Teaching Other People’s Children, Cynthia Ballenger

This literature generally took the attitude that children will learn unless impeded from learning.  It contained at its core an earlier phrasing of the question that motivates many of the most powerful pieces of teacher research today: Why aren’t all children learning? (p. 11)

This quotation sets up the basis of the text, and is at the heart of teacher reflection/descriptive review.  It is mindful of the purpose of education, and the need to question what’s going on when teaching is happening, but learning is not.  This is a question that should be asked of students that are not learning, not just when the students are overtly culturally different. 

. . . these differences tended to look like deficits to us, no matter what we did.  If children hadn’t been read storybooks at home, we didn’t blame them for their lack of experience.  But we still thought of them as behind. (p. 14)

This realization is an important one.  We can recognize that the culture of school and the culture of our students’ homes may differ, but we also must recognize that often there is no meeting place or point of compromise.  It’s almost as if teachers acknowledge the difference but that acknowledgement means nothing.  This is not entirely the fault of the teachers.  A point that came up in a class last week that discussed the culture of school and testing, and that the ultimate goal is not necessarily learning and progress, but rather coverage and assessment.  If the culture of school simply focused on growth, we could acknowledge the “deficits,” which are really just culture differences, and work to develop the student as a person.  However, when the goal of instruction is to complete a syllabus and prepare for an end-of-year exam, the differences place the student so far behind the only way to view their difference is as a deficit that must be overcome. 

. . . it is accurate to say that I went into this classroom without any academic knowledge of the particular culture.  It seems important to make this point because, with all the endless things that teachers are supposed to be expert on, it is not within my experience to say that they need to be expert on the specific cultural background, narrative style, and literacy experience of each child in the class. (p.15)

A point that we discussed in class was the idea of needing to be familiar with a student and his or her culture in order to find an entry point into discussion.  Once the idea was made understandable in reference to the student’s individual culture, the concept could then be transferred into the school cultural ideal.

A point that was discussed in last night class was the idea that not all schools and learning environments are so homogenous.  It is easy to get schooled in Haitian culture if all of the students, families, staff and community share of one heritage.  Am I expected to completely understand the heritage of my students from Bangladesh, Puerto Rico, Nigeria, The Dominican Republic and Jamaica? Actually, I’d like to, but there is not enough time in a day, nor can I find such legitimate and whole samples of the cultures that are willing to let me into them. 

This also leads to a critique: is study and academic knowledge of a culture impersonal and static? 

Why be bookread in the culture of the Haitians when each Haitian is a product of the shared experiences you’ve studied but also their own, rich personal histories?  Would the knowledge Ballenger hoped she had created stereotypes that may have interfered with the understanding of her students?  This is similar to the concept in the article by Gee, in which the differentiation between learning and acquisition is made.  My understanding of the reading makes it apparent that acquisition is the more valuable form of gaining information and understanding.  Ballenger could have learned all she wanted about the Haitians she taught in an academic vaccuum, but she could only acquire more meaningful understandings by being dropped into the classroom (with an excellent range of homogenous supports, might I add).

In childhood the responsibility of the elder is often compensated for by extra privileges.  The practice of many American families of dividing everything equally between siblings, taking turns from the earliest days, is not so prominent among the Haitian families I know.  The eldest is likely to have precedence.  One younger child remembers that the eldest in her family always rode in the front seat of the car with her parents; there was never any turn-taking. The Haitian teachers I knew also did not generally teach sharing – they were more likely to protect the rights of the child who “got it first.” As a teacher, I was upset by the lack of turn-taking as the children played. I felt as first that there was something selfish or wild about a child who could not share.  It was only later that I realized this was something that American parents teacher their children – you see children being physically helped to give another child a turn, handing over a shovel in the sandbox, for example.  This training generally begins when they are still too young to understand or maybe even to do it by themselves. (p.26)

This assessment is powerful for many reasons.  First of all, it acknowledges that different enculturations are present in familial and peer relations.  It is important to realize that there are different expectations of interaction. 

A criticism I feel compelled to discuss based in the way in which Ballenger discusses the socialization of children.  It seems as if the children of the Haitian culture are inherently selfless and respectful of the elder.  The socialization is discussed as if it doesn’t need to be taught, but rather, Haitian children are born indoctrinated without explicit direction on how to interact. By contrast, the American children are selfish and need assistance in learning how to play well with others.  Additionally, it seems as if the concept of sharing is an entirely foreign concept to the American students run by their Id.  Haitians are more creatures of an overproductive Superego, that they have been conditioned to recognize respect for elder.  Does Ballenger seriously believe that the teaching of values she witnesses in American families does not occur in Haitian families because the ends of socialization are so different?

