A r c h i v e d  I n f o r m a t i o n

Systemic Reform: Perspectives on Personalizing Education--Sept. 1994

Prescriptions for Improvement: The Four Principles*

*The following principles do not map onto the four variables discussed in the preceding section; they speak to quite different issues. That each list numbers four is coincidental.

Although the cultural compatibility research base has been developed by examination of monocultural classrooms, it is possible to look at these studies of many minority cultures in another way. That is, are there any uniformities among the recommendations of those researchers who have studied African American, American Indian, Eskimo, Hawaiian, Puerto Rican and all the other culture-school relationships? Indeed there are. In fact, remarkable similarities are present in the recommendations. Another way of phrasing this issue is this. The four variables for which research is reported above are those which, if incompatible, can divide and interfere with progress among members of the learning community. The four principles discussed in this section are educational processes that can unite the members of the community, or at least minimize the impact of their cultural differences. The list has been developed by examination of the existing literature, and assembling the recommendations, research results, advice of experts, and case study implications that are now available to scholarship.

All the principles are stated as descriptors of schooling in which the distilled recommendations are operating.

Principle I. Developing competence in the language of instruction is a metagoal of all instructional activities of the school day.

Mastery of the language of instruction, whether in bilingual or monolingual programs, will continue to be the sine qua non for academic achievement to the extent that verbal means of instruction continue to dominate, and to the extent that literacy continues as the core goal of education.

Cultural groups that do not emphasize verbal analytic problem solving are handicapped in schools because teachers are so heavily reliant on verbal analytic methods and the use of verbal forms of instruction. For such children, cultural compatibility educators have repeatedly advocated the use of visual and wholistic methods for the teaching of literacy, numeracy, and science. However, they also advocate the inclusion in educational programs of activities specifically designed to produce language development (e.g., Kaulback,1984; Speidel,1987b).

The current literacy movement in cognitive and educational research is revealing the deep ties among language, thinking, values and culture. Language development at all levels--vocabulary through syntax--is advocated as a self-conscious and ubiquitous goal for the entire school day. Evidence is also strong that language development of this kind should be fostered through use, and through purposive conversation between teacher and students, rather than through drill and decontextualized rules (Speidel, 1987a; 1987b). The methods appropriate to language development in the multicultural classroom will be discussed under two other principles below; however it is done, the first principle for the multicultural classroom is that development of the language of instruction should be a metagoal of all instruction, and should be pursued throughout the day and across the curriculum.

Principle II: Teaching, curriculum and the school itself are contextualized in the experiences, skills and values of the community.

The second constant recommendation of the culture and education field, and indeed of developmental theorists and educational reformers, is for an increase in contextualized instruction. Schools teach rules, abstractions, and verbal descriptions. They teach by means of rules, abstractions, and verbal descriptions. Many cultural communities do not. Schools must assist such students by providing experiences of how rules, abstractions, and verbal descriptions are drawn from the everyday world, and how they are applied again to it.

In an unusual culture and education study, Hvitfeldt (1986) studied the classroom behavior of Hmongs in an adult education English class, who had enough influence over their classroom and instructor to persist in their preferred sociolinguistic and role-relationships. However hard the instructor would try to use abstract and decontextualized examples, the Hmong would themselves contextualize the instruction by promoting a warm, personal relationship with the instructor, by asking him personal questions, teasing, laughing, and joking with him. When the instructor would not specify context, the students themselves would relate it to a known, personal context. When the instructor used fictional Hmong names in drills, the students invariably stopped the lesson to check with one another about who this person might be in the Hmong community. These adults forced contextualization on the instructor. Child students can seldom do so. Contextualization therefore must be provided by the teacher and school.

Three levels of contextualization are discussed in the culture and education literature. At the first, or pedagogical level, is the necessity to invoke children's existing schema as they relate to material being instructed (Au, 1979). That is, the content of instruction should be drawn from, or carefully related to, the child's own environment and experience (Garcia, 1991).

At the second, or curriculum level, there is uniform advocacy for instructional use of cultural materials and skills as the media in which goals of literacy, numeracy, and science are contextualized, drawing on personal, community-based experiences as the foundation for developing school skills (e. g., Wyatt, op. cit.), and thus affording students opportunities to apply skills acquired in home and school contexts (Garcia, 1991).

