Daily Archives: July 3, 2012

As Minority Health Month comes to an end, we’d like to take a moment to reflect on efforts to address health disparities and particularly how these efforts can have an impact on student learning, an issue in focus at HSC throughout the year. Minority students from vulnerable communities face an increased risk of health problems that can hinder learning and success. Unless we address these health disparities, efforts to close the achievement gap will be comprised. At HSC, we are especially interested in school-based efforts to support student health and address the health disparities that can hold students back from success at school.

How can we take action? I think Dr. Charles Basch, author of the report Healthier Students are Better Learners, said it best when he explained, “The single most effective approach is to address these disproportional issues collectively.” If we work together to cultivate school health and wellness, we can together create a better future for the nation’s children.

The great news is that everyone has a voice. Here in Chicago, our Parents United for Healthy Schools/Padres Unidos para Escuelas Saludables coalition works with parents in the African American and Latino communities to move school food and fitness forward. Parents in this coalition have formed school wellness teams that supported their schools in achieving the high standards for nutrition and physical activity set by the HealthierUS School Challenge.

While on-the-ground leaders in the school community such as parents are making a difference, leaders at the district, state and national level have an important role in creating change. In Chicago, for example, school district leaders have responded to parent advocacy for recess by creating district-level policies bringing recess to all elementary schools.

HSC’s new initiative with Trust for America’s Health, Health in Mind, looks at the role that federal agencies can play in supporting school wellness and addressing health disparities. It encompasses practical policy recommendations that the nation can implement to make immediate and important improvements for health in schools. These policies can better position schools to comprehensively support health and wellness, thereby addressing health disparities, moving to close the achievement gap and helping all students achieve more. Stay tuned for more information about this initiative in the coming week!

For an overview of this issue and the ways that health disparities can affect education, check out our recent webinar with Dr. Charles Basch of Columbia Teachers College and Richard Hamburg of Trust for America’s Health.

via Health Disparities and Student Learning: Taking Action for Wellness – Healthy Schools Campaign.

I love Lisa Delpit. She voices the importance of quality education for all. She tells about what is working and what is not working. She is “convinced of these children’s inherent intellectual capability, humanity, physical ability, and spiritual character.” (p. 30)

While Delpit writes about those being left behind in the US school system, her summary of the basic skills can be transferred to any learner of any level.

This is how the “basic skills” of the middle class should be acquired by children who 
do not possess them upon entering school. This is how middle-class parents, often 
without realizing it, teach their children. They build upon the children’s interests; 
they ensure that the children are exposed to new settings; they discuss what the 
children have experienced while using new vocabulary. That is what we as teachers 
must do for our charges who do not bring to school the academic trappings of 
middle-class homes. And we must not only identify what they don’t know but 
acknowledge and celebrate what they do know and bring with them to class—a 
maturity in problem solving, an ability to do what is needed in difficult situations, 
an understanding of real-world problems—that middle-class children are not 
likely to exhibit for years to come. They bring what schools sometimes 
disparage as “street sense,” knowledge that is not only “higher order thinking,” 
but that can be built upon to spur the acquisition of the “basic skills” 
that schools demand.(p. 70).

I especially liked how she pointed out a problem that I see with my Korean university students.

Steele elaborates on the environment the students of the ’80s experienced. 
“A remedial orientation put their abilities under suspicion, deflected their 
ambitions, distanced them from their successes and painted them with their 
failures.”17 In many of today’s colleges, these conditions remain unchanged. 
It is perhaps easier to fortify oneself against blatant bias than against the 
constant onslaught of the underground microagressions of modern racial relations.

To summarize, when humans feel they are devalued, stigmatized, or made 
invisible in a setting, they either protest or withdraw. Protest is a more 
hopeful sign, as the protesters view at least the possibility of change. 
Withdrawers disidentify with the institution, define themselves as not a 
part of the setting, and seek to value themselves outside its parameters. 
Disidentified students become aliens in the academic world.(pp. 182-183).

My Korean university students are damaged. Early on in their institutional learning career they get labeled regarding their abilities and their ambitions are directed towards what a teacher or their parents believe they should be. My students are distant from their success – their success or failure is something fate does to them, not something that they can effect themselves by their actions. It is a series of microaggressions about status and reputation that break many learners’ spirits into accepting that they are ‘not good’ at something or that they are one of the undeserving because of their inherent ‘lack.’

My students rarely protest; it is not good Korean etiquette to challenge authority. So many of my students have withdrawn. Protest is at least active, even if it is reactive. But withdrawing is passive and we rarely ask within the education context what our more passive students are identifying with. My passive, withdrawn students, I’m sure, are passionate afficiandos somewhere in their life. Finding their world where they are not alien can be done, but some of my learners are so mistrustful and disconnected from me because of my role within the educational system, that even if I invite them to bring in their area of interest, I am met with apathy. I think this apathy comes from not feeling safe in the classroom. In the Korean classroom they are always judged, not just on their skills or abilities, but also on their role in Korean society. They must not act outside of acceptable societal roles. Things like girls should not be scientific or leaders. Boys should not be good at languages. Rich kids are automatically thought of as more intelligent. Poor kids are not thought of.

