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9ОБРАЗОВАНИЕ И КУЛЬТУРА
И.М. Синагатуллин
ПОЛИКУЛЬТУРНАЯ КОМПЕТЕНТНОСТЬ УЧИТЕЛЯ НАЧАЛЬНЫХ КЛАССОВ
Ключевые слова: поликультурное образование, поликультурная компетентность, учитель начальной школы, умения, навыки.
Аннотация: Идеи поликультурного образования приобретают особую актуальность в многонациональных и многоязычных регионах России. Автор рассматривает некоторые вопросы, касающиеся человеческого многообразия, которое наблюдается в поликультурных ареалах России, делает акцент на понятии и сущности поликультурного образования и заостряет внимание на том, какой должна быть поликультурная компетентность учителя начальных классов, призванного работать в многокультурном образовательном пространстве.
Human diversity is known to have existed since the dawn of humanity. Diverse were the people of Mesopotamia, Greece, the Holy Roman Empire, and Byzantium. The great explorers such as Viking Erik the Red, Christopher Columbus, and James Cook, who "discovered and opened" new lands and seas, encountered myriad native tribes on the mainlands and neighboring islands, each speaking their own language and pursuing their own culture.
The notion of human diversity incorporates a whole range of ethnic, linguistic, cultural, religious, social class, and educational categories intertwined in contemporary societies. On another, smaller scale, human diversity includes value systems, judgements, mentality, rural-urban standards of life, styles of clothing, cuisines, customs and traditions, and many other aspects of human life and behavior.
Human diversity is in a continual process of change. Racially and ethnically mixed families rapidly grow in number. People acquire new languages, others gradually lose possession of their native tongue and pass over to exclusively using the state language. Former atheists become religiously minded and vice versa. Still others change their religion under the influence of certain factors. Migration has increased at the rise of the new century. People move both within homelands and across the world. Those changing residences are often driven by an incentive to start a new life in a new place. Continually changing, the human world enriches its diversity, which makes a huge impact on education, challenging educators to generate new ideas and implemente multicultural strategies in educational institutions of different types, including also elementary schools (8).
Russia is becoming ethnically and linguistically diverse, especially in the Volga region autonomous republics, the northern Caucasian region, the southern Ural mountains area, and Siberia. With land area mounting to 6,601,668 square miles, Russia is divided into 7 federal districts, which include 49 provinces, 28 autonomous republics, 6 territories, 1 autonomous region, 10 autonomous districts, and 2 federal cities (5). Especially diverse is the Republic of Bashkortostan, the first autonomous entity in the former Soviet Union. Russians, Tatars, Bashkirs, Chuvashes, Mari, Udmurts, Ukrainians, Mordva, Belorussians, and Germans inhabit this republic. 13 languages, native to various local ethnic groups, are instructed in elementary and secondary schools, content areas are taught in six native languages.
It is known that linguistic diversity is determined by the number of ethnic groups each speaking a different language and also by the people ranging from monolingual to bi-, tri-, and multilingual speakers. Bilingualism is considered to be more widespread than monolingualism, since more than half the world's population claim to be bilingual.
Live languages determine language policies for educational purposes. A language policy is normally a result of a bigger policy and realized within other reorganizations. In a multicultural
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society, language policy is an evolving accommodation to ethnic, sociocultural, and educational changes. It is understandable that in a multicultural Russia, the language policy should take into account students of both Russian and non-Russian ethnic descent.
Russia in general and Bashkortostan in particular are religiously diverse entities. Even though religion is separated from school, religion is greatly influencing educational canons. Russia boasts various religions. Religious diversity does not remain static, but undergoes change. Certain people change their religion and beliefs. A trend to converse from one religion into another is often observed before or after ethnically and religiously mixed marriages. In other cases, believers convert into atheists and vice versa. For example, over the last 80 years Russia has witnessed both.
Russia is characterized by urban vs. rural diversity. People are known to represent one human race, but they are often subdivided into urban and rural residents, and the lives and activities they pursue are normally referred to as urban life and rural life. Urban and rural residents' adherence to basic human values and their attitudes to the issues of education have always differed more or less distinctly. In rural communities, there exist a sense of togetherness, security, and fulfillment; a sense of being happy with what they have; and love for the land. In urban centers, children and teenagers are not usually closely attached to family and community values. They are more independent and generally make decisions themselves regarding their future career. Throughout Russia, about 69% of all elementary and secondary schools are located in rural settings. In the 2006/07 academic year, there were 58.5 thousand elementary and secondary schools; among them, 38.6 thousand were located in villages. Among the overall number of 14.3 million school children across Russia, 4.4 million school boys and girls went to rural school. From 2000 till 2005, the number of rural pupils were reduced from 6.23 to 4.86 million, the number of rural schools—from 45.9 to 41.5 thousand, and the number of rural teachers--from 646 to 613 thousand (3).
