Engaging Ethnic-Diverse Students: �A Research Based on�Culturally Responsive Teaching for Roma-Gypsy Students

PhD. Student: Jennifer Meléndez-Luces

ORCID: 0000-0002-3208-0653

DIGILEC, University of A Coruña

Introduction

• The use of Culturally Responsive Teaching (CRT,) has contributed to overcoming the school struggles these students must face in their everyday mainstream school life.
• Contributions:
• Transforming the way in which intercultural education and inclusion are being faced in educative contexts
• How intercultural education can lead to social changes as erasing the existent stereotypes and misconceptions towards ethnic minorities.
• Research: Qualitative Data Supporting the Study

Introduction

• Intercultural education is nourished by learnings of all kinds, which have been and continue being connected with the students as well as with their social sphere.
• The characteristics of the students,
• their origin,
• their belonging to an ethnic group
• Their history and culture
• should serve as the main foundation for pedagogical developments.
• Therefore, with this research based on Culturally Responsive Teaching (CRT), not only accepting Roma-Gypsy experiences would be considered as a fundamental part of inclusive education but, at the same time, they would be made part of the school along with the lives of gypsy and non-gypsy students.

Roma-Gypsy Students and Culture: Why Should It Be Taught?

• Introducing the Roma-Gypsy culture to all the people who are part of the educational community, both teachers and students will promote the inclusion of this ethnic minority group through dialogue, knowledge, understanding, and, above all, empathy.
• Unfortunately, the existence of documentation that supports the history of the gypsy community is scarce and, in most cases, such documentation is the product of a Western society that has relied on the ideology of supremacy of the majority ethnic groups over the minority ones.
• This, together with the long oral tradition linked to the gypsy community, means that many aspects of the history of the gypsy community are unknown.
• Therefore, it is not surprising that those Roma-Gypsy students who are part of the educational community of a school or high school do not feel represented in the day-to-day of their classes, since the legal framework shaping the curriculum, the books used as well as the contents taught by teachers only represent the mainstream culture, history, and politics.

As we can see, Table 1 provides data from 2005 to 2018 regarding the educative level reached by the gypsy population, and the results being presented are quite alarming as less than 20% of the Roma-Gypsy population have finished Compulsory Primary Education.�Somewhat more positive are the numbers representing Secondary Education. In 2005 only 5.3% of gypsies attending High School finished their studies, while there was an increase of 2.1% in 2011 and a doubling in 2018 with 14.2% of the Roma population having�completed Compulsory Secondary Education. So, in view of the data, it can be stated that there is a necessity to look for new ways and approaches to promote education among the Roma-Gypsy Community.

Why Teaching Ethnic Minorities in the EFL Classroom through Culture?

• The cultural aspects surrounding a language are very important, as the cultural heritage of each society is—at the same time—linked to the evolution of its tongue.
• For this reason, it could be stated that, while teaching English or any other foreign language, it is important to incorporate and involve all the elements that have been key in the history and culture of different communities or countries, especially, because by doing so we will be contributing to the promotion and understanding between different peoples whose historical backgrounds and cultural legacies are very different [19].
• However, appearances are deceptive, as when it comes to teaching English as a foreign language—and any other language—it seems that there is only one way of teaching culture through it, and it is by making use of cultural and historical content that has been repeated and extended for students from primary to further education. What is more, both books and teachers fall into a bounded culture, meaning that the development of the socio-cultural competence among students seemed to not have been considered as one of the main purposes of education when selecting the contents and materials that would present English Speaking Countries to them.

So, it could be said that English Textbooks do not present real English people and neither a broader picture of English-speaking countries, which limits students’ opportunities to explore language and culture in different situational contexts.

• Without going any further, the Council of Europe within its Common European Framework published in 2018 [21] introduced the “Intercultural Dimension” as one of the aims of language teaching and learning.
• In fact, they consider that the essence of acquiring this intercultural dimension does not only rely on the fact that the “learner of the foreign language” must be aware of the culture that has shaped the interlocutor’s identity but, at the same time, and this being more important for the development of our proposal, aware of the culture that has shaped an identity of its own [22].
• It is also stated that, thereby, students would be able to avoid stereotyping as instead of perceiving the interlocutor as a representation of an ascribed identity, they would be perceived as an individual “whose qualities are to be discovered” [22].
• Nevertheless, the dominant mainstream culture continues to be reflected in all aspects of most schools from the way the curriculum has been written to the way in which teachers interact with both students and families. Thus, when ethnic minority cultures are given the opportunity of being in the picture attention is only given to superficial cultural aspects like food and celebrations [23].

Therefore, my question is: ��If as educators we only teach our students a small, fragmented part of the history of a country or language, are we not, in turn, contributing to the creation of Stereotypes?

