Gay, 2000).

          Teachers who don’t know about these negative consequences and aren’t culturally competent are destined to accentuate these effects and continue the academically inequitable context that advantages white students while denying students of color similar privileges. Furthermore, they either knowing or unknowingly fall into the trap of blaming the victim. Beverly Cross, in the introduction to Racial Profiling and Punishment in U.S. Schools, succinctly states:

           “The process of blaming students of color for their own oppression and failure is a long-standing institutional practice. It diverts attention away from the systematic ways in which inequities  manifest themselves in a supposed democratic, free and progressive society…thus the focus is locked on negative racial stereotypes and traits or assumptions rather than on the fallacies of bureaucracies, systems, unearned privilege, and the wider society”. (Applied Research Center, 2001)

The imperative for educators to become culturally competent is made manifest in the growing research that contends that teachers’ lack of knowledge and respect for students’ cultural differences perpetuates the achievement gap, racial stereotyping, low expectations, institutional racism, cultural mismatch, and a host of other dismantling behaviors that cripple non-dominant students and the U.S. economic and educational systems (Ladson-Billings, 1995; Pransky, 2003). Key to avoiding these perils lies in actually knowing how to work with students from diverse cultures.

          Knowing how to effectively work with students from diverse cultures requires that one becomes culturally competent, but what does it mean to be culturally competent? Clare Dunn, in The Importance of Cultural Competence for Social Workers, synthesizes what this entails. She contends that cultural competence is:

           “…a set of congruent behaviors, attitudes and policies that come together…to work effectively in cross-cultural situations. Cultural competence is defined along a continuum from cultural destructiveness to cultural competence and cultural proficiency…five essential elements contribute to the ability to…become more culturally competent, including: valuing diversity; having the capacity for cultural self-assessment; being conscious of the dynamics inherent when cultures interact; having institutionalized culture knowledge; and having developed adaptations to service delivery reflecting an understanding of cultural diversity”. (Dunn, 2002)

For educators this is essential. Most teachers have been trained to “respect” children’s language, use diverse literature, recognize cultural diversity, and acknowledge background knowledge and experience (Cross, 2003), the pertinent question is how does this affect ones teaching? Are cross-cultural situations being managed effectively? If so, according to whom? What actually happens when various cultures meet in the classroom? What are the power dynamics that carry these relationships? What is the institutionalized culture knowledge that mediates relationships in your classroom, at your school and in the larger society? How do these things change your teaching?

          Educators who are culturally competent can be seen “using the cultural knowledge, prior experiences, frames of reference, and performance styles of ethnically diverse students to make learning encounters more relevant and effective for them” (Gay, 2000). An example of cultural competence in action would in a literacy classroom be using students’ home language as a bridge to teach them mainstream English. There are any number of ways to carry out this task such as having students create bidialectal dictionaries of their own language form and mainstream English, translating mainstream English essays or poems to their home language and vice versa, along with role-playing theatrical parts or  famous newscaster characters (Delpit, 1995).

          Another method of doing this is simply changing the context of a given unit to more relevantly be applicable to students. Specifically, Eric Gutstein and Bob Peterson, in Rethinking Mathematics: Teaching Social Justice by the Numbers, provide a number of concrete examples. Two of these examples, more relevant to Latino/a students, are studying algebra in the context of “Home Buying While Brown or Black” and/or “Chicanos Have Math In Their Blood” (Gutstein & Peterson, 2006).

          Speaking of cultural competence in students, Gloria Ladson-Billings in Lisa Delpit and Joanne Dowdy’s book entitled, The Skin That We Speak, states that:

            “Cultural competence refers to the ability of students to grow in understanding and respect for their culture of origin. Rather than experiencing the alienating effects of education where school-based learning detaches students from their home culture, cultural competence is a way for students to be bicultural and facile in the ability to move between school and home cultures” (Delpit & Dowdy, 2002, pg. 111).

Students who are culturally competent are skilled and fluent at navigating between both their home and dominant culture. Culturally competent students feel comfortable and confident in their home culture. They exude a secure attitude that is seen in how they acclimate to circumstances and navigate from one discourse to another. Because these students have a healthy view of their own culture, it allows them to have a healthy view and appreciation for others’.

