Finding Joy in Teaching Students of Diverse Backgrounds: Culturally Responsive and Socially Just Practices in U.S. Classrooms by Sonia Nieto
Nieto taught for 26 years at the University of Massachusetts – Amherst, where she earned a doctorate with specialties in curriculum and bilingual / multicultural education. This book is geared more toward K-12 education than the college level; the teachers quoted and interviewed all come from there. However, college instructors always need to know more about previous levels of education – “feeder schools,” is a community college term, and people at my level know the difficulty in taking what occurs at a “good” feeder and actualizing that at another one.
The book has a lot in common with Diane Ravitch’s The Death and Life of the Great American School System, which I review and which also focuses primarily on K-12 education but is more about how schools are run on the administrative side. This book’s more classroomey. One of many similarities between them is each discusses corporate America’s effect on education, and in addition, has a way of taking up for teachers that shows sympathy for them. Nieto brings up “those who believe that schools should be treated like any other free-market business” (4), with incentive pay, increased capital routed to administrators and noneducators, and a dependence on measured results that almost always leads to overreliance on testing and a narrowed curriculum. At the end of Part II, she writes, “The corporatist focus on education has largely removed the moral dimensions of teaching and learning from existing notions of school reform” (122). Test prep, increased class sizes, a focus on reading and math to the detriment of other subjects, less security and salary for teachers, more administrators to pay: this, she seems to suggest, is what you get with corporatized education.
Nieto cites a study that shows “the quality of a school explains only about a third of the variation in student achievement” (10). Other factors include “poverty, lack of quality preschool and afterschool programs, and inadequate employment, health care, and houses…poor nutrition, unhealthy neighborhoods, and limited prenatal care, among others” (10). Even the best teachers have limited ability to respond to all of the things in a student’s life that compromise their education. K-12 teachers, seeing students every day, can more effectively do things like instill good habits and encourage students to value education, but one gets the sense that the later in life you try to do this for students, the harder the battle is. The importance of early education, in Nieto’s view, can’t be overstated, especially for students from poor backgrounds. She even mentions a study that shows “providing preschool services for low-income families had significant economic benefits that exceeded costs, sometimes by as much as $10.83 per dollar invested, up to age 26” (16).
Wait. Really?
I needed some explanation for this, so I dug deeper. The study she talks about is called “Age 26 Cost-Benefit Analysis of the Child-Parent Center Early Education Program,” which appeared in the academic journal Child Development in 2011. The article states that “The primary sources of benefits were increased earnings and tax revenues, averted criminal justice system and victim costs, and savings for child welfare, special education, and grade retention.”
Allow me to quote from the latter part of the study. In more detail, the economic benefits of early childhood education are:
a. reductions in expenditures for K-12 remedial education, including special education and additional schooling for retained students,
b. reductions in criminal justice system expenditures for juvenile and adult arrest and treatment,
c. reductions in child welfare system expenditures associated with maltreatment,
d. averted tangible and intangible expenditures to crime victims as a result of lower rates of arrest and to victims of child maltreatment,
e. reductions in expenditures for mental health and substance abuse treatment associated with depressive symptoms and substance misuse, and
f. increases in projected earnings and tax revenues as a result of higher educational attainment
I wasn’t sold on this information – the concept and philosophy and benefits of early childhood education make sense, but the economic impact didn’t seem to be something that was measured in the study, more like, elucidated, or hypothesized.
I looked at another source, titled “The Economic Returns to Early Childhood Education,” which appeared in the Fall, 2016 issue of the academic journal Future of Children. This article focused on free and reduced lunches for low-income children, and special programs that occur both in and out of classrooms. Author Lynn Karoly, a senior researcher at the RAND Corporation [for the record, neither the name nor the mission of this organization is derived from the crazy lady who makes the name famous], found that such investments increase participation in education, and this leads to higher graduation rates, higher earnings, better physical and mental health, and less crime. But the scholarship on the actual economic benefits is limited. According to Karoly, a lot of areas, like “a reduced need for services for children with behavior problems” and “lower teacher turnover because of fewer behavior problems” haven’t been adequately studied. This is still an emerging field, establishing with precision the economic benefits of investing in low-income children. But let’s keep in mind, one must be a callous asshole to suggest that unless we see tangible returns, such expenditures should not be deemed essential to the public interest. The debate about how to implement these expenditures will go on, but generally I’m convinced that it’s “earlier the better” when it comes to investing in children’s education, especially when you see education as a place where people are taught to be independent, responsible, good public citizens.
Moving on.
Let me get something out of the way: Nieto cites the U.S. Census Bureau, which shows one in six Americans is now living below the federal poverty rate; she says this is “the highest number in our history” (11).