Culturally Responsive Teaching

• The influence of the humanistic approach to learning can be seen in Culturally Responsive Teaching (CRT). This student-centered approach bears in mind the student’s cognitive processes but also the cultural background they belong to in order to make their learning effective and personal. Additionally, this humanistic way of approaching education posits a bilateral flow of ideas that enriches both—teachers and students—through the teaching and learning process.
• An aspect that is often debated when dealing with education is the relationship between the low achievement of students and their background; especially when dealing with foreign, ethnic minorities, or impoverished students. This continuous debate does not allow us as educators to realize that one of the many possible solutions regarding the engagement of these students might be the acquisition of knowledge (contents and competencies) through the implementation of their own culture in the classroom since teaching is both a contextual and a situational process.
• However, these facts tend to be ignored and fall into oblivion when students—whom the teaching process should be directed—belong to ethnically diverse communities, especially poor ones.

Consequently…

• Students are likely to be taught through the use of a Eurocentric Framework in which there is no place for ethnic minority cultures as, apparently, education has nothing to do with cultures or heritages but with the teaching of intellectual, vocational, and civic skills.
• That kind of teaching ends up leaving behind fanciful notions such as cultural diversity because it is believed that ethnically diverse students—usually considered by the educative systems as “underachievers”—must only learn several skills that could be applied to life in order to assimilate the values and culture of the mainstream society and assimilate to it.
• Unfortunately, this has dire consequences because students forget who they really are and the culture they belong to.

• It should not be forgotten that being able to bring the culture of ethnic minority groups to the classroom requires knowing the cultural dimensions as well as other aspects such as social, political, and economic conditions that are responsible for the inequality among those minority students who are part of the educational community.
• On many occasions, also seen as a huge challenge by teachers as they mistakenly believe that to treat students differently because of their cultural orientations is racial discrimination [31].
• At the same time, teachers commit the mistake of failing to recognize the influence of culture on their own as well as on their students’ attitudes, values, and behaviors.

• This methodology that emerged in the early 1990s, it is important to explain that the same core methodology has been given different names since it had its first appearance. Knowingly: Culturally Relevant Education (CRE); Culturally Responsive Pedagogy (CRP); and Culturally Relevant Teaching (CRT).
• Zaretta L. Hammond—also a contributor to the CRT Methodology—as she beliefs that both the “shallow” and the “deep” culture contribute to the way in which we experience life [35].

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• Chronologically speaking, the scholar-practitioners that gave life to such methodology were: Gloria Ladson-Billings, Lisa Delpit, Geneva Gay, and Sonia Nieto. The four of them are considered the Matriarchs of the CRT Model [36] after making distinct contributions that together form the essential baselines from where educators can start implementing it. Ladson-Billings has been studying since the 1980s the practices carried out by teachers who taught African American students as well as the implementation of the Pedagogy of the Oppressed developed by Paulo Freire [37–39].
• “Her work encourages a more robust insightfulness from a pedagogical perspective into the racial achievement and performance gaps that were uncovered quantitatively through the analysis of standardized test scores” [36].
• In 1995, it was Lisa Delpit who contributed to the CRT Methodology after calling teachers to action “to better understand the scope of influence of the cultural power they hold” [36].
• Her research explores how larger societal power imbalances and cultural conflicts are recreated within the school as well as classroom background and, therefore, deny educational opportunities to ethnically diverse (minority) students.
• In Delpit’s words: “the culprit in these situations is not simply racism, though it certainly plays a part. It is the reluctance of people, especially those with power and privilege, to perceive those different from themselves except through their own culturally clouded vision” [40].
• Teaching a multicultural group, is considered by Delpit a complicated process that is not to be merely answered by “the replication of teaching techniques and tools” [36] but through the “differing perspectives on the debate over ‘skills’ vs. ‘process’ approaches that can lead to an understanding of the alienation and miscommunication”, and thereby to a better understanding of the ethnically diverse students.

• At the same time, CRT contributes to: acknowledging the legitimacy of the cultural heritage of different ethnic groups, both as legacies that affect students’ dispositions, attitudes, and approaches to learning and as worthy content to be taught in the formal curriculum; build meaningful bridges between home and school experiences as well as between academic abstraction and lived sociocultural realities; use of different instructional strategies connected to different learning styles; teach students to know and praise their own and another’s cultural heritage; and, incorporate the information, resources, and materials in all the subjects and skills routinely taught in school [31]
• However, the CRT approach is not only characterized by bringing cultural aspects of students belonging to ethnic-diverse groups to the curriculum and to the classroom but also by being comprehensive, multidimensional, empowering, transformative as well as emancipatory. Is, in other words, not the kind of teaching that has been designed to fit the school culture to the students’ culture but the one that makes use of the students’ culture as the basis for education.

• How would you use the Cultural Heritage to apply the CRT Model?
• Think about a situation in which you have to include an ethnic minority Student within the mainstream classroom. How would you do it? Will you make his/hers own cultural heritage part of the Teaching and learning practice?