OP-ED | Overcoming Deficit Thinking
by Enrique Sepúlveda | Sep 17, 2012 10:56pm
(7) Comments | Commenting has expired
Posted to: Education, Equality, Opinion, West Hartford
One key point about the discourse on education reform that is mentioned repeatedly yet gets very little scrutiny has to do with the way commentators and educators describe low-income urban and immigrant families (this includes NY Times writer Paul Tough, Hartford Courant artist Bob Englehart (week of Feb. 6, 2012), Courant columnist Rick Green (February 8, 2012), Colin McEnroe (Feb. 10, 2012), and even some Hartford school administrators.
Almost from every corner one hears what urban and immigrant families don’t have or don’t do with their children: they don’t have fathers or nuclear families, they don’t read to their kids, they don’t have jobs or a proper work ethic, they don’t speak English and don’t value educational achievement. Accompanying this language of deficits one also hears the language of dysfunction and pathology. Such tropes are widely shared and easily if not always accurately interpretable.
Scholars of education and anthropology for the past four decades have thoroughly debunked “cultural deficit” and “culture of poverty” arguments that emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. Yet these deficit arguments continue to hold currency in mainstream discourse. As anthropologist Carol Stack wrote in her 1970 seminal and celebrated work titled All of Our Kin, “The culture of poverty notion explains the persistence of poverty in terms of presumed negative qualities within a culture: family disorganization, group disintegration, personal disorganization, resignation,” etc. Stack argued back then that many studies on poor and black families tended to reinforce pre-existing and deeply ingrained stereotypes held by white middle class individuals (and liberal), namely that black families in poverty were deviant, fatherless, and broken. Dr. Stack’s work demonstrated in fine detail the opposite, that black families, in coping with entrenched poverty and structural racism, actually developed highly effective adaptive strategies, resourcefulness, and resilience.
Latino families and their children in schools have also been subjected to this historical cultural and class bias. It has been accepted uncritically that Latino families and their culture gets in the way of academic progress, and that Latino families don’t provide rich linguistic and intellectual stimulation in either language.
The research is very clear on what happens when this bias goes unchecked in public schools: higher rates of special education referrals of black children and children who speak another language; lowered academic expectations; tracking; punitive discipline measures, etc.
But there is another way to approach the education of low-income, urban and immigrant children of color. It has to do with starting with what they know as opposed to what they don’t know; finding out what cultural and linguistic practices they’re engaged in as opposed to focusing on the fact that they don’t speak or read English. It has to do with what University of Arizona scholar Norma Gonzalez calls “beginning where the children are.” It’s a very simple proposition but one with huge implications, for it means retraining a teaching workforce (primarily white, middle-class, suburban and monolingual) that is ill prepared to pedagogically build on what urban, multicultural, and multilingual children bring to schools. Much of their training has been technical, not cultural.
Educators have to be cultural learners of their student’s social worlds to be the best teachers for them. Dr. Ernest Morrell (Columbia University) writes, “Little of the research practice in formal pedagogical settings takes into account that students who are labeled by schools as illiterate or semi-literate partake in vibrant and sophisticated language and literacy practices that they learn and utilize in non-school settings.” He argues that “students would be better served to brainstorm how to make meaningful links between their local language and literacy practices” with the literacy and language practices of schools.
Dr. Luis C. Moll, University of Arizona, also has developed a framework for helping educators find ways to tap into “hidden” family resources of poor, minority families in what he calls the “funds of knowledge” that exist in all families and communities irrespective of their socioeconomic predicament. He contends that “existing classroom practices underestimate and constrain what Latino and other children are able to display intellectually.” He argues that the secret to academic literacy instruction is “for schools to investigate and tap into the ‘hidden’ home and community resources of their students.” But teachers cannot do this bridging between schools and communities if they don’t know the communities and cultures from which their students arrive. Nor can they begin to understand, much less take advantage of, the funds of knowledge of these communities and cultures if teachers fundamentally believe that the languages and cultures of their students are deficient.
Teachers who are attuned to the identities and cultural experiences of people who have been segregated from mainstream society position themselves to provide a more balanced and holistic educational experience for communities who have historically struggled for a better education.
Enrique Sepúlveda is an assistant professor of education at the University of St. Joseph in West Hartford.
