classroom education
By Dan Calloway
Published: August 4, 2009, 1:51 pm EST; “Blogging with Dan Calloway” Website
Cultural diversity—as well as societal diversity—in the classroom is often something that causes increased tension among students because they enter the classroom with expectations about what their learning environment will be like and how they should react toward the instructor and toward other students. The majority of these expectations from students stem from previous educational experiences they have had in classrooms in their own native cultures. Likewise, instructors enter the culturally-diverse classroom with some of the same anticipations about the students—how will the students react toward the instructor, what will be the interactions among students in the classroom, and what are the responsibilities of the instructor to ensure that students of differing cultures receive the same level of educational opportunities in a safe and nurturing environment?
In many cultures, the instructor is the authority figure in the classroom and these classroom environments are typically teacher-centered with little to no student involvement. In these classrooms, for example, it is entirely inappropriate for students to even question an instructor. It is the role of the student to take notes on the material the instructor covers in class and to memorize this information. It is the role of the instructor to critique the work of the students and to assess the student’s level of understanding and comprehension of the material. Moreover, in some cultures, the instructor will point out student faults openly in the classroom, thus shaming the student when they make errors with the intent of causing the student to pay closer attention to his/her work and not to make future mistakes in class. As a result, the instructor maintains a professional distance from the student body. These practices are not appropriate for the modern-day classroom in the U.S., for instance, and they are detrimental to student learning and student interaction. (more…)
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