Keepin' It Real
Personalizing School Experiences for Diverse Learners to Create Harmony and Minimize Interethnic Conflict
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4048619 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Amitai Katz (0000-0002-8313-1254, corresponding author), Anne Katz (0009-0009-4124-1525) |
| Year | 1999 |
| Volume | 68 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 496 |
| Publication date | 1999-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Journal of Negro Education (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0022-2984 • E-ISSN: 2167-6437 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/2668150 |
| OpenAlex | W2025966788 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 2 |
| References cited | 4 |
This article reports on an approach to helping teachers learn about the cultures of diverse groups of learners that is based on a sociocultural theory of education. Using this approach, students from diverse racial/ethnic backgrounds are seen as conduits for facilitating teachers' greater understanding of the cultural knowledge that students, theirfamilies, and their communities bring to schools. The article describes the efforts made by leaders at two case study elementary schools to create personal linkages between schools and students. It further explores how these schools have established a caring environment, increased parental involvement, and restructured student groups to reduce interethnic conflict and tension and thus provided a more harmonious environment for learning. When news media proclaim that public schools in the United States are becoming more ethnically diverse, they tend to ignore the fact that only one segment of the school population is changing: the students and their families, who come from an increasingly varied array of ethnic, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds. Though of color and their families make up the largest segment of this population in terms of numbers of stakeholders at a given site, it is another group of stakeholders-those who teach in its classrooms or lead the weekly assemblies-who tend to make the critical decisions about what happens in schools such as what gets taught and how, whose voices get heard, and how classrooms are constituted. The demographics of these members of the school community have, for the most part, remained the same; today's teachers are mostly White and predominantly middle class. Coming to school may present difficulties for any child, but that difficulty is even greater for learners who come from diverse cultures of the other-be their differences linguistic, cultural, racial, ethnic, economic, or combinations of these variables. Delpit (1995) captures the essence of this notion of difference, and the misperceptions that often accompany it, when she writes: I have faced this fog too many times in my career in education. It is a deadly fog formed when the cold mist of bias and ignorance meets the warm vital reality of of color in many of our schools. It is the result of coming face-to-face with the teachers, the psychologists, the school administrators who look at other people's children and see damaged and dangerous caricatures of the vulnerable and impressionable beings before them. (p. xiii)
Demographics · Ethnic group · Harmony (color) · Mathematics education · Pedagogy · Political science · Population · Public relations · Sociocultural evolution · Sociology · Critical Race Theory in Education · Parental Involvement in Education · Psychology · Racial and Ethnic Identity Research
| Unique citing works | 2 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0.29 |
| Citation span | 2019 - 2024 (6) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 2 |