After acquainting the reader with the phenomenon of human diversity and how it is represented in the territory of the Russian Federation, we now switch to focusing on the notion of multicultural education. It is the increasing human diversity that necessitates the conceptualization of the ideas of multicultural education and, consequently, the development of students' multicultural competency.
The ideas of multicultural education were inspired by the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s in the West and have spread to both Northern and Southern hemispheres. Until the mid 1980s, in Russia, bilingual or multilingual education was a more common approach, but the notion of multiculturalism and multicultural education in different forms and content were always present in the sphere of both elementary and secondary education. In Russia's multicultural settings, closely related to multicultural education have always been folk pedagogy and ethnopedagogy (1; 6; 9; 10). Folk pedagogy deals with educating children and adolescents by using the means and strategies having been accumulated by one or several cultures during a long period of history. Ethnopedagogy is a science that collects and investigates the historical experience of different ethnic and cultural group. Ethnopedagogy also studies and explains folk pedagogy and suggests ways of its use in contemporary educational institutions and in home schooling. The close interrelation of folk pedagogy and ethnopedagogy with multicultural education is explained by the fact that the latter, along with other objectives, explores folk educational traditions and learning preferences of different cultural groups and proposes effective teaching strategies to address a diversity of students.
I am of opinion that in each given pluralistic society the notion of multicultural education may be infused with a specific understanding. Multicultural education is a phenomenon encompassing both aims, content, and process of educating students. James Banks claims that, on a broader level, multicultural education incorporates at least three things: an idea, a reform movement, and a process. Multicultural education is an idea stating that all students, regardless of their gender,
ethnicity, race, culture, social class, religion, or exceptionality, should have an equal opportunity to learn at school. As a reform movement, multicultural education involves changes in the total school (and is not limited only to curriculum change) so that all children would have an equal chance to experience school success. Multicultural education is also a continuing process whose idealized goals will never be fully realized. A major goal of such education is improving academic achievement.
Banks also says that multicultural education is a concept characterized by several specific dimensions: content integration, the knowledge construction process, prejudice reduction, an equity pedagogy, and an empowering school culture and social structure. The first dimension, content integration, necessitates the infusion of ethnic and cultural content into the subject area instruction. The knowledge construction process, the second dimension, relates to the extent to which educators help learners to understand and determine the influence of cultural assumptions, perspectives, and biases on the ways how knowledge is constructed within a subject area. Prejudice reduction, the third dimension, conveys an idea that teachers are required to help students develop positive and tolerant attitudes toward different ethnic and cultural groups. An equity pedagogy, the fourth dimension, is bound to facilitate the academic achievement of students from different racial, cultural, gender and social-class groups. As the fifth dimension, Banks defines an empowering school culture and social structure. All members of the school staff are required to participate in creating a school culture that empowers students from diverse background and promotes gender, racial, and social class equity. To implement multicultural education successfully, the school should be thought as a social system, and a change strategy that reforms the total school environment must be formulated and initiated. Banks also states that one of the prime focuses must be on the school's hidden curriculum. This curriculum represents a powerful part of the school culture communicating to students the school's attitudes to a whole range of problems, including how the school views pupils as human beings and its attitudes toward students from various ethnic and cultural background and exceptional students (2).
Nieto examines seven basic aspects of multicultural education, which Ovando summarizes as follows. Multicultural education should be (10 antiracist, (2) a basic and integral component of education, (3) vital for all students without exception, (4) pervasive in the overall educational process, (5) an education aiming at establishing social justice, (6) a dynamic process, and (7) an education incorporating critical pedagogy (7).
Elementary school teachers' multicultural competency should include at least three components: motivational, cognitive and operational. The motivational component symbolizes teachers' attitudes and relates to their feelings, their understanding and readiness to work and interact with a diversity of students.
