In 1990, 70 percent of all American students were Caucasian. Remarkably, current projections indicate that by the year 2026, this percentage will be reversed: 70 percent will be nonwhite or Hispanic (Garcia 1995). As the face of America's classrooms changes, teachers and administrators alike are being called on not only to respect their students' diversity but also to capitalize on the possibilities that diversity presents for teaching and learning.
Professional standards exemplify this trend. The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards recommends that middle childhood generalists "understand that factors such as language, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, and gender can influence learning" and that these teachers "see student diversity as an asset that can facilitate the pursuit of academic, social, and civic aims." Similarly, five of the six standards that the Interstate School Leaders Licensure Consortium developed for beginning principals contain statements like "the administrator believes in, values, and is committed to the benefits that diversity brings to the school community."
Behind the Achievement Gaps
Despite standards such as these, achievement gaps between majority and minority students persist at nearly all age levels and in all subject areas (Mullis et al. 1994). Perhaps the biggest reason for this disparity is that while our student population has grown more diverse over the past several decades, individual schools have remained largely homogeneous (Wang and Kovac 1995).
Even in schools with diverse student bodies, minority students frequently find themselves removed from the mainstream and segregated into remedial programs in disproportionately large numbers (Heller et al. 1982). Too often these remedial classes lack the hallmarks of a traditional high-achieving classroom, such as high expectations for student performance and a challenging, engaging curriculum. For example, after observing 26 bilingual classrooms, Gersten (1996) noted that despite several individual examples of inspired instruction, curriculums in 21 of the 26 classes lacked intellectual rigor.
Persistent learning gaps and the explosive growth of the nonwhite and Hispanic student population suggest that there is both an ethical and a practical need to make classrooms mirror the heterogeneity of the student population. But providing high-quality education for all students is far more complex than simply placing students of diverse backgrounds in the same classroom. A major demographic shift necessitates a major change in how we view teaching and learning.
What Works, What's Transferable
One way to approach the challenge is to look at examples of successful teaching methods used in predominantly minority classrooms and then determine how well these methods might transfer to heterogeneous classrooms. The Kamachamcha Early Education Project (KEEP) is one such example. Initially the project was designed to boost the achievement of native Hawaiian elementary students, a cultural group that traditionally has a high risk of academic failure (Tharp 1982). Project designers adapted the curriculum to the cultural learning styles of the Hawaiian children.
For example, KEEP researchers noted that native Hawaiian culture is collaborative and group-oriented. Siblings often care for one another at home. Accordingly, in each classroom, teachers had students work in groups of four or five children. The teacher would move through each group, engaging the students in what Tharp (1989) refers to as instructional conversation, that is, a dialogue that brings together prior knowledge and experiences with new material to build understanding.
KEEP made a successful leap from theory to classroom application. Researchers randomly assigned 1st graders at a public school to either an experimental KEEP class or a control class. At the end of 1st grade, students took the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Vocabulary and Comprehension tests and the Metropolitan Achievement Test. Average scores ranged from 2.5 to 3.4 percentile points higher for the KEEP classes than for the control classes. Although these gains are relatively modest, they indicate that KEEP's nontraditional style improved performance on traditional standardized measures.
What can we take from the KEEP example? Two important lessons. First, the instruction was predicated on what Villegas (1991) calls a "culturally responsive" pedagogy that recognizes students' cultural background with respect to how they learn. This is not to be confused with deriving content from culture—teaching African-American students about Martin Luther King Jr. is not necessarily culturally responsive.
Equally important, teachers in KEEP's classrooms were responsive to culture while maintaining all the typical elements of more traditional high-achieving classrooms—attention to time-on-task, a challenging academic focus, and a structured curriculum (Tharp 1982).
On the other hand, specific culturally responsive techniques may not be transferable across cultures. For example, when teachers used KEEP's methods with Navajo schoolchildren, the children worked just as hard as the Hawaiian children, but much more independently and with little interaction between boys and girls. Tharp (1989) attributes these differences to the Navajo's pastoral tradition. Navajo parents give young children individual shepherding responsibilities, and the male and female roles in this work are traditionally separate.
For the Navajo children, teachers formed single-sex groups limited to two or three students. And they got positive results. Yet, even though this adaptation worked in a homogeneous Navajo classroom, such refinement would be far more difficult with heterogeneous groups of students.
A More Formidable Hurdle
Bridging cultural learning styles may prove particularly challenging in classrooms with students who are in the minority linguistically. Iglesias (1994) suggests, however, that some of these students may face an even more formidable impediment than their English language skills: many students do not "come from school-motivated families with verbal-analytic cognitive emphases" (p. 142).
Hakuta and Garcia (1988) support this view, noting that linguistic impediments do not explain the disparate academic achievement of different linguistic minority groups. In their view, we must also consider the larger context of how cultural learning styles interact with instructional approaches.
Of course, culturally responsive pedagogy is far easier to write about than to achieve. It is not yet clear whether such pedagogy is transferable—whether it be across subject areas, age levels, cultural groups, or languages. As we march toward 2026, the challenge will be to expand and refine our understanding of culturally responsive teaching so that we can realize the full potential of diversity to enrich learning.