I also love reading Delpit because I discover how I’ve been damaged by my high-quality education.

Another aspect of culturally influenced academics has to do with how we teach. 
One consistent but often ignored aspect of African American learning styles 
has to do with whether teaching begins with the big picture and works down 
to the details, or whether it begins with subskills and works up to the global. 
Traditional teaching favors the latter—first you learn the pieces, then you 
put them together for the whole. African Americans tend toward the former. 
Students often want the big ideas, the big story, first. They want the “back 
story” of whatever is being studied—who created it? Why? What is it used 
for? What other perspectives exist? What controversies surround it? They 
also want to know how it is connected to real life, how the knowledge might 
be useful. Can what is being studied help their community in some way? 
Will they be given an opportunity to use the information in some real task? 
For many African American students, it is important to actually “do” scholarship 
not just study it. By engaging in the doing—conducting research, presenting 
findings, publishing writings—no matter how limited or amateur the end-product, 
they will be more willing to do the work to refine the component parts. (pp. 187-188).

As Delpit is describing African American learning styles, I very much see myself and how I struggled in my learning. I, too, am a global learner. I need to see the big picture first before learning the specifics. If I start with the specifics, I make them global. This works for me when I studied philosophy, but when I studied chemistry – well, my experiments never came out because of the step by step approach that was emphasized. And because my experiments never came out, I would cheat. And no one would really stop me from cheating. Judge me, sure. Stop me, no.

I am also grateful for this book because I’ve been introduced to a new influencer and hero – Robert P. Moses.

Education is not a job for the weak-willed. There are so many elements that 
fight against us—senseless bureaucracies, unfeeling systems, societal 
inequities, to name but a few. It is not easy to keep one’s courage up. One 
of my primary role models for courage has been Dr. Robert P. Moses. Bob 
Moses is a hero in the history of America. Many books and films have 
chronicled his journey in the Civil Rights Movement. As a young man in his 
early twenties, he left his job as a math teacher in New York and traveled 
to Mississippi, where he came to be one of the primary leaders of the 
Mississippi Civil Rights Movement. Bob, and the young Freedom Fighters 
who came to view him as their leader, faced beatings, imprisonment, 
and even death to bring the vote to the black sharecroppers of the 
South and democracy to America.(pp. 194-195).

I have had students and others ask why I teach in Korea and why I don’t teach at a more prestigious institution because of my credentials, abilities, and experiences. When I hear these questions I remember the words of a colleague at Gwangju University, Suh Kyung Hee. “It is easy to teach the ‘good’ students. They don’t really need any teaching. They teach themselves.” Being in a learning context where you can help a learner re-connect to the power of learning is more inspirational and heartening when working within a broken educational system than ‘producing’ students who are not necessarily more intelligent but just good at being successful within the education system.

I am also impressed with her optimism about the higher education system.

Could the reward system of the university be swayed to value collaboration 
over individual attainment? Articles that shared information about problems 
solved with other cities and other communities would be recognized over 
solely theoretical treatises, for example. In the same vein, I’ve wondered 
why we don’t have stronger connections among the colleges that address 
human services. After all, those in the Departments of Education, Social 
Work, Juvenile Justice, Law, Nursing, and so forth, are often working with 
the same clients. What could happen if we had an interdisciplinary course 
in which students from each discipline were exposed to professors from the 
range of disciplines in a yearlong, community centered, problem-solving 
course that would gather knowledge of how the client’s needs might be 
addressed from each discipline’s perspective? Just think of the models such 
endeavors could provide for how university students, as future practitioners, 
might collaborate to solve problems once they are in the workforce.(p. 204).

These are great suggestions, but I am too jaded. I really see the higher education system – actually all public education as imploding. Digital technology has liberated the classroom and we don’t have social technology (rules, procedures, laws, new behaviors) to help deal with the elements that Delpit mentioned as being important for learners (and society) – development of inherent intellectual capability, humanity, physical ability, and spiritual character – in fair and constructive ways.

Pick up this book.
Here is the Table of Contents:

Part One: Inherent Ability

1. There Is No Achievement Gap at Birth

2. Infinite Capacity

Part Two: Educating the Youngest

3. Stuff You Never Would Say: Successful Literacy Instruction in Elementary Classrooms

4. Warm Demanders: The Importance of Teachers in the Lives of 
Children of Poverty

5. Skin-Deep Learning: Teaching Those Who Learn Differently

6. “I Don’t Like It When They Don’t Say My Name Right”: Why “Reforming” 
Can’t Mean “Whitening”

Part Three: Teaching Adolescents

7. Picking Up the Broom: Demanding Critical Thinking

8. How Would a Fool Do It? Assessment

9. Shooting Hoops: What Can We Learn About the Drive for Excellence?

Part Four: University and Beyond

10. Invisibility, Disidentification, and Negotiating Blackness on Campus

11. Will It Help the Sheep? University, Community, and Purpose

Delpit, Lisa (2012-03-20). "Multiplication Is for White People": Raising 
Expectations for Other People's Children . Perseus Books Group. Kindle Edition. 

via Multiplication is for White People: Raising Expectations for Other Peoples Children by Lisa Delpit – KoreaMaria.