Becoming "Like Them"

I have dedicated this week to preparing to teach this course next week, and after about a zillion hours of reading course materials, I took a break to watch "Spanglish" with my mother. I had very low expectations for this movie, although I didn't really know anything about it except that the title seemed like it might be mildly offensive and Adam Sandler movies are generally pretty stupid [that is, post-Happy Gilmore, which I thought was hilarious when it came out]. But it is my mother's living room and I needed a break, so we watched it. And once again, I found myself thinking "isn't this just the perfect time to see a movie like this?"

The movie, to put it shortly, is about a Mexican woman and her daughter who leave Mexico for California in order to "find a better life" for the daughter. The mother puts the daughter's needs far ahead of her own, works for a wealthy white family [Tea Leone is an incredibly annoying high strung self-appointed Messiah type, and Adam Sandler is the sensitive chef-husband who deserves better, yada yada] but the reason I mention it is because the mother struggles with the desire to send her child to private school on a scholarship, because while she wants her child to succeed in "mainstream society" [i.e. dominant white middle class culture] but she does not want her daughter to lose her cultural identity and become "one of them." She says at one point that she can only see two possible outcomes: her daughter being "odd" or her daughter "becoming like them."

I think that this relates to a common misconception that teachers who come from the "dominant" culture have about the students they teach from diverse backgrounds. There tends to be this attitude that the teacher is teaching the student how to accomodate and assimilate into the dominant culture, and that this is the desirable outcome for all students, to "become like them" and be successful. This notion not only assumes that dominant white culture is superior to other cultures, but that every person "should" aspire to be a part of the dominant culture.

Furthermore, this idea of cultural superiority infers that being educated or successful is synonomous with being white or middle or upper class, and that one cannot maintain their own cultural identity and their own values and succeed in today's society. Teachers who go into teaching with these attitudes are missing the point. It should not solely be the job of the student to do all of the accomodating in the classroom in order to succeed, but rather the job of the educator [and the educational system... or even the community as a whole] to do part of the accomodating: adapting curriculum to reflect the diversity in the classroom, embracing and valuing the diversity of the students, and learning themselves, as teachers, about cultures they may have little firsthand knowledge about.

This is clearly not a "new idea." Schools and educators everywhere preach about "Multicultural Curriculums" and "Diversity in the Classroom" and on and on and on but I have to say, in my experience, the actual implementation of these ideas is total bull. Just because NYC chooses a bunch of books for classroom libraries that feature people from different parts of the world doesn't make the curriculum "multi-cultural." It is so much more than the texts and even the lesson plans. And I'm not trying to be all high and mighty and claiming to have any of the answers as to how to "teach" teachers appreciation for diversity, or even saying that I did a good job at using a multi-cultural approach to ELA in my classrooms, but my point is, if I even have a point, that the problems are so huge and systemic and complex that it makes my head spin.

I guess this is a good sign, since I am about to embark on a 5-7 year experience as someone whose job it is to think and talk and read and write and advocate these very ideas, and I am very excited to devote such a serious amount of time to it, but at the same time I am completely terrified that these ideas, while not in the least "radical" ideas, all eventually lead back to the same grander [and occasionally more radical] ideas of politics and sociology and I can't help but think that if there was actually "a solution" to problems like these, wouldn't someone have come up with it already? I hate to have a defeatist attitude like that, and obviously I don't really feel that way or I wouldn't be setting my life up to pursue educational reform as a career, but the task seems truly daunting.