Blog #4 Cultural Diversity
As I read the assigned article and the text, I couldn’t help but think of the saying “you can please some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can’t please all of the people all of the time.” When it comes to cultural pluralism and educating in such diverse environments as we see today, we fall into this predicament. Examining how to evaluate results broken down into cultural groups may allow us to please more people. The real question becomes how.
Personally, I have never been in such a diverse environment as this class. I can understand how this would limit my ability to recognize cultural insensitivities. I do not posses enough knowledge of other cultures or their customs to see lesser instances of cultural bias. As Reeves points out, “the collaboration of representatives of each target culture is necessary to identify less obvious sources of cultural bias” (1997). This may be quite a bit harder than we think. How do we determine the groupings? How would we separate our class? Do we separate by gender, nationality, religion, and age? Sedlacek refers to this as the “quest for the golden label” and explores the idea that by defining the proper labels, diversity issues would be eliminated (1994).
A few years back, I was assigned to an assessment project at our school district. It was my job to correlate the raw data values with matching values in our student information system. The top level administrators were extremely concerned with certain values such as ethnicity being correct. I was informed it was essential that the district be able to run reports broken down by select variables to get a clear understanding of the assessment. Once the reports were generated, there were multiple issues where my correlation was questioned. In one instance, a building principal questioned the results from her building because the ethnic breakdown from the assessment did not match the records for the building. It turned out that several multiracial students did not record their ethnicity to match their student records.
In the case explained above, the district believed it had successfully separated the students by ethnicity and had run good assessment reports. Once the inconsistency was found, all students were manually checked against our student information system to verify ethnicity. The reports were run again to reflect the changes. The question I have today after thinking back on this experience is who was right? Was our determination to use the code we had in our database correct or should we have used the value the student provided? I’m not sure how much the assessment report changed on the second run but it would be interesting to see.
As our country becomes increasingly diverse, it may become harder and harder to separate us. Does this mean that we should stop trying? I don’t think so. Efforts should continue towards developing the best educational environment for all students. To do so, we need to recognize the differences in our students and work towards finding a way to eliminate cultural bias and insensitivities in our teaching. Only then can we provide the best educational opportunities for everyone regardless of culture.
References
Reeves, TC. (1997). An Evaluator Looks at Cultural Diversity. Educational Technology, 37(2), 27-31.
Sedlacek, WE. (1994). Issues in Advancing Diversity through Assessment. Journal of counseling and development, 72(5), 549-53.
Personally, I have never been in such a diverse environment as this class. I can understand how this would limit my ability to recognize cultural insensitivities. I do not posses enough knowledge of other cultures or their customs to see lesser instances of cultural bias. As Reeves points out, “the collaboration of representatives of each target culture is necessary to identify less obvious sources of cultural bias” (1997). This may be quite a bit harder than we think. How do we determine the groupings? How would we separate our class? Do we separate by gender, nationality, religion, and age? Sedlacek refers to this as the “quest for the golden label” and explores the idea that by defining the proper labels, diversity issues would be eliminated (1994).
A few years back, I was assigned to an assessment project at our school district. It was my job to correlate the raw data values with matching values in our student information system. The top level administrators were extremely concerned with certain values such as ethnicity being correct. I was informed it was essential that the district be able to run reports broken down by select variables to get a clear understanding of the assessment. Once the reports were generated, there were multiple issues where my correlation was questioned. In one instance, a building principal questioned the results from her building because the ethnic breakdown from the assessment did not match the records for the building. It turned out that several multiracial students did not record their ethnicity to match their student records.
In the case explained above, the district believed it had successfully separated the students by ethnicity and had run good assessment reports. Once the inconsistency was found, all students were manually checked against our student information system to verify ethnicity. The reports were run again to reflect the changes. The question I have today after thinking back on this experience is who was right? Was our determination to use the code we had in our database correct or should we have used the value the student provided? I’m not sure how much the assessment report changed on the second run but it would be interesting to see.
As our country becomes increasingly diverse, it may become harder and harder to separate us. Does this mean that we should stop trying? I don’t think so. Efforts should continue towards developing the best educational environment for all students. To do so, we need to recognize the differences in our students and work towards finding a way to eliminate cultural bias and insensitivities in our teaching. Only then can we provide the best educational opportunities for everyone regardless of culture.
References
Reeves, TC. (1997). An Evaluator Looks at Cultural Diversity. Educational Technology, 37(2), 27-31.
Sedlacek, WE. (1994). Issues in Advancing Diversity through Assessment. Journal of counseling and development, 72(5), 549-53.
posted by mcavallaro at 12:04 PM
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