Who's In My Classroom?. Tim Fredrick
My research is informed by the work of the late developmental psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner. His well-regarded theory is that development is influenced by our individual characteristics (such as our age, gender, race, or ethnicity) and our experiences within multiple settings that influence us all at the same time.10 He describes these experiences as “proximal” or up-close influences (such as our experiences within our families or our experiences in school) and “distal” or more distant influences (such as the type of jobs our parents had). He argues that we are influenced by the interplay between them (such as when parents’ work schedules make them unavailable to assist their children with homework).
Drawing on Bronfenbrenner's work, I believe that supporting our students’ developmental needs means paying close attention to how these simultaneous influences shape their development. In the following excerpt, Hoa Vu reflects on how her father's abandonment and her mother's poverty impacted her social development and her relationships with her peers:
One night four years ago, while other children were enjoying the end of a lazy summer day, I was sitting on the sidewalk outside my apartment building with all my stuff. My mother often told me not to sit on the sidewalk, but tonight she didn't say anything. My brother sat on one of our suitcases with his head down. It was late. The city streets were quiet. We had been evicted.
It was a good thing no one was around because I hated the look people gave me when they felt sorry for me. The landlord gave me that look when he saw my brother and me packing up our childhood toys. The cops who told us that we were evicted gave us that look when they saw us place our suitcases on the sidewalk.
Every time we moved we got the look that became known to me as the look of pity. And we moved a lot. The first time was when I was around 7. That's about when my father left us. Until then, I had grown up in an apartment in Ridgewood, Queens, with both parents and my brother.
My mom used to work in telemarketing, but she stopped when my brother was born. After my father left, she didn't seem able to support us. My mother would convince a landlord to let us move in, but after we couldn't pay the rent for a few months, we would have to move to another place. This was a pattern that I considered normal. We moved so many times I didn't think it was strange.
For the next four years, I moved in and out of four shelters. My mother didn't do what the caseworkers told her to so we could get housing or even public assistance, which is one of the requirements to continue living in a shelter. Every time we moved, I had to start over with a new caseworker and try to explain my mother's refusal to talk to them, which I didn't understand myself. Eventually, they all gave up on us.
Living in shelters changed me. Almost from the first night, I started acting differently. I used to be the conversation starter, but not anymore. I grew quiet. I didn't want to make ties to people that I would have to cut when I moved again. Because I carried this logic with me I didn't make many friends.
As Bronfenbrenner suggests, the simultaneous influences of living with a single parent, living in poverty, and experiencing housing insecurity collectively shaped Hoa's view that having close relationships with her peers would be a liability. Instead, she believed that she could better protect herself and her emotions by not making friends. In school, she might appear as a “loner” or an “outsider” who might even seem to be socially withdrawn, socially awkward, and unable to make friends. In fact, it wasn't that she lacked the skill or desire to make friends. Rather, she “logically” decided that the cost of trying to make new friends, and the pain of losing them, would outweigh the benefits of those friendships.
Why Cultural Responsiveness Is Crucial for Teachers
Of course, there's more to knowing students than brain development and the settings our students inhabit. Recent research within the field of developmental psychology is revealing important information about the role that culture plays in the psychological developmental of children.11 Culture is the shared values, norms, and beliefs that we hold because of our group membership,12 plus the quality of life that we experience as a function of our income.
According to psychologist Jonathan Tudge, it's through their interactions with people within their cultural group that children “learn what is expected of them, the types of activities considered appropriate or inappropriate for them, how they are expected to engage in these activities, the ways other people will deal with them, and the ways in which they are expected to deal with others.”13 In this way, culture shapes our development by influencing how we adapt to our social and physical environment.
Culture also shapes how we adapt (and sometimes have difficulty adapting) to school. Over four decades ago, Ronald Gallimore and his colleague Roland Tharp provided a well-documented record of this through their study of the Kamehameha Elementary Education Project (KEEP). KEEP was founded to address the lag in literacy development that was observed among Native Hawaiian children when they entered Honolulu public schools.14 To address this, the project developed a reading program for kindergarten through 3rd grade students that was designed to be responsive to the culture and language of Native Hawaiian students.
This research found that classroom teaching is more effective if it is “culturally compatible.” They noted that culturally compatible teaching reflected a concern for three types of educational experiences students were engaged in outside of their classroom (what they referred to as “cognition”):
the manner in which students interacted in social settings (social organization);
the conversational patterns that students typically demonstrated (sociolinguistics); and
the factors that influenced their feelings of self-efficacy (motivation).15
When the pedagogical practices of teachers were responsive to the culture and language of the students (such as by including more peer-to-peer activities and providing students with more opportunities to learn at their own pace), they reported greater levels of self-efficacy and motivation. These increases were directly linked to increases in student achievement. As a result, research in this area finds that the most effective teachers transform their pedagogy to make it responsive to the cultural experiences of their students.16
Some researchers suggest that one way in which teachers can respond to the cultural experiences of students is by actively soliciting their voice.17 In light of this, several studies have highlighted the importance of learning students’ perspectives on what they feel makes teachers effective. For example, almost 30 years ago, a study by education scholar Etta Ruth Hollins and her colleague Kathleen Spencer regarding students’ views on their experiences in school found that positive relationships between teachers and students increased academic achievement. They also found that teachers’ responsiveness to students’ personal lives generated positive feelings that led to greater student effort. Additionally, they found that students preferred teachers who enabled them to use experiences from their personal lives in completing assignments and this led to increased engagement in class discussions.18
Similarly, when Tyrone Howard, a noted scholar in the field of culturally responsive teaching, asked African American students to discuss what made their teachers effective, they reported that the most effective teachers established a sense of family and community within their classrooms, displayed a genuine level