At the third, or policy level, there are advocates for contextualization of the school itself. School-learning is a social process that affects and is affected by the entire community. "More long-lasting progress has been achieved with children whose learning has been explored, modified, and shaped in collaboration with their parents and communities" (John-Steiner & Smith, 1978, p. 26).

All levels of contextualization by anchoring in personal, community, and cultural meanings appear to have this same felicitous, if paradoxical, effect. The high-literacy goals of schools--verbal, analytic, and abstract knowledge and cognition--are better achieved in everyday, culturally-meaningful contexts. This contextualization utilizes child experiences and skills as a sound foundation for appropriating new knowledge. This approach fosters pride and confidence, as well as greater school achievement.

The first two principles that we have discussed are entirely consistent with all available research and theory. And Garcia (1991) is pointed and accurate in urging these conditions all the more for culturally diverse classrooms. This introduces an apparent paradox: the greater the need for contextuality, the greater the apparent difficulty of producing it. How is the teacher to provide for contextualization in the experienced life of the student when the students vary so widely in their life contexts? And how can teachers know that context for each diverse child?

Principle III: Teaching and learning occurs in contexts of joint productive activity with peers and teacher

The basic strategy for maximizing the contextuality for students of diverse cultural origins, is to create a common context of experience in the school itself. Contemporary sociocultural theory emphasizes that learning takes place best in joint productive activity, that is, when experts and novices work together for a common product or goal, and during the activity have opportunities to converse about it (Wertsch, 1985; Tharp & Gallimore, 1988; Rogoff, 1991).

In natural (non-formal) settings even the youngest children, as well as mature adult learners, develop their competencies in the context of joint activity. Shared ways of understanding the world are created through the development of language systems and word meanings that are used during shared activity. Schools do not typically do it this way; there is little joint activity from which common experiences emerge, and therefore there is no common context that allows students to develop a common understanding with the teacher and with each other.

The well-understood, formal task of schools is to promote the development of discourse competencies, word meaning, and conceptual structures in a variety of content areas. How does one develop those competencies? It is not well understood by schools that it requires everyday, shared experience in which the concepts take on meaning, activities that provide an interface of the content area systems with those of everyday concepts. It is on that interface that the highest order of meaning is achieved, insuring that tools of verbal thought can be manipulated for the solution of practical problems of the experienced world. "Effective instruction with young children involves a continuous integration of language and action" (Wood, 1980, p. 290).

This system is used consistently in the highest reaches of scientific and philosophical thought. Theoretical thought and discussion requires a continual freshening by example and a testing against sensory data. This constant connecting of schooled concepts and everyday concepts is the basic process of understanding the world used by mature schooled thinkers.

Joint productive activity is also motivating. For example, we know that the discourse of science occurs in a particular register with its distinct rules and formalities. In the teaching of science, however, these conventions are frequently violated by the interpolation of everyday discourse. These variations stimulate students' interest. These alternations are marked by tone of voice, laughter, asides, etc. During these times, the attention of students is at its highest (Cazden, 1987).

One final characteristic of joint productive activity as the basic context of instruction for culturally diverse classrooms: the activities should be shared both by students and teachers. Only if the teacher is also present sufficiently to share the experiences can the kind of discourse take place that builds basic schooled competencies.

This principle of joint productive activity has been summarized by Garcia (1991) as a set of teaching principles for Hispanic students. The conclusions are no different for any classroom in which a shared children-teacher cultural and community context is lacking. In such classrooms there should be 1) activity settings for joint work with peers and teacher, 2) learning through active rather than passive endeavors, 3) in an integrated curriculum, providing opportunities to study a topic in depth, and applying skills acquired in home and school contexts; and 4) opportunities for applying concepts to a meaningful context (paraphrased from Garcia, 1991).

Principle IV: The basic form of teaching is through dialogue between teacher and learners--through the Instructional Conversation.

For so long as the basic goal and process of school is verbal knowledge and verbal analysis, then the royal road to educational attainment, which can provide the cognitive and experiential basis for allowing teachers to relate emerging knowledge to the individual, community and family knowledge of the student, is the Instructional Conversation. The development of thinking skills, the abilities to form, express, and exchange ideas in speech and writing: for all these basic processes, the critical form of assisting learners is through dialogue, through the questioning and sharing of ideas and knowledge that happens in the Instructional Conversation.

The concept appears to be a paradox: "Instruction" and "conversation" appear contradictory, the one implying authority and planning, the other equality and responsiveness. The task of teaching is to resolve this paradox. To most truly teach, one must converse; to truly converse is to teach.

