REFERENCE
McMillon:
Why Joshua Can’t Read: LA 78:2
SUMMARY
The
title of this article intrigued me and then I got hooked. Why is it that some African-American
children do well in Sunday School but are problems in school? The authors of this article have a readable
style that pulls you into the case study a kindergartener whose Sunday School
teacher in the African-american church
commends him for high verbal intelligence, but whose white pre-school at
a mostly white private school is concerned about his low social
intelligence. Through the case study we
meet Joshua, a pleasant, expressive, social, interactive boy who loves to go to
Sunday School, even though it is a highly structured environment. During his first year at a private school,
Joshua becomes sullen and disruptive, and develops a distaste for school. To explain this transformation the authors
examine enabling experiences in Joshua’s Sunday School and disabling
experiences he has in his pre-school classroom.
McMillon
and Edwards note that children are first acculturated socially in their home
communities. The authors trace the transformation in Joshua to
culture clash between his home
community and school. In Joshua’s home
community, discourse is often topic associated and non-linear as is very common
in oral societies, while the teacher at his school expects classroom responses
and oral presentations to follow a linear topic orientated discourse
structure. Thus Joshua’s pre-school
teacher gets frustrated with his seeming random responses to questions and he
is not allowed to participate as much as he would like. In Joshua’s home community, group
involvement in any task is a high value, but this value clashes with the teacher’s
desire to promote independence in work habits so he is chastised for helping
others with their computer work.
CONNECTION
This
article is so applicable to the international school population that I work
with. This population is composed of
children who grow up in a country different from that of their passport and who
frequently travel between both the home country and the passport country. Typically their parents are embassy workers,
business people, military personnel, humanitarian volunteers, and religious
workers. The term Third Culture Kid
(TCK) has been coined to describe these children who are not fully a part of
their parents culture, nor fully a part of the host country where they are
living; they live somewhere between in a “third” culture that is a mixture of
both. These kids are always juggling
their parents behavioral expectations, the host country’s expectations, and
their teacher’s expectations (who in all likelihood is from yet another
culture)
One
semester I was acting principal at an international school where 15 different
nationalities were represented among the children and staff. Nearly all of the “behavioral” problems
referred to me turned out to be sourced in cultural misunderstandings. Believe it or not, there are differences in
opinion regarding: wearing of hats, direct eye contact, speaking up in class,
initiating responses in class, addressing peers on the playground, responding
to teachers, … the list goes on. I saw
how very important it is to be self-aware and to ask what the hidden curriculum
is.
DISCUSSION
So
I’m wondering, how frequently have teachers in our group come up against
culture class with their students.
Sometimes it is obvious, other times it isn’t so obvious. When you have a kid that is really bugging
you in class, do you consider his background before attaching meaning to the
behavior? What experience have you had
with making implicit expectations explicit?