A multicultural teacher is required to have a positive attitude to the phenomenon of diversity. Thus, he needs to understand that human diversity has existed since ancient times and that it incorporates not only ethnic and language differences, but also social, political, economic, gender, rural vs. urban, age, exceptionality, and other issues and is continually changing. Working with a diversity of students, educators need to have positive and tolerant attitudes toward alien values, cultures, and standards of life, toward children with alternative health, toward parents who may possess various expectations of, and attitudes toward, schooling. It also becomes important for teachers to recognize their work as a most significant occupation capable of helping innovate and reorganize the curriculum and the entire school environment. The multicultural teacher is expected to be skillful in using and benefiting from the positive factors of diversity in educating children; to be able to promote mutually favorable teacher-parents and school-community relationships; and to be able to facilitate students' knowledge, skills and attitudes for them to successfully function in a pluralistic society.
The pedagogical profession requires that each teacher continually widen and deepen his or her professional mastery. For teachers committed to multicultural education this task is
invaluable. The knowledge and information acquired at the pre-service period of pedagogical and personal development can not last long, because pedagogical and psychological sciences are advancing and being enriched, especially in this new centennial, by novel ideas, information and approaches. So are instructional techniques, methods, and strategies. Teachers are required to regularly enrich their global knowledge and information by self-education methods. There are many ways of realizing this important task. In-service teacher education programs provide educators with necessary expertise and skills in regular intervals. Such programs successfully function in Russia and practically in all countries. Only, the ideas of multicultural education are not always included into the content and aims of the higher educational institutions that organize inservice teacher training.
Teachers are expected to gain from the colleagues' professional experience. A prime goal of a multicultural teacher, especially at the start of career, is to benefit from seeing and learning from lessons and modes of teacher-student interaction of other educators implementing multicultural strategies. Apart from standard schools, teachers should also visit schools for children with alternative mental and physical health, schools for gifted children, as well as schools located in rural settings. It would be useful for teachers to see how their colleagues conduct lessons and interact with children and parents from different cultural backgrounds, how other teachers motivate children to cognitive activity, articulate lesson objectives, select means of teaching, use the needed content, conduct the didactic process, and evaluate and assess learners. To learn about their colleagues' pedagogical experience, teachers can participate in different conferences and workshops where they can share insights on different problems related to the teaching profession. Such forums help them come to the conclusion that it is necessary to further shape and implement the ideas of multicultural and global education taking into consideration the diversity of students in each concrete school and school district.
The cognitive component relates to knowledge base. Multiculturally minded teachers are in a more difficult position than teachers implementing the requirements of a standard mainstream curriculum, because, in addition to this standard curriculum, they have to gain, digest, and process more knowledge on the diversity of classroom students and on the diversity of the entire humanity. They also must construct knowledge and information so as to provide students with equitable and equal opportunities to school success, regardless of their ethnic and cultural characteristics.
They are required to possess knowledge about ethnic, national and global values and virtues, as well as about attitudes, values, and customary qualities characteristic of different cultural groups. First of all, there are values that are vital for any human being in any society. Such are love, freedom, respect for the elderly, tolerance, responsibility, etc. Values are deeply-rooted, dynamic principles monitoring an individual's behavior and lifestyles, irrespective of continually emerging, specific situations. A person often subconsciously materializes their essence in life and professional behavior. Values are dynamic because any person, especially a multiculturally minded educator, continually grows in knowledge and skills and opens the realms of the unknown in the outer world. Values are the virtues to which people should attain to be good human beings, good members of the community, nation-state, and global society. "Attaining and becoming such a personality is a matter of extreme difficulty. If this task were not difficult, human society would have long ago reached an ideal state of development and prosperity" (8). The value system of an ethnic group often represents an amalgam of ethnic and acquired features. From an ethnopsychological perspective, the value system is traditionally reflected in the mentality and the national character of an ethnic group.
Teachers have to be knowledgeable about religious diversity. Religious groups may encompass members of various ethnic and language groups. The greatest priorities for a Christian are love to God and love to the neighbor. The core value of Islam is the confession of faith that reads, "I bear witness that there is no god but God, and Muhammad is the prophet of God." The Hindus, adherents of Hinduism, pursue polytheism. They value and believe in the
existence of one divine principle; the many gods are only aspects of that unity. In all its forms life is an aspect of the divine, but life appears as a separation from this divine, a meaningless cycle of birth and rebirth, determined by the purity or impurity of past deeds (karma).
