Transcript Slide 1

Multicultural and Bilingual
Aspects of Special Education
Education and Cultural Diversity:
Concepts for Special Education
Banks suggests six major components or elements
of culture:
1. Values and behavioral styles
2. Languages and dialects
3. Nonverbal communication
4. Awareness (of one’s cultural distinctiveness)
5. Frames of reference (normative world views or
perspectives)
6. Identification (feeling part of the cultural group)
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
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
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
Sociocultural Theory
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A complete account of learning and
development must take into account three
levels:
1. The individual plane- individual cognition,
emotion, behavior, values, and beliefs
2. The interpersonal plane- communication, role
performances, dialogue, cooperation, conflict,
assessment
3. The community plane- shared history,
languages, rules, values, beliefs, and identities
Ethnic minority communities
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have a strong influence on students’
achievement and school behavior,
three cautions:
1. Guard against stereotypes
2. 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
3. The support of families and the minority community
may be insufficient to improve the academic
success of minority students
Purposes of Multicultural Education
1. To promote pride in one’s own cultural
heritage and understanding of microcultures
different from one’s own
2. To foster positive attitudes toward cultural
diversity
3. To ensure equal educational opportunities
for all students
Purposes of Multicultural Education
Two questions complicate the matter when
we get below the surface and address
the actual practice of multiculturalism in
education
1. Which cultures shall we include?
2. What and how shall we teach about them?
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?
Implementing Multicultural and
Bilingual Special Education
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Exceptionality group- a group sharing a set of
specific abilities or disabilities
Multicultural special education- focuses on 2 main
objectives:
1. Ensuring that ethnicity is not mistaken for educational
exceptionality
2. Increasing understanding of the microculture of
exceptionality
3. 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
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
Instruction
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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:
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Teaching tolerance & appreciation of difference
Working cooperatively with families
Improving instruction for language-minority students
Adopting effective teaching practices
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
Improving Instruction for LanguageMinority 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 languageminority 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
Six Components of Effective Teaching
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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
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