Tags: Enrique Sepúlveda, education, immigrants, Latinos, teachers, dh
(7) Comments
posted by: saramerica | September 18, 2012 8:39am
Bravo! What you say in your piece was evidenced by the Mexican American studies program implemented in the Tucson Unified School District. http://annenberginstitute.org/commentary/2012/03/emulate-dont-eliminate-tucsons-mexican-american-studies-program
Unfortunately, a xenophobic Republican legislature passed a bill that led to the program being shut down. Meanwhile, the current Democratic administration, joined by GOP corporate “reformers” want to implement the Common Core curriculum, which will further limit the abilities of teachers to relate the material to their students in a relevant, meaningful way.
posted by: Ybello | September 18, 2012 1:17pm
Exacto! In my work with the Latino community more often than not, deficit thinking is a barrier to health. The power of positive thinking is real. On a micro level may move someone from addiction into recovery and on a macro level moves society forward. I have witnessed the power of positive thinking for people in impossible situations and it is infectious. I am humbled to be in a position where I can create an environment where we focus on the assets of a person has rather than his or her deficits (real or perceived).
posted by: Joe Eversole | September 19, 2012 9:48am
So in a nutshell, Latino children would be better served if they were taught in their native language? How exactly does that prepare them to move into a Society that doesn’t use said language?
posted by: ALD | September 19, 2012 3:52pm
” It’s a very simple proposition but one with huge implications, for it means retraining a teaching workforce (primarily white, middle-class, suburban and monolingual) that is ill prepared to pedagogically build on what urban, multicultural, and multilingual children bring to schools. Much of their training has been technical, not cultural.”
Hmmmmm,
I was born into a very poor large Italian family ( both my mother’s and father’s sides) that had all immigrated from Italy to America. They came to work for a better life then the home land they loved, but were forced to leave could provide. I was taught the value of education, respect for my elders, and teachers, and hard work both in and out of the classroom.
I went to grade school in a city with many other very poor children from immigrant families just like mine, except some spoke Polish, or German, even some Spanish. I don’t recall many if any speaking French. The funny part was somehow our teachers who were without exception white, and middle class as described above, all somehow managed to teach a classroom of 40 kids with vastly different cultural backgrounds how to read, write, and do arithmetic. Latter on in High School obviously much more.
Years latter when I went back for my 20 th HS class reunion I was stunned to see how so many of my old class mates for whom English had been a second language, in the late 50’s and early 60’s, had already become huge successes in business.
Personally, I am very thankful that my white, middle class, suburban, monolingual teachers, of 50 years ago, did not need to under go any retraining to successfully do a very good job of dealing with me, and my multicultural, mulitlingual classmates.
posted by: saramerica | September 19, 2012 4:47pm
Does anyone else wonder if Joe Eversole reads and comprehends his native English? It certainly doesn’t appear that he read and comprehended what was actually written in this piece.
posted by: GoatBoyPHD | September 19, 2012 5:11pm
All you have to do Enrique is establish a Charter School at St Joseph’s and prove y0ur theories in the classroom. Lobby for vouchers and school choice and awe us with results.
Speaking as a former urban teacher and taxpayer, I want results in the field. Proof of Concept. Small scale. Affordable. The rest is the usual Academic Journal and Ivy Tower mountain of crap.
Where Higher Education awent wrong in the US? The “Publish or Perish” mentality won over the “Praxis or the Axe” mentality where the field is the real marketplace and the only true judge of merit.
My udnerstanding is Higher Ed oppsoes vouchers because it woud remove all barriers, all excuses from offering competing ideas in the marketplace. As any self-respecting Professors knows, suicide is preferable to proving the results in the field in affordable small scale experiments.
Of course I’m talking about another kind of cultural dysfunction and deficit.
posted by: Anne L | September 23, 2012 10:47am
“Beginning where the children are” ... what a concept. Oh wait, doesn’t that already happen? Don’t our current educational expectations, goals, and materials—textbooks, videos, testing programs, etc, begin where the, oh, yes, *white, Anglo, middle-class* children are?—including relying on and reinforcing the “knowledge” of other cultures they have “learned” through their pre-school years of exposure to mass media and dominant culture representations of the same? Yet, there is no drive to “subtract” from their pre-existing knowledge or to address their “deficits”. Great article, Enrique.