Dr. Sherick A. Hughes is an Assistant Professor of Education in the Judith Herb College of Education at the University of Toledo
Recently, as my college of education prepared for NCATE accreditation, I realized that we often discuss diversity with the assumption that faculty, staff, and students understand its importance. This assumption is dangerous. Even after a decade of study in the area, I was challenged positively by members of our Minority Recruitment and Retention Sub-Committee to offer a robust answer to the question: “Why is diversity important to the university?” I later took the question one step further to ask more specifically, “Why is family diversity education important in teacher and administrator education?” The following commentary offers what I believe to be a sound response to family diversity education supporters and critics alike. There are at least four tenets of democracy supporting our pursuit of family diversity engagement in teacher education: (a) checks and balances of the law, (b) optimal decision-making, (c) social justice, and (d) peace.
Checks and Balances of the Law in School Communities
Checks and balances of individual rights and societal ideals can potentially benefit not only local individuals and families, but also learning communities at large. Because majority and underrepresented families depend on the teachers we education, our universities-school communities can be only as strong as the past, current, and future teacher education faculty, staff, and student members—members who should be equip to manage the challenges and build upon the strengths of family diversity in our society of learners. The ultimate task of checking and balancing the family diversity components of teacher education is to enhance the school/college of education climate in a manner that requires all of us to revisit and critique the notions like political correctness. This part of our teacher education should also allow us to extend ourselves to addressing how the strings of liberation in our democracy tie each child’s family to our own.
Family diversity education in teacher education might also address the law or legal tenet from a democratic rights purview. Individual families have the right to separate life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, so long as that separate pursuit does not encroach upon the democratic rights of others. Through family diversity education, we might help pre-service teachers cope with the rules and norms that govern political correctness and provide a platform from which we may argue for a democratic ideal to ensure that minority family rights aren’t being ignored, forgotten, or discredited. In the end, the checks and balances of the law bring us to one level of problem finding/solving without taking us to higher order thinking and feeling levels necessary for the democratic ideals of optimal decision-making, social justice, and peace.
Optimal Decision-Making in School Communities
Horticulturists use the term variegation to describe the blending of various patches of plants and flowers for expanding the possibilities optimize diverse beauty and utility. Each flora’s brilliance is enhanced by its counterpart. Recent research supports the notion that diverse human groups also render the spoils of variegation and socialized hybrid vigor in the realm of decision-making and problem-finding/solving. When working to seek and resolve problems, diverse human groups (ethnicity, gender, social class, social status, etc.) excel beyond homogeneous groups in terms of final product excellence, irrespective of the degree of complexity of the problem or pending decision.
In 2003, a Dartmouth University study suggests that “Racism makes us dumber.” This study involved: (a) pre-testing of participants for high/low prejudice; (b) subjecting participants to speaking briefly with a Black experimenter; (c) subjecting participants to a test of cognitive ability; and (d) comparing cognitive ability test results of pre-tested high/low prejudice participants. Results indicate that participants performed more poorly on cognitive ability tests when the stimulus of their prejudice was present in the testing situation. Researchers conclude that high-prejudice participants spent so much cognitive energy toward coping with their prejudices that it was detrimental to their ability to maximize their cognitive potential. From the target’s perspective, Claude Steele’s work on stereotype-threat informs us that in order to counter such prejudice, participants need a frequency and intensity of positive educational experiences and expectations to overcome mental barriers linked to being part of a stigmatized group. Therefore, research findings suggest that the lack of positive, frequent, and intense exposure to family diversity can hinder our ability to complete cognitive tasks at our highest potential. Thus, it seems imperative that we engage family diversity education in teacher education.
We might extend “university engagement” to include a concerted effort to recruit, retain, and support diverse teacher education faculty, staff, and students. Recruitment as related to retention is important to mention here because there is no sustainability without substitutability. More specifically, the recruitment of an equitable (with adequacy as the equity standard as discussed by Dr. Helen Ladd of Duke University) quantity of new, high quality teacher education diverse faculty, staff, and students seems more likely to enhance the retention of those diverse members in schools and colleges of education. Such a move also enhances the likelihood of decreasing reports of tokenism, and insufficiency by introducing more members of the university-school community from underrepresented groups on campus and off-campus service committees to render more sustainable optimal decision-making.
We might also extend “university engagement” for the inclusion of extended service learning opportunities for teacher education students that involve meaningful collaborations with diverse families. For example, following a school-community project she initiated, Dr. Barbara Seidl of OSU finds that her white female teacher education students make better pedagogical decisions regarding some of the Black families they serve. The project requires those students to attend and learn as co-equal partners from the worship conditions of a local historically Black church attended by some of the Black families of their school district.
A University of Michigan study in the new millennium suggests that group think may get in the way when homogeneous groups basically represent very similar backgrounds and thereby limited variation on ideas about how to proceed. Homogenous groups tend to fall more often into the trap of structure and agency as described in the pioneering work of Anthony Giddens in 1979. In short, Giddens alludes to the point that our decision-making is only as “good” as the structures we create lets it be and our human agency (ability to act) is limited by how we learn and teach each other and tell ourselves to act within the structure. Perhaps, family diversity in teacher education might also move teachers to take leadership responsibilities to form co-equal partnerships where they are more likely to work with families and actually build some generative knowledge that can transcend the incessant challenges still facing diverse schooling.