Also, while cultural relativism and the appreciation of different socialization is very nice, what are the implications for teaching?  Should the teacher continue to reinforce the Haitian ideal, or is the teacher expected to impress upon the students the culture of the new land in which they live?  I wonder if Ballenger would have been more accepting of her American drive to socialize and force sharing if the environment in which she taught was more heterogeneous.  I am given the impression that she did not want to force American values upon these students because they were so culturally isolated.  I wonder if reinforcing the isolation is best.

Another child, a teenager, in the Haitian community here was caught stealing in school.  His teacher made an appointment to visit the family to tell them what had happened.  When she arrived the boy was there with his father, and many of his father’s friends as well.  She was invited to go ahead and explain.  Then all the father’s friends joined the father in reprimanding the boy, pressuring him to act right.  At parent meetings at my school, parents would often ask in front of everyone assembled how their child was doing.  In both these examples, i would have expected this information to be saved for a more private interview. (p. 30)

So much is present in this paragraph that needs to be discussed in terms of the implications for teaching.  More than the idea that issues of raising children are not keep private and shameful, there is the importance of the communal network of child-raising.  I have seen this with families, and I would not want to say it was only in one nation’s culture, but it has been very jarring to me to air what my parents would view as “dirty laundry” in front of mothers, aunts, uncles and cousins. 

The shame attached to keeping troubles private comes from the “every mother for herself” attitude within the nuclear family.  Instead of being shocked by the shared nature of child rearing, discipline (and positive reinforcement, as well), should be discussed with all of the people that shape the child’s life. It is very funny, however, that many people are so put off by the idea of sharing the rearing of children, yet we are very quick to deplore homes in which there are too few role models.  

Or, when a child pushes or pinches another child right next to her, many teachers will suggest that if the child does not like people to sit so close, she should say so rather than pinch them to make them move.  Rose felt, and in my observation I concurred, that Haitian teachers do not often do this.  Colette suggested further that if she were concerned about an individual child and his particular problems, instead of articulating for him the difficulties in his life, her goal would be “to make him feel comfortable with the group.” (p.35)

My first Masters is in Special Education, and much was done on functional behavior assessments.  There is a trend in education that behaviors are the response to the environment, which is all well and good, but sometimes this idea of finding the function of the behavior gets in the way of actually disciplining the children.  I may know that the child is pinching her neighbor, and I may know that it’s because the child does not like to be too close to other students, and maybe that feeling comes from the fact she feels she is from an overcrowded home with too many siblings; but in the instant the child is pinching another, the action does is not necessarily a conscious act as a function of every antecent to the behavior. 

Sometimes we over-rationalize in our discussions of behavior with students.  I rather like the idea that for pre-schoolers expectation of behavior come in the form of “That’s not what friends do,” or even, “That’s not nice.”  The expectation that three-year-olds recognize their behaviors in light of intricate causes-and-effects seems almost silly.  It falls under the category of the academic versus the pragmatic. 

I wonder why Ballenger makes this such an issue of American versus Haitian, when to me, it sounds like “Behavior Management Learned in FBA 101″ versus “Behavior Management Technique as a Product of Classroom Experience.”  She makes it explicit that this technique is used in both class and home, and therefore must be a Haitian philosophy, however, I’m not sure that American parents run around dissecting their children’s behavior and using A-B-C charts to understand why their children throw their toys.  She is putting her educational philosophy on an entire “American” culture, simply because she has recognized that she is, and her actions are, outside Haitian culture. Does that necessarily mean that all of her actions, as a byproduct of being decidedly not Haitian, must be American?  Is there a difference between American educational philosophy and American culture?

As she is presenting this case study, it seems as if there is no difference, and that she represents all of American culture.  Her view is binary and static, in both her assessment of what is Haitian and what is by Not Haitian, which by default, has become American.

The choice of this form, that is, questions to which the answer is assumed, emphasizes the fact that children already know that their behavior is wrong. (p. 36)

This sounds much to the point of understanding the instant’s behavior in the larger framework of what is right and wrong in a way that functional behavior assessments cannot.  It also minimizes the amount of actual displincing (admonishing, the act of discplining, not the keeping of regulated discipline) that needs occur in order to rectify one situation. 

What is striking to me is that is it not followed up with “Then, why did you do it?”  I remember being asked if what I had done was right, which was usually as much disciplining as I ever needed; but it was always followed up with “Then why did you do it?”  That again speaks to the rationalization of behaviors, that maybe children are quite ready handle at three.  However, simply calling to mind that the child is aware that what they had done is in fact outside the bounds of acceptable behavior reinforces the code of discipline.