Objection!
Nieto is citing a study titled Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2010, a massive text that seems to be produced yearly and is housed on the website census.gov. According to the study, “The number of people in poverty in 2010 (46.2 million) is the largest number in the 52 years for which poverty estimates have been published.”
So, not in our nation’s history. Since 1959, when we started measuring poverty.
In other news, it wasn’t until 1959 that we started measuring poverty.
She also references the Organization for Economic Development and Cooperation, which “found that our nation has the highest overall poverty rate and the highest childhood poverty rate of any major industrialized nation in the world” (11). That data is from 2011; in 2019, the United States according to the same organization had the world’s fourth-highest poverty rate, behind South Africa, Costa Rica, and Romania. In that same year, the International Monetary Fund ranked America as the world’s #1 GDP at $21.4 trillion, over $3.5 trillion more than the entire European Union combined, and over $2 trillion more than the next two countries on the list [China and Japan] combined.
One more time: the richest country in the world by a California mudslide has the world’s fourth-highest poverty rate.
For the stat nerds: South Africa has the #34 GDP in the world, Costa Rica #76, Romania #46.
And as for the kids: America had the #7 overall child poverty rate in 2019 [South Africa, Costa Rica, Turkey, Romania, Israel, and Chile are the top 6. Turkey has the #19 GDP, Israel #31, Chile #41].
Nieto does what a lot of people do: shows you how our society is wealthy as fuck but that the uber-rich are hoarding it. She writes, “in the past three decades [roughly the 80s, 90s, and Aughts] the wealthiest Americans made the most income gains of any group” (11). Combine this with two other realities of American life: the political value of college degrees in society and the workforce, and our transition into more knowledge-based labor opportunities. It’s about the types of jobs that are available, and the quality of the jobs, and how much a college degree enhances one’s point of entry and subsequent advancement. Education today is more crucial than ever as a determinant of one’s opportunities in life. And for a poor person, born into shit systems, trying to get in the game, even if they’re working hard and passing their classes, something’s got to give when you need a degree but face all kinds of financial, work, family, and health obstacles. What happens, what gives? Dropping out, and / or student loan debt.
Is at all their fault if they drop out with no degree? Consider some things: to start, in my college, we studied a cohort of students over a six-year period. About half of enrollees dropped out by the end of the first semester. Another third, roughly, dropped out the next semester. 11% graduated within six years, and 4% transferred to a four-year university. 3% of our “graduates” didn’t earn degrees, but earned certificates and completed job training – kind of padding the numbers there. Anyway, you see, a huge chunk of them sit in these classrooms and quickly decide they can’t do it. How can we keep them there, invested, excelling? Do they deserve the debt they carry? What made them drop out? What was their level of preparation? What the hell can you do inside the classroom to help reverse this trend?
The national graduation rate at two-year schools, FYI, is 39%. Four year schools 59%. Why? That’s hard to say in truth, but it’s not hard to say that a lot of people are walking around with student loan debt and nothing to show for it.
Often it’s student negligence, or a lack of capability to take on the work, but often people experience poor academic preparation, or don’t have the time and resources to fully invest. And even if they do, often once they get to college the quality of education is poor – think burnt out old people, inexperienced and undertrained young people, and detached specialists, everyone overworked and bound up in the demands of the institution that have nothing to do with teaching.
Furthermore, poverty makes things worse. Transportation, family and work demands, access to digital technologies, and chaos in the home, are all made worse by poverty and represent more obstacles. And “institutional poverty,” a term Nieto uses frequently, leads to things like too-large classrooms, expensive administrators, too many adjuncts and grad students running classes for cheap, massive teaching loads, a lack of adequate facilities.
Nieto claims schools with more resources “have a broader range of course options than do poor schools” (13). I have experienced this. Our campus here at Yuba College is very small, and students often complain of a lack of courses to choose from, sometimes ones they desperately need. Sometimes a course they need is offered once a year, and they can’t make it work with their schedule – and it’s not so simple for them as “why, just get a new job!” She also talks about how teachers in underperforming schools, “like their students, often suffer from a lack of adequate resources and support” (15). This isn’t just about teacher pay or gigantic class sizes, it’s about access to support networks, professional development opportunities, and things like printing services, technical support for web instruction, adequate office space, free cookies.
Nieto stresses the need for white teachers to consider the perspectives of nonwhite students. An inevitability of education in America, given the prevalence of white teachers, is white people teaching nonwhite people. In an early passage, she mentions research that shows over 80% of public schoolteachers in America are white (14).