In the instructional conversation, there is a fundamentally different assumption from that of traditional lessons. Teachers who engage in conversation, like parents in their natural teaching, are assuming that the child may have something to say beyond the "known answers" in the head of the adult. They occasionally extract from the child a "correct" answer, but to grasp the communicative intent of the child requires the adult to listen carefully, to make guesses about the meaning of the intended communication (based on the context, and on knowledge of the child s interests and experiences), and to adjust their responses to assist the child s efforts in other words, to engage in conversation.

Through this conversation, the culture of the learner is clearly revealed. The assumptions, perceptions, values, beliefs, experiences--all the subjective and cognitive components of cultural membership will be revealed through genuine conversation, thus allowing the teacher to be responsive, to contextualize teaching in the experience base of the learner, and actually to individualize instruction in the same way that each learner is individualized within culture.

Teaching through dialogue is (in one way) already present in the cultural repertoire of most teachers, and in another way is an exquisite skill that requires much work to perfect. Although good instructional conversations often appear to be "spontaneous," they are not even though young students may never realize it. The instructional conversation is pointed toward a learning objective by the teacher's intention, and even the most sophisticated learners may lose consciousness of the guiding goal as they become absorbed in joint activity with the mentor.

In American schools the Instructional Conversation is rare indeed. More often our teaching is through the "recitation script," in which the teacher repeatedly assigns and assesses, assigns and assesses. But when true dialogic teaching occurs, classrooms and schools are transformed into "the community of learners" that schools can become "when teachers reduce the distance between themselves and their students by constructing lessons from common understandings of each others' experience and ideas" and make teaching a "warm, interpersonal and collaborative activity" (Dalton, 1989).

These four principles are related and form one wholistic view of education for classrooms of diversity. That is, the instructional conversation is the best method for development of the language of instruction, that occurs best when contextualized in experience, the ideal form of which is by creating joint productive activity, that becomes the setting for the instructional conversation. These principles distill the uniform research and experience of those who have worked in schooling of monocultural minority and of multicultural and of linguistically diverse classrooms.

Are these principles valid only for minority students? Far from it! Indeed, the principles are entirely consistent with natural teaching and learning, as practiced by homo sapiens traditionally, in all informal community, cultural, productive and familial settings since the dawn of time and on every continent. The principles may also be used to describe most-effective education for majority-culture students also. Traditional North American education, however, has not practiced such education, because the schools have relied on the family and community experiences of majority-culture adults to provide the activity, the conversation, the language development and the shared context upon which the schools could depend.

This is no longer true, in culturally and linguistically diverse nations. The schools must now provide the common experience, activity, language and conversation that learners require, both for individual development and the development of a common, shared and mutually endorsed community.

Therefore, we may confidently summarize the implications of research and development for policy:

To the extent that cultural diversity is present, it is the more critical that developing competence in the language of instruction is a metagoal of all instructional activities of the school day.

To the extent that cultural diversity is present, it is the more critical that teaching, curriculum and the school itself are contextualized in the experiences, skills and values of the community.

To the extent that cultural diversity is present, it is the more critical that teaching and learning occurs in contexts of joint productive activity with peers and teacher.

To the extent that cultural diversity is present, it is the more critical that the basic form of teaching is through dialogue between teacher and learners--through the Instructional Conversation.

Adherence to these four principles will not remove the cultural differences that divide teachers and students. But classrooms so organized will provide for the common understanding and shared experiences upon which unity can be expanded. Adherence to these four principles will not change the wisdom of teacher sensitivity to differences among children in the courtesies and conventions of conversation that make them most comfortable, but it will provide common experiences upon which a new classroom convention and courtesy can be built. In short, these principles do not dissolve childrens' cultures; rather, they describe the best known available means of creating a new culture of the school which will move toward unity through a new, created microculture of the school.

Best now known must be emphasized. These conclusions derive from widely available published sources, and as such reflect the (surprisingly) consensual conclusions of active researchers, developers and theoreticians at this time. Much remains to be known, and there is no doubt that richer, wiser, and more inclusive knowledge can be developed. Additional knowledge, however, will now require that we begin the detailed study of classrooms that incorporate these state-of-the-art recommendations, so that the limitations of our current knowledge will be revealed. This should be the next emphasis of educational research and development.


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[4) Are There Universal Forms of Teaching That Will Equally and Adequately Address Classrooms of Students of Diverse Cultures? ] [Table of Contents] [References]