Teachers working with a diversity of students must be knowledgeable about students' learning styles and learning preferences that they bring to school from their families, kindergartens, and local communities. The development of a learning style is affected and determined by the following factors:
• social factors, which tremendously influence the character of individuals' learning preferences;
• academic factors, exerting a significant effect on pupils' learning styles;
• parental factors, often standing as salient constituents shaping a child's modes of cognition;
• technological factors, making a huge impact on learning in this information era;
• cultural factors, which are specific in each ethnic and cultural community;
• religious factors, which are often long-lived and undoubtedly making a subsequent impact on cognitive preferences.
A teacher's indispensable arsenal is the knowledge of the traditions of folk pedagogy. Folk pedagogical methods and approaches, which are now used by parents, relatives and community members and which had been passed over by their predecessors, make a colossal impact on developing elementary school children's personality growth. Folk pedagogy may be considered an essential part of multicultural education. On the one hand, the means and principles of folk pedagogy of different peoples and cultural groups have much in common, because these principles normally proceed from the overall value patterns characteristic of all human race. On the other, each ethnic group inserts its own values in folk pedagogy. There are a lot of means of folk pedagogy that are used in different cultures. Frequently used in the educational space of Russia are fairy tails, folk music, folk dances, proverbs, riddles, and festive events.
Widely used in various cultures are fairy tales, which make a positive impact on child development. They contain valuable ideas. One of the most important themes embedded in fairy tales is the struggle between good and evil, with the former eventually coming out victorious. The main ideas of some fairy tales are congruent with those of proverbs and sayings. Among many peoples, singing lullabies to little ones is considered a significant element of folk pedagogy. Volkov assumes that "lullaby pedagogy is the most nature-conformable pedagogy in human history" (10, p.89). Each culture has at least one bed-side song or tune, named by one word meaning "lullaby."
There are also factors of folk pedagogy such as family, nature, labor activity, religion, holidays, festive events, and cultural rituals. For instance, family as the primary cell of human society creates a natural and supportive environment for children. Family circle promotes the use of different pedagogical methods such as playing with children, involving and challenging them into various types of work, watching and monitoring children's daily responsibilities and duties, and providing them with an example to be imitated. Family members may involve children in social dialogue, providing them with valuable insights about the surrounding reality and helping them understand important phenomena in life. It is useful for children to talk and interact with the elderly. Old people can often create a secure and nurturing environment for the young and provide them with valuable admonitions.
National holidays, fairs, festive events considerably influence children's imagination and personality growth, elicit their curiosity, and open a novel and cheerful world for them, especially when children themselves participate in the activities. In Tatar and Bashkir communities people celebrate an annual national holiday Sabantuy (plow party). Both the adult and the young gather in an out-of-town area where various competitions and festive events are held.
In fact, today a Sabantuy has turned into an intercultural festival.
The operational component of a teacher's multicultural competency deals with pedagogical skills. To address the challenges of the increasing diversity, it becomes important for a multicultural teacher to possess skills of developing students' positive attitude to native and universal values. Developing students' positive attitude to such values requires time and energy. Sometimes, developing attitudes involves behavior change. The whole school should create a favorable environment for children's personality development and the development of their positive attitude to indigenous and global values.
Teaching pupils to be tolerant to other cultures and alien mentality is another set of skills that teachers need to possess to adequately deal in a pluralistic classroom. Dmitriyev assumes there are four stages that students should pass through to become a tolerant personality. Learning to be tolerant is the first stage, during which tolerance can be perceived by students as a forced and disappointing necessity. The second stage is understanding and acceptance of other cultures. The third stage is respecting cultural differences. This stage presupposes an admiration from and high evaluation of different lifestyles and behaviors. Approving of cultural differences, the fourth stage, presupposes the development of students' active position. Teachers, at this stage, should be capable of critically looking at the ways and styles of interactions with children in order to find out if there are biased and prejudiced attitudes in their own behavior (4).