How is white school experienced by nonwhite students? Nieto cites professor Lilia Bartolomé, who believes “dehumanization happens when students are robbed of their language, culture, history, and values” (22), and a study showing “subtle daily insults that as a form of racism, support a racial and cultural hierarchy of minority inferiority” (131). Examples of this in the classroom might be texts that don’t originate from a nonwhite point of view, or courses with a focus on social and cultural issues that aren’t as vital to nonwhite communities, or which fail to immerse the class in nonwhite perspectives, or which simply don’t show a lot of respect for or inclusion of outside voices.
White teachers can be “like fish in the fishbowl, who may not realize they’re in the water – it’s just their environment” (140). Teachers like these can be ignorant of how white the world is for nonwhites, and how they can, unwittingly or otherwise, perpetuate a culture of “white is the norm.”
A crucial part of any book like this, in my opinion, should be strategies and methods to actualize what’s ideal inside a classroom. Nieto does a good job of this. She quotes one teacher who says, “I need to know where they’re coming from. I need to know what their goals are in life” (53). She recommends including “cultures, experiences, and histories” in a course (53). This can be driven by writing prompts that ask them to draw on their knowledge, or which give them freedom to choose topics to write about, or texts centered in perspectives that might be more familiar than white text after white text after white text. One teacher brings up an IEP, or Individualized Education Plan, to get and keep students on track (98); another asks students in high school “to think about what they hope to be doing when they’re thirty-five” (100); another talks about the importance of “critical love,” which is “pushing and cajoling them, being both nurturing and demanding” (126). One quote later on stands out to a two-year teacher: “It is the number one thing that you can be as a teacher for your kids,” according to a high school teacher, “a pipeline to other opportunities outside of the classroom” (130). Every semester I show my students a slideshow of campus resources, and ask them to write about some of the things that might be helpful for them personally. Every two-year campus has programs designed to replicate, as much as possible, the ocean of resources and opportunities university students are constantly immersed in. You hear the “lead a horse to water” metaphor a lot, reflective of the constant effort to bring them into campus life [which can be a problem at the four-year level too].
At the beginning of the book Nieto cites a study that shows “teacher quality has far more of an impact on student learning than class size, per-pupil spending, students’ socioeconomic backgrounds, or previous academic performance” (14). And that butts up against what should be a disconcerting reality: 40% of K-12 teachers in America identify as “disheartened and disappointed with their job” (14). This is an issue to Nieto because “teacher satisfaction can and must go hand-in-hand with student learning” (23).
What is it that stresses teachers out? Nieto points to a nationwide study that identified the top stressors for K-12 teaching as:
1. Teaching needy and unmotivated students without the needed support
2. Having too many responsibilities
3. Lacking control over decisions that affect students
4. Being constantly subject to accountability measures
I definitely see #1 and #2 as problems at the two-year level, but actually administrators do a pretty good job of letting us do as we see fit inside the classroom. Restrictions apply to textbook selection, and people from the writing center will call you out, often on an email with several people included, if students bring in prompts they don’t like, but other than that the compliance-monitoring in my experience is minimal compared to what I read about going on in K-12 [I discuss this more in the Ravitch review]. As one of my mentors in graduate school told me, “Unless your students are seeking out administrators to complain about you, you could be teaching them to worship Satan and no one would know.” This freedom, as a matter of principle, is good, but obviously some form of accountability is helpful [think of teachers assigning Jane Austen in freshman writing courses, which in my view is far more evil than Satan worship as a potential subject of study].
At the end of Part I, Nieto gives a list of what teachers need, which she claims is, among other things, “support, resources, modeling, guidance, and more time to collaborate with peers” (30). A little bit later she says “All the teachers I interviewed identified the connection with students as a primary reason they thrived in the classroom” (36). I agree, except I’d say it’s the primary reason. She also says “Teachers must be competent in teaching content, and they need to remain curious, excited about learning, always on the lookout for both information and pedagogical approaches that will keep them current and fresh” (36). I also agree here. When teachers are overwhelmed by chores they have a tendency to fall back on familiar materials, which leads to pedagogical atrophy, a consequence of which is students detecting a checked-out teacher who doesn’t care, is just going through the motions, is running another batch of students through the hackneyed, tired, arthritic, retrograde system. Linda Darling-Hammond, in her book The Flat World and Education: How America’s Commitment to Equity Will Determine Our Future, has an extensive section on Northern European models of education based on rigorous screening, trust in teachers to run courses independently, and mandates for ongoing professional development, which means less teaching overall. I’ve found teaching thirty units an academic year at the two-year level [what they call the FTE, or “Full-Time Equivalent”], leaves little time for pursuing new avenues of teaching, especially when as a full-time faculty member you are expected to participate in the shared governance of a college – even through the yearly 48 hours of professional development, or “FLEX,” that is required. A lot of this FLEX is knocked out via shared governance, like committee work, and a lot of the workshops just suck.
