Chapter 5- Multicultural and Multilingual Education

          I chose to write about this chapter and not the previous one, because I think that Chapters 4 and 5 dealt with a lot of the same concepts. To be honest, I am not very familiar with ESL education or school settings that contain mostly Hispanic children. However, the insights in the book were very helpful when the discussion of different mindsets came up. Bilingual education is a heated debate no matter where you go, but discussion bicultural education is a completely different issue. It is in this context that we must understand the way that different cultures operate in terms of authority and their particular values on the educational system. For the purpose of connecting the topics in this chapter to my own experiences, I will stay fairly close to a this theme.

            The most powerful part of the multicultural discussion occurred for me as a reader when Spring cited a research project about the strongly different ways that Asian and Western students view the world. I had always known that the cultural mindsets were different, but I also put them into dichotomies that already fit my existing schema. I now understand a little bit more about how inappropriate that actually is.

            Last summer I traveled to Beijing, China for about three weeks with another American friend of mine to visit her parents who were working for a large corporation that had many offices in China. Her parents were living and working there, but we went on a vacation type of setting. This was especially exciting for me as a history major, because I wanted to soak in all of the culture and experiences that I could so that I could reference my travels later on in classroom and see if the things I had learned about in some of my classes were actually true. Throughout my time there my friend and I came to the rather ignorant conclusion that no one could simply make a decision on their own. We often saw three or four people doing the job that we assumed would only take one person to do in America. Furthermore, service industry jobs were always collective and tips were not part of the custom. Both of these things seemed strange to us.

We originally thought that perhaps this was a cultural manifestation of the communist government’s mindset on the population. However, now that I have learned more in my education classes about the way other mindsets and cultures operate, I feel terrible about making assumptions about the Chinese culture. The information in the chapter states that Confucian based mindsets are far more holistic than the typical Western mindset. That is to say that there is a far heavier emphasis placed on environment and interaction. This was evidences by a study that showed American children and Chinese children pictures of a pond where there was one focal fish. Americans later on described and remembered the main fish while Chinese students described the environment in much more detail.

With this information in mind, the interaction with others and with society is obviously far more important to Asian cultures. What to us had seemed like a completely indecisive nature was actually the way that they interact in order to comprehend their own self worth. The same way the Americans typically push for the more impressive or innovative form of individualism, Confucian based societies typically have more emotional ties to their families and peers and understand the importance of being part of a whole. When I look at the perspective and culture from this positive perspective my viewpoints wholly change.

This type of information led me to agree most with Spring when he recommended a cultural hybridization in schools. While bilingual and bicultural methods are certainly valid, this approach seems to make the most sense for diverse students. Since the students are coming from different backgrounds and different mindsets their individual needs do all need to be taken into account. However, it is equally important that we take into account that our job is to prepare these children for the real world by promoting civic competence and the necessary skills to be successful in America. Therefore, an approach that attempts to eradicate culture or wholly value countless different cultures in either extreme form would most definitely be detrimental to the child one way or the other. Cultural hybridization that would involve teaching children the importance of code-switching in their speech and an appreciation for their own diversity as well as others can only help them. I think that when this positive approach is taken instead of trying to “Americanize” students from first or second generation immigrant homes every benefits more from the process.

          As previously stated, I do not have extensive experience with students from Mexican or Native American populations. However, I have learned to understand that a student’s ethnicity or heritage is not nearly as important as the balance that the teacher strikes between valuing that heritage and teaching them the importance of learning the skills they will need to be successful in the type of school system that they are currently trying to navigate