True Story 1.16
Hawaiian pupils’ atypical pattern of question-answering
The setting for this story
A working-class suburb of Honolulu was the site chosen for a study of Native Hawaiian pupils’ classroom communication. For seventeen months, a researcher, Stephen, made biweekly all-day visits to the same first and second grade classrooms, each led by a teacher who was not Native Hawaiian. Although Stephen also was not Native Hawaiian, he became well accepted by all of the pupils.
A story of misaligned minds18
As the seventeen months were drawing to a close and the first graders had moved into the second grade, Stephen decided to seek answers to a new research question. So during a portion of each of his biweekly visits, Stephen tried to get the pupils, one at a time, to answer several prepared questions. This approach yielded few answers, even when they concerned popular categories such as food, animals, and people. After two months, merely six useful replies were recorded.
Stephen then abandoned that question-asking approach. He now restricted his activities to making himself available, talking with individual pupils after they had initiated a conversation, expressing interest in whatever they told him, and only occasionally asking a question. This approach yielded a large quantity of lengthy, useful commentaries.
Stephen noticed similarities between his aborted questioning approach and both teachers’ instructional styles. During a whole-class session, if the teacher asked a question of a specific child, that child would answer minimally or not at all. Yet on these occasions it was common for several other children to provide answers. And if the teacher threw out a question to the whole class, at least a dozen hands would usually shoot up and then, before she could recognize anyone, several pupils would blurt out their answers, occasionally speaking at length.
Especially curious was this: When the teacher had asked a question of the class and several individuals answered, if the teacher then called on one of those individuals, that pupil often was unwilling or unable to repeat or comment on the answer they had just given spontaneously.
Stephen’s question
What is the underlying explanation for these curious patterns of question-answering?
Critique of story 1.16
In many traditional and indigenous societies, the lives of children, even small ones, are largely lived apart from adults. Children have their own sub-society that frequents the same location as that of the adults but receives little or no adult supervision or instruction. Children learn most of what they need to know by watching and imitating the adults, not by being directly instructed by them. (An exception is that manners and morals typically are taught by direct adult instruction.)
When modern ways of life including schools gradually overtake such societies, families are attracted by modern comforts and conveniences while holding fast to their norms and values. The children enter school around age six or seven, by which time they’ve internalized their family’s patterns of social interaction. In their classrooms, they encounter behavioral expectations that are completely unfamiliar, with some being directly contrary to their families’ established patterns. If they behaved this way at home, they’d be punished.
Most likely, the explanation that Stephen was seeking is this: Native Hawaiian pupils have little or no experience of being constantly supervised by an adult. They’ve learned to regard an adult’s direct questioning as putting a child on the spot, i.e., threatening negative consequences for undesirable responses. But they’ve also learned that adults can be supportive and loving; adults sometimes have good things to dispense, too.
Thus, an adult who seems receptive is someone who can, and probably should, be engaged in dialogue. The good things adults have to dispense are more likely to come to children who cooperate with them. When an adult poses a question or request to a group of children, it’s advantageous for them all to respond. And, in general, it’s a good idea to offer adults the information they are seeking. But here’s the thing: A child usually offers information only on his or her own initiative.
For thought
This story concerns the type of cultural complication to teaching that often occurs when children from a communitarian society (explained in Chapter 3) are learning in a classroom in which behavior is expected that follows the norms of an individualistic society. This situation has occurred repeatedly since the early 1800s as Western societies, emboldened by the advances of modern science and the values of individualism, began expanding into traditional and indigenous regions where communitarian values applied, then began to build and staff schools.
It’s useful for individualistic educators to gain insight into the communitarian cultures of traditional and indigenous peoples. If you’d like to begin doing so, please consider my book, How Other Children Learn: What Five Traditional Societies Tell Us about Parenting and Children’s Learning, only 208 text pages in length. Visit howotherchildrenlearn.info.
Related stories
Stories 4.13 and 7.08 also contain analyses of culturally different perspectives on students’ question-asking. See also, in Chapter 8, the section entitled “
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Endnotes:
18 Boggs, 299–313.
Full citations are available at misalignedminds.info/References.