True Story 10.19
Hawaiian pupils don’t work well alone:
A story in two parts
The setting for parts 1 and 2 of this story
Willa, a primary school teacher with years of classroom experience in the continental U.S., was new to Hawaiian schools. She soon became stymied by her Native Hawaiian pupils. Here’s how she explains what happened:
Part 1
A story of misaligned minds25
If I’ve told them once, I’ve told them a hundred times: “Do your own work!” They look at me; they hear me; it seems like they “get” what I’m asking of them. They never refuse. But minutes later they go right back to asking their friends for help and even offering to help one of their friends. When it comes to working independently, these Hawaiian kids are incorrigible!
Willa’s question
What is it about these children that makes it impossible for them to do their own work?
Critique of story 10.19, part 1
Willa’s question necessitates our becoming aware of a characteristic child-rearing practice of Native Hawaiians. Beginning when they are toddlers, children are cared for primarily by an older sibling or cousin, secondarily by their parents. This practice, common among other indigenous and traditional societies, is known to anthropologists as sibling caretaking, or “sibcare.”
Sibcare ensures that children become accustomed to learning from, and learning together with, other children. Furthermore, when a new infant joins the family, the previously cared-for child, now four or five years old, becomes a caretaker and figures out how to support his or her new sibling or cousin. For many, seeking help from other children, and offering to help other children without being asked, becomes a comfortable, accustomed way of living and learning.
Teachers who ask Native Hawaiian pupils to work independently tend – understandably – to interpret their non-compliance as disobedience. Yes, but it is not willfully defiant disobedience. It’s unfamiliarity with three factors: First, they have little experience of being told what to do and not do by an adult. Second, they have little to no experience directing all their attention to one adult for several hours at a stretch. Finally, their life experience so far has heavily involved freely giving and receiving all kinds of support, including learning new facts and skills, with other children.
Thus, self-reliance is not a way of being that is experienced at home by most Native Hawaiian pupils. Together with other children, they are consistently experiencing mutual support and interdependence across multiple daily settings. Adults play merely supporting roles.
For thought
I’ve just explained where Native Hawaiian pupils are “coming from.” Let’s think about where they’re headed to. They’ll soon be coping, as young adults, with higher education and/or the entry-level job market, where they’re sure to encounter expectations of self-reliance.
Are primary school teachers preparing them well for that near-future encounter if they always accommodate their interdependence? If you answer “No,” then how might educators go about giving Hawaiian youngsters increasing classroom experience of self-reliant individualism?
Part 2
A continuing story of misaligned minds26
One of the research teams that has studied schools in Hawaii reported finding that primary school classrooms were characterized by “a low level of Native Hawaiian child attention to teachers and classwork, and an extreme orientation to peers that disrupted typical classroom routines.” These researchers also played a role in disseminating the explanation that this problem “might be a result of the extensive use of sibling caretaking by Native Hawaiian families.”
Fortunately, educational authorities in Hawaii paid attention to this research and took steps to incorporate peer teaching into classrooms. Wherever this instructional practice was introduced, Native Hawaiian pupils realized major gains in achievement. In fact, on standardized reading tests, they rose from well below national norms to score at or above those norms.
How wonderful! This story had a happy ending: A problem enticed researchers’ attention; researchers came up with findings; findings were applied to practice; revisions to practice yielded strongly positive results! An upbeat note on which to conclude this collection of seventy-six true stories, no?
But that’s not this story’s end.
The members of the research team had become enticed by a new problem: Their findings, given high credibility by the resulting learning gains, was encouraging educators to assume that sibcare had been experienced by every Native Hawaiian child. They were planning instruction accordingly. The problem? The sibcare-by-all assumption was not accurate.
The researchers knew that this assumption about sibcare was one example of a widespread tendency: People assume that an evidence-based generalization – i.e., a research finding – about a group’s shared behavioral trait is characteristic of every group member.
For example, consider this common, research-based, generalization: Chinese deeply respect those with advanced academic learning. Associated sweeping assumption: Every Chinese student deeply respects his or her teachers. Is that sweeping assumption accurate? It is not.
The assumption that an attribute (color, size, belief, behavior, etc.) commonly associated with a class (society of people, species of animal, type of object, whatever) is inherent in every member of that class is called “essentialism.” Essentialism implies that the attribute is innate, inborn. Here’s an example of essentialist reasoning in which the attribute is individualism and the class is American: “Individualism is essential to being an American. Bob is an American. Therefore, Bob is an individualist.” (Stated differently, “Every American, literally, is an individualist.”)
Essentialism is similar to stereotyping, in which an attribute of some members of a class comes to define every member of that class. True, some girls find math difficult, but does math phobia define every girl? Decades ago, a speaking Barbie doll appeared that said, “Math class is tough,” yielding angry cries of “stereotyping!” (To be fair, Barbie also said “I’m studying to be a doctor.”)27
The researchers in Hawaii were determined to eradicate essentialism, stereotyping, and similar inaccurate beliefs about human groups. They recognized that their findings could feed the false assumption that all Native Hawaiian children are equally and uniformly affected by the traditional values and practices of sibcare. That is the outcome that these researchers wanted to avoid.