Regarding professional development, what’s jarring is how much crucial training goes unaddressed – for instance, Nieto discusses one study that found “in a three-year period, fewer than 23 percent of teachers received even one day of professional development focusing on English language learners and students with disabilities” (25). Another showed that “on average teachers spend less than three hours a week in structured collaboration with other teachers” (26). She reminds us that “good teachers know that their work cannot remain static; it needs to improve constantly based on new techniques, materials, technologies, and innovations, as well as critical reflection on and assessment of these things” (60). As they say in Zen, we are in an eternal process of becoming – or unbecoming, as the case may be.
She gives some other advice that I find only marginally helpful: “align yourself with people who are also happy and who are professionally motivated instead of always down on the kids, always down on what’s going on at school” (147). What if no one’s happy? What if teachers hate teaching and it’s a department culture? What if they’re rude to you? What if the majority of faculty doesn’t answer emails, and no-shows for significant department and campus events? What if they fight a lot? How do you build alliances? This seems like an undeveloped field of scholarship: Thriving Pedagogically in Emotional Hellscapes.
In Part III, Nieto discusses a study that shows “empowerment for teachers includes a sense that they are doing significant work, that they are being treated like professionals, that they have time and space to collaborate with and learn from colleagues, and that they are in control of their professional lives” (150). It is so important to treat teachers well; this quote, by the way, seems like it’s directed at deans and department chairs. As if to say, your teachers have super-stressful jobs and absorb a lot of negativity that dampens their spirit. Don’t be an ass to them, and show respect for the work they do.
As I say earlier, one of the most important threads of this text has to do with things teachers can do inside of the classroom. In many ways, she tells us, it starts with attitude. In a section entitled “Teaching From a Social Justice Perspective” Nieto says teachers should be multicultural in spirit, that is, permeable to the influence of others. “One also needs to become a multicultural person,” she writes, “rather than just being a multicultural teacher” (20). Part of this is treating students well, making them feel respected and supported, just like your bosses are supposed to do with you. Nieto cites a study that shows “students benefited academically from their teachers’ acts of kindness and thoughtfulness, from bringing in tacos to feed hungry students to being available to help them whenever needed” (34). This, in my experience, can be supplemented with straightforward, easy prompts and tasks early in a semester, and praising the things they do well, to give them a sense of belonging and familiarity with the school environment. Get them interacting with each other, have them explore the campus. Teachers can also make an effort to show they are “demonstrating an interest in [students’] families and their communities by interacting frequently with them, attending community events, and becoming in some sense a member of those communities” (35). This is part of what the Puente program I am involved with is for, to take students to events and hold functions that build relationships outside of class. We want to integrate them with college life as much as possible.
She interviews teachers who give their own strategies – things like devoting the last ten minutes of the day to informal chatting (38), learning about students’ backgrounds and incorporating them into class projects (39), understanding that some students are better in cooperative learning settings and some prefer to interact with an authority figure (43), even giving out your cell phone number (43). I actually do this – in my experience, texting is people’s preferred method of communication.
One teacher has students imitating writers’ styles (52). I do something like this – in one activity, I use an excerpt from Malcolm X’s “A Homemade Education,” to show his motivation to gain literacy [lack of respect from others], his process of becoming literate [reading and writing nonstop in his jail cell], and what he did with his literacy afterward [understood the horrors of American society a lot better and decided to do something about it]. I ask students to think about something they became “literate” in, and have them write about their motivation, process, and results, in essence replicating the structure of his essay. The ability to comprehend and manipulate structure is a crucial skill for any writer to have, in my opinion. In other activities, I break down each sentence of a scholar’s abstract, or an art critic’s description of a painting, and tell the students to imitate the sentences while writing an abstract / piece of art criticism of their own. It’s incredible how good their writing looks when you give them this much structure to consider – you want them to recognize what makes the sentences and the content “quality,” get them to recognize it, value it, consume it, produce it.
Still more pedagogical strategies: familiarize students with means of identifying and addressing injustice (61), draw attention to students’ talents, skills, and abilities (106), and more broadly, as one teacher says, recognize that the project of education “cannot be achieved alone; all parties involved – the district, the school, the teachers, other school affiliated professionals, the community, and the parents – must have open, collaborative discussions” (94).
Nieto, overall, calls the purpose of education “to help prepare moral beings and productive citizens” (105) and that “the goal of teaching is to prepare young people to make ethical life choices” (127). Teachers must focus on “cultivating relationships and giving students hope and another vision for the future” (134). Education, for everyone, should nurture “a culture of hope and happiness to replace the culture of stress and despair so common in the teaching profession today” (145). Yes to all that.