True Story 7.18
Communitarian pupils outwit their individualistic teacher
The setting for this story
Before becoming a leading anthropologist of education, Harry Wolcott began his professional career during 1962 teaching indigenous children (ages six to sixteen) in a one-room school in “Blackfish Village,” situated on a tiny island between the mainland of British Columbia and Vancouver Island. In a fascinating journal article entitled “The Teacher as Enemy,” Harry recalled his experiences there.
A story of misaligned minds28
My classroom assignments were frequently perceived as a group task. Worksheets and practice papers were treated as optional; almost invariably, my students collaborated in deciding to complete or ignore them. Their choices were driven by whether or not an attractive alternative activity was on offer. They also collaborated in preparing worksheet responses, with the older and brighter students completing the work for the younger and slower ones.
Teasing and bullying were disruptive elements in my class. Some of this was related to family squabbles, but some was a process of pupil socialization in which the brighter children learned not to outperform their age peers. On the other hand, my students also had an interest in ensuring that none of their age peers would appear too inadequate in my eyes. Consciously or subconsciously, they were striving to appear as a group that was both united and uniform in terms of academic ability. This “equalizing” behavior and their close collaboration on classroom assignments made my task of diagnosing individual learning difficulties almost impossible.
As a class, my pupils were organized to cope with me collectively while I was trying to cope with them one by one. In short, my students were attempting to socialize me into village ways. “Attempting” is misleading, for their techniques were effective, including giving slow, reluctant responses to my directions, ignoring my comments (by “not hearing” them), mimicking my words or actions, and constantly requesting to leave the classroom to go to the toilet.
These children expect to be at school but their participation is similar to traveling on someone else’s boat: One gets on, sits patiently during the long slow ride, and eventually gets off. Age 16 is the destination of their educational boat ride. There is no record of any student completing the work of this school, then officially going on to the secondary school at Alert Bay.
Harry’s question
Is there any instructional approach that could succeed in motivating at least some of these students?
Critique of story 7.18
In addition to the article cited above, Harry Wolcott wrote A Kwakiutl Village and School, a book about his year teaching in Blackfish Village. Many passages are worth excerpting. Here are two:
Formal education is predicated on the notion of learner incompetence. Education across cultures exacerbates that incompetence by identifying worthy knowledge as located outside the students’ culture. When our educational efforts “take,” we witness minority group children incorporated into modern communities. But when a minority group feels overrun, dislocated, or threatened with involuntary assimilation, resistance to “the system” and its teacher may become an entrenched student strategy, a posture readily adopted as appropriate. Such was the case in Blackfish Village.
This study illustrates a situation in which two educational systems – one informal, indigenous, and present-oriented; the other formal, non-native, and future-oriented – confront the children, their parents, and their teacher with conflicting goals. The teacher represents an educational system whose mission is to minimize traditional Indian culture. His efforts are met by a variety of responses, each of which depends on the degree to which parents and their children accept ways of the dominant society that differ from the traditional ways of the village.29
In Harry’s experience in Blackfish Village, we witness an exceptionally wide cross-cultural gap. Its width isn’t only a function of the normative, cultural, and material differences between the village and modern British Columbia; it’s also a function of the willingness of these students, individually and (more importantly) collectively, to undertake – or not – the work of learning “knowledge located outside their culture.” Could any instructional approach, any multicultural educational materials, any exceptional teacher – even a veritable Jaime Escalante* – draw these youth to abandon their determined resistance? I defer to your judgment on this question.
The reason why I selected this story for inclusion was because I see in it a cautionary tale for scholars like me who develop frameworks for making sense of the seemingly disparate scenes that characterize culturally mixed classrooms. The frameworks I prefer have been emphasized throughout this book. Here they are, simply stated:
The normative behavior of people in many societies is well represented by the generalizations communitarian and individualistic. Communitarian societies usually have knowledge-focused classrooms; individualistic societies usually have learner-focused classrooms.
Harry’s story is an example of why I just used the word “usually” twice. Blackfish Village society can be fairly characterized as communitarian in its values and norms. Ordinarily, that would prompt me to expect a preference in its schools for knowledge-focused classrooms. I think you’ll agree, though, that “knowledge-focused” does not work as a generalization about the children’s behavior in Harry’s classroom.
Our frameworks and generalizations frequently are useful in enhancing our grasp of unfamiliar situations. But as we see here, they also are capable of leading us to an erroneous expectation or interpretation.
For thought
Some folks seem to assume that scholars in their ivory towers conjure up generalizations such as “communitarian” and “learner-focused,” then force-fit them to characterize real-life situations. That’s not, or at least should not be, the way it works. Generalizations summarize myriad past observations. They give a name to a pattern of values and relationships seen again and again. An example is, “Communitarian societies usually have knowledge-focused classrooms.”
But just because we’ve seen this pattern repeatedly in the past is no guarantee that the same pattern will characterize the next unfamiliar situation we encounter. As the ads for attorneys and investment advisors often say, “Past performance is no guarantee of future outcomes.”
For me, the principal value of Harry’s story is that it reminds me to always apply my storehouse of generalizations cautiously, tentatively.
Related stories
Story 7.17 similarly describes a situation in which students strongly resist whatever their teachers are trying to accomplish in the classroom. Story 1.09 is another cautionary tale about the potential hazards of heavily relying on generalizations to explain and predict.
* Jaime Escalante was an educator renowned for successfully teaching calculus to Hispanic high school students in East Los Angeles during 1974–1991. He was the subject of the 1988 film, Stand and Deliver.
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Endnotes:
28 Wolcott (1974), 413–16. Final paragraph of the story (the boat ride analogy) is inspired by Wolcott (1967/2003), 95.
29 Wolcott (1967/2003), 144, xi, both lightly edited.
Full citations are available at misalignedminds.info/References.