Multicultural and Bilingual Aspects of Special Education

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Multicultural and Bilingual Aspects of Special
Education
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Education and Cultural Diversity Concepts for
Special Education

• Banks suggests six major components or elements
  of culture
• Values and behavioral styles
• Languages and dialects
• Nonverbal communication
• Awareness (of ones cultural distinctiveness)
• Frames of reference (normative world views or
  perspectives)
• Identification (feeling part of the cultural
  group)

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Education and Cultural Diversity

• Macroculture- race, religion, social class,
  disability, gender, and ethnic group these
  elements together make up a national or shared
  culture
• Microculture- smaller cultures that share the
  common characteristics of the macroculture but
  have their unique values, styles, languages, and
  nonverbal communication

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Education and Cultural Diversity

• Nearly 1 in 5 Americans does not speak English at
  home
• More than 2 million grandparents are raising
  their grandchildren
• The number of adults who work solely out of their
  homes has grown a third since 1990
• 1 in 6 children lives in poverty
• The nation gained more immigrants in the 1990s
  than in any previous decade
• Poverty places children at higher risk of
  disability

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Sociocultural Theory

• Theory that the individual, interpersonal or
  social experiences, and community or institution
  are all important and inseparable causes of human
  behavior and that language ties all of these
  aspects of development together

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Sociocultural Theory

• A complete account of learning and development
  must take into account three levels
• The individual plane- individual cognition,
  emotion, behavior, values, and beliefs
• The interpersonal plane- communication, role
  performances, dialogue, cooperation, conflict,
  assessment
• The community plane- shared history, languages,
  rules, values, beliefs, and identities

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Ethnic minority communities

• have a strong influence on students achievement
  and school behavior,
• three cautions
• Guard against stereotypes
• The fact that minority communities may have a
  strong influence on school success does not
  relieve schools of the obligation to provide a
  multicultural education
• The support of families and the minority
  community may be insufficient to improve the
  academic success of minority students

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Purposes of Multicultural Education

1. To promote pride in ones own cultural heritage
   and understanding of microcultures different from
   ones own
2. To foster positive attitudes toward cultural
   diversity
3. To ensure equal educational opportunities for all
   students

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Purposes of Multicultural Education

• Two questions complicate the matter when we get
  below the surface and address the actual practice
  of multiculturalism in education
• Which cultures shall we include?
• What and how shall we teach about them?

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Multicultural Education

• One of the most controversial aspects of
  multicultural education is the use of language
• What labels and terms are acceptable for
  designating various groups?
• Consider cultures in which women are treated as
  chattel, as well as the drug culture, the culture
  of street gangs, the culture of poverty
• To what extent does every culture have a right to
  perpetuate itself?
• How should we respond to some members of the Deaf
  culture, who reject the prevention of deafness or
  procedures and devices that enable deaf children
  to hear, preferring deafness to hearing and
  wishing to sustain the Deaf culture deliberately?

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Implementing Multicultural and Bilingual Special
Education

• Exceptionality group- a group sharing a set of
  specific abilities or disabilities
• Multicultural special education- focuses on 2
  main objectives
• Ensuring that ethnicity is not mistaken for
  educational exceptionality
• Increasing understanding of the microculture of
  exceptionality
• Disproportionate representation of racial
  minority students in special education classes
  points to the need to make strong academic
  programs for all students, implement effective
  special education policies, increase level of
  home/school involvement, and use diverse
  community resources

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Assessment

• Traditional assessment practices have often
  violated the U.S. ideals of equal opportunity
  regardless of ethic origin
• Educators and psychologists assessments-
  criticized as being biased because of
  misrepresentation of the abilities of students
  and useless because they only result in labeling
  rather than educational programming
• Traditional standardized tests have serious
  limitations- do not take cultural diversity into
  account, they focus on the individuals deficits,
  and they do not provide useful information
• Curriculum-based assessment (CBA)- A formative
  evaluation method designed to evaluate
  performance in the particular curriculum to which
  students are exposed

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Instruction

• Objective of multicultural education is ensuring
  that all students are instructed in ways that do
  not penalize them because of their cultural
  differences
• If students differences are ignored, the
  students will probably be given instruction that
  is not suited to their cultural needs
• Classwide peer tutoring- helpful for elementary
  children who are not proficient in English
• Four instructional goals
• Teaching tolerance appreciation of difference
• Working cooperatively with families
• Improving instruction for language-minority
  students
• Adopting effective teaching practices

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Teaching Tolerance and Appreciation/ Working with
Families

• We can do so by learning more about ourselves and
  our heritage
• Teaching tolerance includes differences of all
  types, including disabilities
• More information on tolerance
• http//www.tolerance.org/teach
• Parents have different views of disabilities and
  different ways of accommodating these differences
  in their children
• Parents of low-income and minority children may
  feel alienated from schools

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Improving Instruction for Language-Minority
Students

• Students for whom English is a second language
  face demands of learning a new language and
  mastering traditional subject matter
• Those with disabilities also have to cope with
  additional hurdles imposed by their disability
• Different approaches to teaching
  language-minority students
• Native-language emphasis- students are taught for
  most of the day in their native language and
  later make a translation to English
• Sheltered-English approach- students receive
  instruction in English for most of the school
  from the beginning of their schooling

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Six Components of Effective Teaching

• Scaffolding and strategies- the teacher assists
  the student in learning a task and then phases
  out the help as the student learns to use the
  strategy independently
• Challenge- All students need to be given
  challenging tasks
• Involvement- Students must be engaged in extended
  conversations, in which they use complex
  linguistic structures
• Success- Students at the highest risk of failure
  and dropping out are those who have low rates of
  success in daily school activities
• Mediation and feedback- Provide frequent,
  comprehensible feedback on performance
• Responsiveness to cultural and individual
  diversity- The content of instruction must be
  related to students experiences

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Socialization

• Involves helping students develop appropriate
  social perceptions and interactions with others
• Teaching about different cultures and their value
  may be important in reducing ethnic conflict and
  promoting respect for human differences.
• Cooperative learning- A teaching approach in
  which the teacher places students with similar
  abilities together to work on assignments