The research team’s question
Is sibling caretaking really an across-the-board characteristic of all Native Hawaiian families with children? And if it’s not, then why did the introduction of peer teaching lead to significant gains in Native Hawaiian pupils’ achievement?
Critique of story 10.19, part 2
There’s only one way to learn in depth and nuanced detail what is going on within a group with which you’re unfamiliar: Spend time with the group and directly learn about their lives via observation and questioning. Your goal is to experience their world from their vantage point.
Accordingly, these researchers conducted wide-ranging in-the-home interviews with fifty-six mothers of second and third graders. They also carried out direct observations of eight kindergarteners through third graders – four boys, four girls – in the children’s respective homes after school. On twenty different days, each child was separately observed – you could say “shadowed” – for thirty minutes. All families were Native Hawaiians, and most (but not all) of them were receiving public assistance.
The researchers reported an extensive series of findings. Especially significant were these:
- Assuming that older children were available in the home, families that were more likely to use sibcare consisted of more than six members and/or had mothers with a heavy workload.
- Sibling caretaking is not an emotionally charged feature of Native Hawaiian culture; rather, it is a familiar and culturally approved practice that parents may use for pragmatic reasons. Many mothers had an ambivalent view of sibcare, yet they were open to using it if necessary.
- Mothers of families with a relatively high occupational level were more positive toward the practice of sibcare than mothers of the families on public assistance.
- Considering all of the child observations, in only 22.7 percent of cases was the child being cared for by an older sibling. Considering only those observations during which an older sibling was available and the mother was away, sibcare was occurring in 48.9 percent of the cases.
- Children are rarely monitored or directed by adults or older siblings. They have wide latitude in what they do and how they do it. Relying on their own reasoning, they adapt to emerging situations and figure out how to perform ably without relying on adult instruction. They often play with other children; during these times much information and assistance is exchanged.
The following two paragraphs excerpt or closely paraphrase the research team’s conclusions:28
Peer assistance was important in these children’s daily activities. Teaching and learning activities, including language-related events, occurred most often in child-initiated, child-managed, and child-driven contexts. Such activities were not directly associated with sibcare but with the presence of peers and multi-age play groups. Mothers were seldom involved; when they were, they didn’t often “scaffold” interactions to guide the children. Overall, the children being studied shape their own styles of interaction, communication, and language use with parents, siblings, and peers.
Our revised cultural hypothesis is that Native Hawaiian activity settings with child-generated and child-assisted features are the most likely sources for accommodations usable in classrooms.
For thought
So they figured it out, right? We finally know for sure what it is about native children’s home environments that explains the success of peer teaching. Sibcare was the wrong explanation.
No, we do not know that “for sure.” Yes, by applying fresh findings, these researchers did revise their hypothesis. But it’s still merely a hypothesis, useful for now. It is vulnerable to findings from future additional painstaking efforts to grasp the disconnects and connects between the culture of these children’s homes and the culture of their classrooms. Note that:
- Sibcare was the “wrong” explanation, yet when it was applied in practice, learning improved.
- These researchers investigated homes; they paid no attention to the culture of the classroom.
- Of the fifty-six families this team studied, only a small minority were not receiving public assistance.
This is the inherent nature of anthropological and cross-cultural research, indeed of all social science research. Facts are found. Conclusions are drawn. Generalizations are disseminated via print and online. Some recommendations lead to changes; some changes lead to improvements. But what we know – know – remains an approximation of the truth – a better one – but still an approximation.
Here’s how all this affects me, an author trying to help American teachers make sense of what anthropologists find and conclude. Like other social scientists, I have no choice but to make heavy use of generalizations. In fact, most of the sentences in this book are generalizations. If I were to hedge, qualify, and note exceptions to every generalization I write, this book would be vastly longer, and the few who bought it would soon junk it as being way too verbose to plod through.
But generalizations have a downside. By ignoring if-and-but details, they make it easy for us to forget that it’s all an approximation of the truth and assume that we fully understand the social phenomenon being discussed. That’s why I always remind my readers: Beware! Generalizations.
In bringing to a close this collection of seventy-six true stories, I leave you with this thought:
Related stories
Stories 4.01 and 4.04 tell similar stories about children collaboratively helping each other learn. Stories 1.09, 1.16, 1.17, 10.12, and 10.16 also provide insights into how cross-cultural educational researchers go about their work. Story 1.16, like this one, is about Native Hawaiian children.
Go to Chapter 1 Quick-Links | Go to Chapter 4 Quick-Links | Go to Chapter 7 Quick-Links | Return to Chapter 10 Quick-Links
Endnotes:
25 Au, 27–28; and Cushner, 107–08.
26 Weisner, et al., 330–42.
27 Wikipedia, entry entitled “Teen Talk Barbie.”
28 Weisner, et al., 341–42. The short paragraph in italics closely paraphrases part of a paragraph on page 342 that also was in italics.
Full citations are available at misalignedminds.info/References.