True Story 4.14
Anglo teacher laments Native American students’ timidity
The setting for this story
Dell, an Anglo teacher, was working in the U.S. Southwest teaching middle school students including both Native Americans and Anglos. In this story, he shares his main frustration.
A story of misaligned minds19
Before the end of my first semester here, I noticed that my Native American students seem reluctant to finish their in-class assignments on time. They also didn’t want to correct the papers of other students. And when I threw out a question during class, if the first student who responded wasn’t correct, it was never a Native American who volunteered the right answer. They just did not seem competitive.
But that was only in the classroom! Put them on the school’s basketball court and, bam!, they were equally or even more competitive than my Anglos. Then as soon as we returned to our classroom, it was my Anglo students who competed to show that they had the right answer. My Native Americans? No. They all lacked initiative and motivation. They just sat there passively. Either they felt timid in classrooms or they just didn’t see the point of school learning.
Dell’s question
Why were my Native American students, who were fierce go-getters on the basketball court, always passive during class?
Critique of story 4.14
Dell’s question arises, in part, from our American assumption, characteristic of individualists, that each individual is animated by stable internal dispositions and principles (think personality) that constantly guides his or her behavior and style. Therefore, we expect each individual to act similarly in all social situations. Dell saw his Native students always acting competitively on the basketball court, which led him wonder why they never acted competitively in the classroom.
A basketball court provided these students with a familiar social situation, one in which teams compete. A classroom was a situation in which the norms of behavior they had absorbed since infancy at home were violated. They didn’t want to do something morally wrong.
In most Native American groups, people are not judged by their verbal performances. And little of what children learn at home is transmitted to them verbally; after watching silently as others use skills, the children practice those skills privately and in small groups until they’ve mastered them.20 Anglo classrooms operate 180° differently. Students are expected to learn via verbal means (from teacher and text), to respond vocally and in writing (usually before they have time to privately practice the new material), and to demonstrate “engagement” by physical and vocal activity. In response, Native Americans go quiet in the classroom.
Constantly quiet students perturb American teachers: They’re passive! What’s wrong with them? Or is it me?
Native American societies are guided by communitarian values while most Anglo classrooms are highly individualistic. A paramount communitarian value is intragroup harmony, demonstrated in part by each member’s conscious care to avoid doing anything that sets themself apart from the others – such as answering a question your classmate flubbed. Interpersonal competition is avoided. Cooperation reigns, such as on the basketball court where wins are due to our team’s effort, not to the skills of one or two outstanding players.
Timidity does not explain Native American students’ passivity. The explanation is that their teacher expects a new way of behaving while their conscience recalls community norms to the contrary. That’s an ambiguous situation, practically and morally. Their response is to observe but not to participate.
For thought
Americans assume that each individual has – should have – a set of stable internal dispositions and principles that guides them to act similarly in all social situations. If you have a male friend who treats women respectfully while in your presence, you assume he’ll treat them respectfully when others aren’t around. We admiringly call this quality “integrity,” meaning undividedness, uniformity. (Its opposite is “hypocrisy,” deliberately leaving one impression but later acting differently.) We feel disdain for those who don’t act with integrity, a charge we often levy against politicians.
When Americans and other Westerners evaluate another person’s behavior, we expect that, in all social situations, they are likely – or at least they ought – to act with integrity, i.e., according to their stable internal dispositions and principles. But when we’re considering an instance of our own behavior that’s prompting criticism by others, we often come up with reasons for why the unusual characteristics of the social situation we were in at that moment compelled us to act contrary to our internal principles.
Related stories
Stories 1.15, 7.09, and 10.12 also discuss Native American students’ “passive” behavior in Anglo classrooms.
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Endnotes:
19 Swisher & Deyhle, 2–3, 6–9.
20 An exception is that, in many Native American settlements, children are frequently obliged to attend evening campfires during which elders talk at great length. See Story 1.15.
Full citations are available at misalignedminds.info/References.