An objective of prime importance become skills of considering students' ethnopsychological characteristics in classroom practice and extracurricular activity. Such characteristics are closely related to pupils' learning styles that the author mentioned in a previous discussion. For example, students of Russian background are mainly polychronic, but they can also concentrate on one task. They tend to disturb their counterparts clarifying or specifying academic tasks; low achievers often ask bright students for academic assistance. Information flows freely from class to class: students know about their peers' academic outcomes and personal lives. The teacher is an authority figure and strict discipline is considered a valuable asset in enhancing students' academic performance. Each student usually has a fixed place at a table and, without the teacher's permission, is not allowed to move within the classroom or leave it
The Tatar students are normally bilingual owing to early exposure to natural bilingualism. Tatar students tend to be polychronic, hard-working and have an inquiring mind. They are field-sensitive and excel in cooperative learning environment. A common practice in class and after class activities is mutual help and collaboration of high- and low-achieving students. Like in Russia communities, Tatar parents are very sensitive to their children's academic progress and sustain close relations with teachers and school. Students of the Bashkir ethnic origin are field-sensitive and polychronic, they prefer cooperative learning strategies. They often prefer listening to volunteering and challenging questions and ideas and excel in mathematics. Mutual academic assistance is a normal practice. Children can cheerfully discuss their academic grades and test outcomes. Students have a special respect for the teacher and the elderly and obediently follow instructions. Bashkir parents are very concerned about their children's education and behavior and consider teachers authority figures.
The Mari students tend to be field-dependent and prefer cooperative working strategies. They achieve better academic performance in small groups; nevertheless, they can also work individually, volunteering questions and challenging interesting topics and ideas. Mari children are considerate and courteous to parents, teachers, and elder people. Academic mutual assistance among Mari pupils is a widely spread practice. Students of the Chuvash background progress academically in cooperative environment, but they equally achieve working individually and in small groups. Volunteering and challenging educators often occur in a Mari classroom. The phenomenon of territoriality, peculiar to students from Western cultures, is not well developed among Chuvash children (as well as among their Mari, Bashkir, Tatar, and Russian counterparts). An average Chuvash student assists peers in completing different tasks and often discusses grades throughout the classroom.
Teachers need to possess skills of educating children with alternative health conditions.
Developing students' empathetic attitude to their peers and people with alternative physical and mental problems become a prime objective in a multicultural teacher's work. Some children, due to various reasons, suffer from different diseases, both physiological and mental.
Educators are required to possess pedagogical tolerance and understanding in dealing with mentally retarded children and their parents. For example, mental retardation may be caused by hereditary factors, overuse of medicine, certain illnesses and biological accidents during pregnancy, a child's brain injury while being born, etc. A large number of cases are due to unknown causes. Interestingly, individual human capacity can not be measured at each given moment. We all change, especially at a younger age. Owing to efforts from educators, medical personnel, parents and societal institutions, a great number of exceptional children change considerably with time and join the ranks of their peers.
It is necessary for educators to use the appropriate terminology while interacting with exceptional students in the presence of other students. It is prohibited to additionally draw a child's attention to his disabilities by pronouncing such units as "invalid," "deaf," etc. Accentuating a negative attention on some ethnic and cultural features will be twice as vulnerable for exceptional children than for their mainstream peers.
A teacher is expected to possess classroom management skills. In a multicultural environment, the quality of classroom management is largely dependent on how the teacher knows students' indigenous values, communication styles, socialization patterns, learning styles and cognitive preferences, and patterns of ethnic identification. In other words, an effective classroom management depends on the entire pedagogical expertise of a multicultural teacher. An integral part of classroom management is classroom control, which encompasses primarily the behavioral aspects of children's interaction with the teacher and peers during the educational process as well as the teacher's ability to cope with that behavior. Classroom control or discipline is closely related to teaching. The more the teacher is involved in the process of teaching and the more students are motivated and actively occupied with cognitive activity, the less problems may arise with discipline. Conversely, the more able is the teacher in handling discipline, the easier may be the processes of teaching and learning.
A teacher working in culturally pluralistic classroom may be an excellent specialist, nevertheless, stressful situations may arise and they may arise even more often than in a standard monoethnic classroom. Continual stressful and frustrating situations can eventually cause teacher burnout. In classroom management, we recommend the teacher to start out with firm discipline without injuring the ethnic and cultural pride of any pupil. It is much easier to lighten up than become more strict when problems start emerging. It is also important to love and treat each pupil as being of equal value as well as to be honest and trust all students, regardless of their ethnocultural background, academic achievement, and personal behavioral characteristics (9).
The article has explored only a limited number of important variables concerning human diversity, multicultural education, and multicultural competency of an elementary school teacher. We assume that the overall issues related to multicultural education must be more scrupulously analyzed and investigated with reference to the educational institutions of different types.
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