Social Justice in School Communities
Social justice involves validation of the rights of others, a commitment to working and learning with others, a commitment to safety while others rights our in our hands, and a confidentiality when others trust us enough to share sensitive and volatile information. In short, the question of social justice becomes “what do we need, and do we need more or less of it to meet or exceed the same ideal standards imposed upon ‘others’?” Social Justice regards the ability of a society to balance the individual rights with the democratic ideals and it involves societal choices. With social justice in education, e pluribus unum (of the many, one) could exist as James Banks suggested, with an unum that is negotiable and diverse within a non-negotiable goal-structure where reaching one’s highest potential is the pinnacle. In 2001, Kevin Kumashiro argues that indeed one obstacle to social justice emerges from our own teacher and administrator education about “others,” because we tend talk about teaching the other, and teaching about the other, without being critical of “othering” and without understanding ourselves as “other.” Despite our noblest efforts, social justice slips out of our grasp in teacher and administrator education without a comprehensive family diversity education component. Too often, we may not even be conscious of how we tend to (at the very least, on occasion) do what Lawrence Blum suggests in I’m Not A Racist But…: exaggerate differences between others, over-emphasize similarities within others, perceive characteristics of others as immutable or unchangeable, and concede to beliefs in group hierarchy.
The late Paulo Freire describes social injustice as oppression that is replete with “othering” in the forms of victimization, racialization, sexism, disenfranchisement, and human hierarchy. Prior to being exiled for his pioneering work in 1964, Freire’s literacy teams of the 1950s and 60s taught the oppressed peasants and field hands of Brazil not only to read and write, but to do so as a form of resistance to oppression. Upon being asked to return in 1979, a now internationally acclaimed Freire further pursued his work in critical pedagogy. Critical pedagogy involves teaching and learning for social justice by facilitating situations against “othering” and against seeing oneself as a “destined to be doomed” other. In his work, empowerment is encouraged through family education, teacher-student relationships, dialogue, critical consciousness, and action.
In order to act in pursuit of the democratic ideals of social justice in light of Kumashiro and Friere, a school or college of education can reconsider how to build upon the presence diverse families. Engaging an education of diverse families can advance social justice and anti-oppression by helping teacher leaders and administrator of schools learn to involve families in their curriculum and school management planning for the purposes of sponsorship, role modeling, and mentorship, which relates to the 1997 work of Carla O’Connor. In addition, this condition can work for enhancing university support systems by creating more spaces to exchange any transferable information from families about hidden rules and norms that can positively affect present and future teacher- and administrator-family relationships. It seems that one must retain a diverse family education plan in order to benefit from the social justice environment that such diversity can induce, support, enhance, and sustain.
Peace in School Communities
Dale Snauwaert, peace educator, and philosophy of education professor, describes three interdependent moral resources integral to peace in our society: (a) knowledge, (b) reasonableness, and (c) sympathy [empathy]. Snauwaert’s work has been adapted here to discuss the fourth tenet of democracy that relates to the importance of diverse faculty and staff. Diversity is a key component of the moral resource of knowledge because of the history, experiences, and praxis that knowledge engulfs. Without the daily presence of diverse family influences our knowledge banks are incomplete and the experiential stages to engage knowledge and praxis are based on limited vicarious teaching and learning situations.
Reasonableness relates to our ability to be open to new ideas, new experiences, and counter-evidence. When we are reasonable, pushes us to examine our own lived contradictions, and to accept change when our taken-for-granted actions, beliefs, values, and knowledge is challenged in a sound and substantial fashion. A strong and complete education of diverse families provides fertile ground for teachers and administrators to cultivate the knowledge from which reasonableness feeds. Reasonableness can take us from what I have come to describe as malignant ignorant resistance to what I conceptualize as critical conscientious resistance that is conducive to upholding the law, to optimal decision-making, social justice, and peace. For example, a prevalence of narratives describing a token ethnic-minority faculty/staff/student situation is more likely to hinder all faculty/staff/student abilities to distinguish hits (perceive bias and bias exists) from misses (don’t perceive bias and bias exists), false alarms (perceive bias and bias doesn’t exist), and correct rejections (don’t perceive bias and bias doesn’t exist). In the book Prejudice, social psychologists, Swim and Stangor explain that the degree to which we perceive and/or act upon a hit, miss, false alarm, or correct rejection is related to the social, psychological, and emotional, and financial cost we perceive. The estimated costs of a false alarm may greatly outweigh that of a hit for an underrepresented family member. Any perceived misses could also contribute to the pressure that prevents our ability to retain family members that add to our diversity. Reasonableness seems highly linked to our knowledge, and it also seems to be only as consistent as our willingness and ability to empathize with others.
Snauwaert’s sympathy is adapted here as empathy to more accurately speak to the utmost validation from one to an “other.” Where knowledge and reasonableness help us recognize social justice or injustice, empathy can guide us to action. Empathy is emotional validation that can lead to feelings of verisimilitude, a feeling of actually being the other person, having been the other person, or potentially being the other person in a very similar lived experience. Although, such validation can occur vicariously, it is commonly understood in sociology and social psychology that most humans find it extremely difficult to identify with an “other” with whom they perceive no immediate connection (which is affected by limited experiences and biases).
Closing Thoughts
The trilogy of knowledge, reasonableness, and empathy are necessary moral resources for peace, but they are insufficient for maximizing the benefits of family diversity education in teacher and administrator education. Ultimately, it is the complete and consistent engagement of family diversity education among Education faculty, staff, and students that brings diversity’s importance to life in our democracy.