          Too many educators go through graduate school, gaining a piecemeal exposure to ethnically diverse literature, coupled with a few classes that expose them to white privilege and the plight of students of color, and leave believing that they are culturally competent(Cross, 2003, 2004). Some researchers contend that schools of education that espouse this type of experience (which is most), are fertile ground for future teachers to learn rather than unlearn racism (Cross, 2003, 2004; Ladson-Billings, 1995). Culturally competent teachers teach to and through their students’ personal and cultural strengths, intellectual abilities and their prior accomplishments (Gay, 2000).

          There is no recipe or prescription for becoming culturally competent. For many it comes from growing up in a certain cultural circumstance, for others it comes from interjecting themselves into a cultural situation that is foreign to them and remaining their until they forge lasting meaningful relationships that go beyond a professional or superficial setting. Yet for others this comes through a mixture of constant study of various cultures and comingling with superior educators from those cultures, gleaming from them the truths and skills that make them successful in their respective situations. Regardless which path culturally competent educators have taken, it all boils down to having an abundance of circumstantial experience. Experience can never be replaced by theory or reading about a people group in books. Casually listening in and observing doesn’t constitute this experience. This experience involves meaningful relationships, discomfort, exposing oneself to making mistakes, listening and becoming involved. If tomorrow’s educators are to be true change agents, if they want to see academic equity attained and if they want to see the achievement gaps go away, they will have to go beyond their “education” and take it upon themselves to become culturally competent teachers. To some cultural competency is just another buzz word. To students, all students, it is the gatekeeper to their attaining successful tools to navigate through an inequitable multicultural society. What is it to you?

Bibliography

Applied Research Center. (2001). Racial Profiling and Punishment in U.S. Public Schools: How Zero Tolerance and High Stakes Testing Subvert Academic Excellence and Racial Equity. Oakland: Expose Racism & Advance School Excellence (ERASE) initiative.

Cross, B. E. (2003). Learning or Unlearning Racism: Transfering Teacher Education Curriculum to Classroom Practices. Theory Into Practice , 203-209.

Cross, B. E. (2004). New Racism, Reformed Teacher Education, and the Same Ole’ Oppression. Educational Studies , 263-274.

Delpit, L. (1995). Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom. New York: The New Press.

Delpit, L., & Dowdy, J. K. (2002). The Skin That We Speak: Thoughts On Lan (Dunn, The Importance of cultural competencefor social workers, 2002)guage and Culture in the Classroom. New York: The New Press.

Dunn, C. (2002). The Importance of cultural competencefor social workers. The New Social  Worker , 2-5.

Gay, G. (2000). Culturally Responsive Teaching: Theory, Research, and Practice. New York: Teachers College Press.

Gutstein, E., & Peterson, B. (2006). Rethinking Mathematics: Teaching Social Justice by the Numbers. Milwaukee: Rethinking Schools.

Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). But That’s Just Good Teaching! The Case for Culturally Relevant Pedagogy. Theory into Practice, Vol. 34, No. 3 , 159-165.

National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). (1999). Trends in Academic Achievement Among Student Subgroups. National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Pransky, K. (December 2002/January 2003). To meet your students where they are, first you have to find them: Working with culturally and linguistically diverse at-risk students. The Reading Teacher , 370-383.

 

 

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[1] Dominant Culture: Whereas traditional societies can be characterized by a high consistency of cultural traits and customs, modern societies are often a conglomeration of different, often competing, cultures and subcultures. In such a situation of diversity, a dominant culture is one that is able, through economic or political power, to impose its values, language, and ways of behaving on a subordinate culture or cultures. This may be achieved through legal or political suppression of other sets of values and patterns of behavior, or by monopolizing the media communication. A few American dominant cultural traditions are: democracy, heterosexism, racism, “standard” English, capitalism, white privilege, individualism, classism, and patriarchy.

[2] Cultural Mismatch: This mismatch occurs when there is a lack of knowing, understanding and appreciating the culture and cultural nuances between individuals and at times between institutions and people. This mismatch or misperception of what one is doing and why one may be doing it can have deleterious results, especially when one party has power over another in any way.